It’s happened to us all. E3 comes around and we see trailers and teasers for games that we feel like we are going to love. We see all the following media campaigns and our excitement builds for the game. Then we go to a midnight release event somewhere and we get the game. We hurry home to tear it open and jam it in our consoles, only to find that the game is not what we thought, nor is it what we were promised. These letdowns have punctuated gaming for a few years now. These are a few are the ones that hurt us the worst.
The Bouncer
When I saw the trailers for this game I got a little excited. I remember the joys of playing Final Fight for hours on end in the arcade. So naturally when a new beat-em-up style game was coming out, I wanted to play it. It had a cool art style and some seriously intense cutscenes. So I grabbed it up for my PlayStation 2 and headed to the house. I called a buddy over so we could bloody our knuckles together, but once I got past the awesome opening cutscene, I realized that this game was exactly like Final Fight , only prettier. No plot, repetitive controls and linear gameplay all added up to one serious snoozer of a game. Maybe if they had added some sort of two-player, fight off it might have been better, but it ended up just being another of the lackluster titles in the PS2 catalog.
The Fable Series
When I played the first Fable title, I was amazed. It was so different from the turn-based RPG games that I had come to know and love. It gave me the façade of roaming free within a fully rendered world and the freedom to do what I wanted and to see how those choices affected the world around me. So naturally, when they announced the second title and started advertising all the new things you could do I got even more excited. Fable 2 could not have been more of a snoozer. I had more fun marrying as many women as I could and ending up with STDs and buying property and chopping wood than I did playing the actual game. This was the first game I had ever played where the side missions were actually more enthralling than the main story. And don’t even get me started on the Fable/Kinect garbage. I can only talk about so much crap in the morning before I hit my limit.
Ryse: Son of Rome
I liked the Crysis games, so naturally when I found out that Crytek was doing Ryse , I figured it couldn’t be all that bad. Also, it was a launch title for the Xbox One and I figured that they wouldn’t want to put out a crappy game as their first big foray into the new gen of systems. The trailers looked incredible and the graphics were awesome as well, so I decided to give it a go. I was in awe at first; the overwhelming look of the world in the game was unvbelievable. It was my first look at a next-gen console and I was blown away. Then as I played on, I realized that the gameplay was more of the same every time a battle ensued. The co-op modes were clunky and the online even more so. All in all, this game slowly but surely repeated its way to being a letdown.
Too Human
RPGs are always hit or miss for me, and action-RPGs even more so. However I had heard some good stuff about this game so I looked into it. It was a hack and slash, action-RPG set way in the future but interwoven with Norse mythology. I figured that was an interesting enough concept for me to give it a whack, so I bought it and tossed it in the ole Xbox. Right out of the gate, the controls had a steep learning curve. I have never, and will never, enjoy using the analog sticks for combat purposes. They should only be used for directional manipulation in my mind. So having to always deal with a bad control scheme tarnished what could have been a good game. Then you had the issue of gigantically massive levels that dragged on for an eternity and a story that was nearly as lame as the control scheme.
Fracture
Being a fan of games like Red Faction , when I saw the trailers for Fracture I thought it was a cool concept. When you can’t find cover or a