Video Games What was the most disappointing game you ever played?

[Lemon_Lime]

My Time at Portia. I love casual games where you can take your time and relax. That's the reason why I can play Stardew Valley for ages, or even the Sims 3. So you can probably imagine how excited I was to find something similar to Stardew, except... Well, it really just sucked. Personally I didn't find the character models charming at all, their personality and voice acting is flat and just dull ((it would be better with no voice acting, tbh)), the whole thing with grinding for materials and trying to come out on top for the workshop awards is really frustrating too. Especially when you get quests and jobs where you have to craft this one thing, except you've got no clue where to get or how to craft the materials needed to assemble this big thing you're building.

All in all it's really confusing and just meh. The only thing I found somewhat fun was the dungeon crawling, cause at least there I know what I'm doing. But other than that it's unfulfilling and after I got married in game to this weird red haired dude I don't feel any attachment whereas in Stardew Valley when I got married to an NPC the first time I was very excited and attached to them. I dunno, it's a pity, but the only thing that bugs me is the fact that nintendo doesn't do refunds lol

 

[Lemon_Lime]

Animal Crossing. I had high hopes when I started playing it because all my friends were super happy with it and I trusted their opinion. I really tried hard to enjoy it. In the end, I was disappointed. The customization is so tedious that it takes away all the fun from the game, some interface design decisions are really questionable. I don't know how a game can be so fun in concept but so uncomfortable to play.

i disagree, but agree as well. New Horizons was my first animal crossing game and after a while it just became really damn dull. I'd visit so many people's islands and that just contributed to a big burn out in regards of creativity as it's really hard to get a nice looking island. I spoke to a friend about it who had played most animal crossing games and it is true that there was WAY more to the older games. Like, even the villagers actually felt like they had a personality and were rude as hell to the player at first which I would have loved to see in New Horizons.

Now the new update somewhat gave more stuff? Or at least it made things easier to collect, but even then it's just an island decorator. The DLC on the other hand I do love, because while it is a glorified decorating game like the base game is supposed to be, it still has way more substance than it because it's just more satisfying. I personally like the UI, because it's clean, but that's about it. As much as I like Animal Crossing New horizons because of it's cuteness and relaxed manner, it's just a glorified island decorator tbh

 

[Werepunk]

Gonna say The Last of Us 2. I loved the first one so much, it was a great exploration of a deeply flawed protagonist. I don't even like stealth-based combat, but I enjoyed the characters so much that didn't matter. Then the second one came out, and... Ehh.

It was exploring how these characters got trapped in this self-destructive cycle of violence and revenge, which on its face was very interesting, but then the actual gameplay directly contradicted its heavy handed message (main character is bad for killing Important NPCs, but the dozens and dozens of grunts the player wasted to get here don't matter.) Not to mention a certain character was very poorly handled, imo.

(Also I wanna give a big shout out to everyone who mentioned a Dragon Age game. Dragon Age is my favorite franchise and I love all three games so much, but also I totally understand people's issue with the games and also I would like to personally fistfight EA and Bioware /jk )

 

[Jannah]

Gonna say The Last of Us 2. I loved the first one so much, it was a great exploration of a deeply flawed protagonist. I don't even like stealth-based combat, but I enjoyed the characters so much that didn't matter. Then the second one came out, and... Ehh.

It was exploring how these characters got trapped in this self-destructive cycle of violence and revenge, which on its face was very interesting, but then the actual gameplay directly contradicted its heavy handed message (main character is bad for killing Important NPCs, but the dozens and dozens of grunts the player wasted to get here don't matter.) Not to mention a certain character was very poorly handled, imo.

(Also I wanna give a big shout out to everyone who mentioned a Dragon Age game. Dragon Age is my favorite franchise and I love all three games so much, but also I totally understand people's issue with the games and also I would like to personally fistfight EA and Bioware for their bad decision making /jk )

I loved the first game too. I heard the second was terrible so I didn't bother.

 

[Seabunny]

It would definitely have to be Fallout 76.

 

[Cosmo]

Not terribly disappointing, but still disappointed me was Dark Deity. Game built upon the same style as Fire Emblem but isn't Nintendo only, which is good, more competition and I never say no to more RPGs on the market. But... It isn't Fire Emblem in the wrong way.

Saint's Row 1 and 2 weren't Grand Theft Auto in the right way. They were heavily inspired by GTA's gameplay and story, but they had their own touch and spin that made them excel in their own way.

Dark Deity... is... the wrong way. As I played it, I couldn't help feeling how weak it was compared to Fire Emblem, how it felt lacking.

The characters just don't really land, outside of a few, and they keep throwing more and more characters that it feels like almost a Roleplay where anyone who wanted to join made a CS and the GM just didn't know how to say no. The story is janky and jumps so much that it is hard to follow and I get that can be hard, for Fire Emblem-lite game... but start in the academy, then fighting bandits, then a war, okay, gotcha, with it so far.... then.......... ancient civ... ancient evil... traitors... oh noes, secret organization and now we're the rebels! Like, guys, what are you doing? There is no real pacing here, no sense of time or direction. It just feels like they had a bunch of ideas and no one around to keep the ideas in check to make a coherent story. Like, god, I think I only managed to get halfway through the story before my interest just kinda up and vanished.

Some of the gameplay features they added just.. aren't great. Having 'four styles of attack' doesn't really make the combat feel deep, just like adding an extra, unneeded, step [and when I played, one was clearly superior, the crit/evasion one (Seriously, have the developers just never played a video game before? Why would crit and evasion be the same type? That's always busted)]. The companions lacked the classic Fire Emblem 'Grind the relation pairs you really wanna see and play matchmaker' and are 'there' in appearance, but are unlocked as you progress so you don't 'feel' like you are earning those growing ties, or that you are setting it up, just that.... they are happening.... And you are.... around to see it. Which why? It.. isn't as good.

As I was playing it, I just kept wondering, "God, what am I doing? Why don't I just go play Three Houses or Awakening or something?" which, funnily enough, I ended up doing. Might give it another 'college try'... sometime in the future [I bought it and played it fairly close to it's release dates and it's had a few updates since so who knows? Maybe they... fixed it. Kinda doubt it], but man, disappointed. Was hoping for a Saint's Row style copy, one that is great and stands on it's own. Not Wal*Mart brand Fire Emblem.

 

[PerfectlySafePenguin]

Kingdom Hearts.

I spent half an hour attempting to get into it, then gave up and sold it to a friend.

 

[Zoneria]

Alien vs Predator for this obscure gaming console called Jaguar

 

[Murdergurl]

Alien vs Predator for this obscure gaming console called Jaguar

ah, but did you ever play the Arcade Aliens versus Predator? It was the tits!

 

[Rekai Leon]

Warcraft III - Reforged, without any doubt. I have requested a refund for that. Just to make this clear, I am talking about Reforged and Reforged only. Reign of Chaos and The Frozen Throne are great.

 

[Vinegar3]

Don't know if this counts, but I felt really disappointed by New Vegas Bounties 3, a mod for Fallout: New Vegas. For those who don't know, New Vegas Bounties is a series by a mod author called someguy2000 and have been critically acclaimed for some pretty solid writing and voice-acting, but what people loved the most about it was (obviously) being able to roleplay as a bounty hunter. The series had a narrative going along, which involved you chasing this bad motherfucker named Marko. He had been built up throughout the NVB series as this horrible bandit who you did not want to fuck with, who burned down villages and did all this horrible shit. He was basically the boogieman, and NVB3 was hoping to tie up that storyline by having the player confront him in this all-new area.

When I met him, I was severely disappointed. Hell, the entirety of the mod was kind of disappointing. It was set in this new worldmap in a snowy area with a handful of explorable areas, but there's nothing that really incentivizes you on going off the beaten path. But the worst part was Marko. What someguy aimed to do with Marko was to try to deconstruct the Courier's actions, to try to deconstruct the hero archetype that the player had built for themselves.

The problem with that, though, was that the mod had tried to place Marko at a higher moral standard than the player, when the problem with that is twofold. Number 1: After everything you've been told Marko's done, everything that other characters have accounted, the fact that he tries to morally postulate and call the player's actions misguided and evil comes off as hollow criticism and deflection considering his own checkered past.

Number 2 is the fact that Marko is literally wrong, but the dialogue choices and literary framing try to railroad the player into affirming his position. This one chafes me the hardest. He tries to call the player bad for all the people he's killed in his bounty-hunting, trying to guilt-trip you, which might stand some ground depending on which character the player is roleplaying, but that's the problem: it doesn't account for the fact that the player might be roleplaying a heroic character, in which case his argument (which amounts to "you stopped evil people from doing evil things which made more evil people do other evil things") falls flat on his face. If it weren't for the Courier, the same amount of evil would still be happening, and the Mojave would arguably be worse off by the time of New Vegas Bounties 3.

And like I said, the dialogue options don't point out this fallacy: there are no special options if you have a good karma or if you've killed specific people, no Speech checks, nothing like that. There are a static and unchanging amount of options which bottleneck you into affirming exactly what he says by expressing guilt over the very clearly malicious and evil people you have killed just to give Marko's stupid argument more weight.

I love the someguy series, but by god do I hate Marko. He's like Kai Leng from Mass Effect 3.

 

[ria0089]

mass effect andromeda. it wasn't suuuper bad but it wasn't good as the other titles. way too prolonged and the ending was anti climatic. definitely something I wouldn't play another again

 

[Nine of Swords]

Depression Quest.

It's a choose-your-own-adventure text game about, well, depression. I can probably write an essay about it but the TLDR is that I found the game to be somewhat condescending in the end despite the developer's good intentions. The characters and plots are poorly written and executed too. I just think Howling Dogs did it much better.

If we're strictly limiting it to graphic games, well, I'll have to say Final Fantasy 13.

 

[SpazTheButcher]

Homefront: The Revolution

I cannot describe how bad it is except that every gun is off the same platform

That sniper you got? Turn it into a GL somehow

 

[Abyss]

Devil May Cry 2, sort of.

Not entirely fair, because I knew of its reputation going in, but daaaaaaaaamn was I ever determined to slog my way to the end so I could finally be done with it. Even the map is unfinished and unusable. THE MAP.

More genuinely would be Infamous Second Son. I absolutely loved this game for the first 1-2 thirds, but gradually it became too repetitive and certain plot points just completely ruined any sense of satisfaction I could get from the story. Overall, I just feel like the game could have been so much more and they missed the mark in some areas, which is made more noticeable because it had such a strong start.

 

[cocacola]

might sound completely odd, but gang beasts. im not a big video game person so when i do play a video game, i typically always know that i will like it lol.
i tried playing gang beasts once with friends and it was a horrible experience. i remember all the video game youtubers would love it and it always was sooo fun to watch, but it was flat to me. the controls were bad, but they were bad on purpose (i hope, so that the game can be more difficult) but the ui was god awful. we couldnt even figure out if text was a button or if it was just flat text. there was no explanation of how to move through the ui either -- it was a lot of trial and error.

 

[bad wolf]

Gonna say The Last of Us 2. I loved the first one so much, it was a great exploration of a deeply flawed protagonist. I don't even like stealth-based combat, but I enjoyed the characters so much that didn't matter. Then the second one came out, and... Ehh.

It was exploring how these characters got trapped in this self-destructive cycle of violence and revenge, which on its face was very interesting, but then the actual gameplay directly contradicted its heavy handed message (main character is bad for killing Important NPCs, but the dozens and dozens of grunts the player wasted to get here don't matter.) Not to mention a certain character was very poorly handled, imo.

Spoiler: It's in a spoiler for a reason, folks.

I haven't completed the second game yet, but I already feel you on this. There are aspects to it that I think are interesting and would be nice to explore, and it was handled okay up to a point, but it really lost me when it jumped to Abby's perspective.

I don't quite know how to explain this so bear with me! But I get really frustrated when shows try to get you to sympathize with new characters who did something AWFUL to pre-established characters. TWD tried to do the same thing with Negan and it just didn't work for me. It's a whole series of unfortunate events that happened and if the story started game one from Abby's perspective, I'm sure I'd have a different opinion, but it wasn't. We got to know Joel and Ellie. Glenn and Abraham. They were the characters we saw struggle for survival, characters we cried with and felt happy for. Ultimately, Abby and Negan are strangers who did equally awful things in the name of survival.

Was what happened to them terrible? Yes. And I like that they're not outright ignoring that or just painting Abby as this one-dimensional villain who lacks any sort of motive. But that's not going to make me any less angry at her for what she did. Maybe I'll feel different at the end of the game! But I can't deny that I had to take a good long break from it just to decompress when they suddenly shifted perspectives like that. I loved Joel, man. And I'm so angry that they did that right after she killed Jesse, too.

BUT ANYWHO... Another game that I'm disappointed with is Detroit: Become Human. It looks stunning and the characters are decent. Story driven games, or games that play like movies with divergent paths to explore and different endings are just SO fun to me. I also loved the dynamic between Hank and Connor, and I bawled my eyes out playing through Kara's story.

But the writing is kind of shit. The plot is full of wholes and introduces a lot of things that go nowhere. Some plot points just don't make sense altogether.

Its similarities to actual historical events could have also been handled more tactfully. For the life of me, I can't understand how you can have literal segregation, prejudice, and concentration camps in your game and say things like "people can make those parallels if they want but it's mostly just about androids." Like, that shit isn't something you briefly touched on. It's written throughout your story. You can't play the game and say it doesn't make those connections, so why ignore them by not talking about it or outright just denying it? "iT's NoT oVeRtLy PoLiTiCaL" and "i DiDn'T dRaW iNsPiRaTiOn FrOm AnY rEaL wOrLd EvEnTs" my ass.

It sucks because there are parts to the game I really like, but David Cage is so tone deaf it hurts. What an ass.

An interesting article that talks about this can be found here.

 

[Vinegar3]

Spoiler: It's in a spoiler for a reason, folks.

I haven't completed the second game yet, but I already feel you on this. There are aspects to it that I think are interesting and would be nice to explore, and it was handled okay up to a point, but it really lost me when it jumped to Abby's perspective.

I don't quite know how to explain this so bear with me! But I get really frustrated when shows try to get you to sympathize with new characters who did something AWFUL to pre-established characters. TWD tried to do the same thing with Negan and it just didn't work for me. It's a whole series of unfortunate events that happened and if the story started game one from Abby's perspective, I'm sure I'd have a different opinion, but it wasn't. We got to know Joel and Ellie. Glenn and Abraham. They were the characters we saw struggle for survival, characters we cried with and felt happy for. Ultimately, Abby and Negan are strangers who did equally awful things in the name of survival.

Was what happened to them terrible? Yes. And I like that they're not outright ignoring that or just painting Abby as this one-dimensional villain who lacks any sort of motive. But that's not going to make me any less angry at her for what she did. Maybe I'll feel different at the end of the game! But I can't deny that I had to take a good long break from it just to decompress when they suddenly shifted perspectives like that. I loved Joel, man. And I'm so angry that they did that right after she killed Jesse, too.

BUT ANYWHO... Another game that I'm disappointed with is Detroit: Become Human. It looks stunning and the characters are decent. Story driven games, or games that play like movies with divergent paths to explore and different endings are just SO fun to me. I also loved the dynamic between Hank and Connor, and I bawled my eyes out playing through Kara's story.

But the writing is kind of shit. The plot is full of wholes and introduces a lot of things that go nowhere. Some plot points just don't make sense altogether.

Its similarities to actual historical events could have also been handled more tactfully. For the life of me, I can't understand how you can have literal segregation, prejudice, and concentration camps in your game and say things like "people can make those parallels if they want but it's mostly just about androids." Like, that shit isn't something you briefly touched on. It's written throughout your story. You can't play the game and say it doesn't make those connections, so why ignore them by not talking about it or outright just denying it? "iT's NoT oVeRtLy PoLiTiCaL" and "i DiDn'T dRaW iNsPiRaTiOn FrOm AnY rEaL wOrLd EvEnTs" my ass.

It sucks because there are parts to the game I really like, but David Cage is so tone deaf it hurts. What an ass.

An interesting article that talks about this can be found here.

Frankly, any and all excuses David Cage could have made about not drawing from any real world events just fell out the window when you had the option to graffiti a raised fist on the wall.

 

[diet_pepsi]

Honestly? I think that Miitopia is pretty overrated. That might just be me not liking those kinds of games, but I don't know it just wasn't that interesting to me.

 

[Cosmo]

Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky. I wouldn't say it's fair to call it a 'disappointment' more that I was disappointed. I've heard so many good things about the game, and I'm sure it is a good game, but something about it just doesn't... click with me. I don't know if it's the characters, or the setting, or the design, but for the life of me.... I'm just not interested. I think I barely got an hour into it before I started to wonder why was I bothering?

Might have been the character design? I find other games like that tend to make it very unappealing. Like I recently tried FFXII, booted it up, saw the prince who looked like a 14 year old kid wearing his dad armor, started to sweat that is who I would be playing the entire time... Turned out it was going to be discount, legally distinct, Disney Aladdin and I just noped out. So that was also a disappointment but probably more a personal disappointment rather then the game, itself, doing anything inherently wrong. Just like with Trails, I've heard good things about FFXII [mostly about the side characters and companions], but I really dislike overly, for lack of a better word, boyish protagonist. Something about it just doesn't click with me. So was disappointed to find two RPGs, with reasonable good reviews, that I just had no interest in.

Spoiler: It's in a spoiler for a reason, folks.

I haven't completed the second game yet, but I already feel you on this. There are aspects to it that I think are interesting and would be nice to explore, and it was handled okay up to a point, but it really lost me when it jumped to Abby's perspective.

I don't quite know how to explain this so bear with me! But I get really frustrated when shows try to get you to sympathize with new characters who did something AWFUL to pre-established characters. TWD tried to do the same thing with Negan and it just didn't work for me. It's a whole series of unfortunate events that happened and if the story started game one from Abby's perspective, I'm sure I'd have a different opinion, but it wasn't. We got to know Joel and Ellie. Glenn and Abraham. They were the characters we saw struggle for survival, characters we cried with and felt happy for. Ultimately, Abby and Negan are strangers who did equally awful things in the name of survival.

Was what happened to them terrible? Yes. And I like that they're not outright ignoring that or just painting Abby as this one-dimensional villain who lacks any sort of motive. But that's not going to make me any less angry at her for what she did. Maybe I'll feel different at the end of the game! But I can't deny that I had to take a good long break from it just to decompress when they suddenly shifted perspectives like that. I loved Joel, man. And I'm so angry that they did that right after she killed Jesse, too.

Spoiler

It has a lot of failures. One of the biggest is that it shouldn't have been the Last of Us 2. It should have been the Last of Us 3. The Last of US 2 should have been Ellie's coming of age story. It should have been Ellie finding out what happened and her leaving Joel and going on a journey on her own, meeting people, doing questionable things. The story should have been split with us playing Joel, trying to find her, and Ellie trying to find herself. It was outright insulting that this was just thrown into a flashback in the actual Last of Us 2. During this adventurer, Ellie could have met Abby, becoming friends, hinting at the truth of Abby's past but never really unveiling it. Allow us to grow comfortable with Abby, to like her. To trust her. And then, at the end, you have Abby kill Joel. This better sets up the 'cycle of violence' as it adds another, well developed, link to the chain [not that the 'cycle of violence' is a particularly new theme], allows the players time to feel, time to mourn, time to get angry, time to understand, time to entrench themselves...

And then, in Last of Us 3, you do Abby and Ellie. You further develop the theme of violence, you make it easier for players to avoid killing random grunts and npcs, and, most importantly, when it comes time for Ellie to face Abby, you give the players the choice. You let them decide if they want to kill Abby, or step back and have Ellie return to the family she made for herself in the previous game. You trust in your writing and your players to come to a conclusion... There are games that have done this and done this perfectly, like Metro. When done right, the impact and weight of the decision and story will stick with the player.

But they didn't do this. So Last of Us 2 feels like solid ideas that were poorly implemented, rushed and, worst of all, they looked into the abyss of challenging player's and their vendettas... and they blinked by not allowing the player to make that decision themselves.

 

[bad wolf]

Spoiler

It has a lot of failures. One of the biggest is that it shouldn't have been the Last of Us 2. It should have been the Last of Us 3. The Last of US 2 should have been Ellie's coming of age story. It should have been Ellie finding out what happened and her leaving Joel and going on a journey on her own, meeting people, doing questionable things. The story should have been split with us playing Joel, trying to find her, and Ellie trying to find herself. It was outright insulting that this was just thrown into a flashback in the actual Last of Us 2. During this adventurer, Ellie could have met Abby, becoming friends, hinting at the truth of Abby's past but never really unveiling it. Allow us to grow comfortable with Abby, to like her. To trust her. And then, at the end, you have Abby kill Joel. This better sets up the 'cycle of violence' as it adds another, well developed, link to the chain [not that the 'cycle of violence' is a particularly new theme], allows the players time to feel, time to mourn, time to get angry, time to understand, time to entrench themselves...

And then, in Last of Us 3, you do Abby and Ellie. You further develop the theme of violence, you make it easier for players to avoid killing random grunts and npcs, and, most importantly, when it comes time for Ellie to face Abby, you give the players the choice. You let them decide if they want to kill Abby, or step back and have Ellie return to the family she made for herself in the previous game. You trust in your writing and your players to come to a conclusion... There are games that have done this and done this perfectly, like Metro. When done right, the impact and weight of the decision and story will stick with the player.

But they didn't do this. So Last of Us 2 feels like solid ideas that were poorly implemented, rushed and, worst of all, they looked into the abyss of challenging player's and their vendettas... and they blinked by not allowing the player to make that decision themselves.

Spoiler

I got chills. That really would have been perfect! Holy shit. Hopefully the tv show will do a better job of explaining and building character background like that. It’s just unfortunate the game wasn’t able to achieve that kind of depth and connection.

I think I’d definitely be able to sympathize better with Abby this way. It’d make Joel’s death and Abby’s turn that much more surprising and devastating. You’ve got a good connection not only with Joel but Abby, too. Player feelings would be better balanced and not as one sided.

Again, I haven’t completed the game and quit right when it changed pov’s, so maybe I’ll feel differently after completing it. But I already LOVE the way you explained everything.

 

[Cheesemick]

Fable 3. I was a young boi when it came out, fable the lost chapters will always hold a special place near to my heart. When fable 3 came out and I got it as a kid I was so excited but well...it was fable 3 what more can I say.

 

[NekoGirl665]

Well the game itself was not all that disappointing. But one of the endings really ticked me off and that was Liege Dragon. it has multiple endings but it doesnt give you a save after the final boss. So if you want to see other endings you need to beat the game. And you get to pick a character you maxed trust with. One ending was awesome( end with the character) . One ending was predictable(ending up with the character). But one just was terrible(you leave the person! ) and I made sure I was maxed trust with everyone so why didn’t they make an ending where you stayed with that character!? Super disappointed putting in all the work to have it end up like that.

 

[Cassie Lang]

Off the top of my head? This.

Land of the Dead: Road to Fiddler's Green - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Probably one of the most soulless, boring experiences I've had playing through a game.

 

[Inno]

Not really surprising but that garbage they called a 'Saints Row Reboot'. Luckily I was able to get back my money for it. But yeah, they should have not called it Saints Row at all. It was utterly ridiculous.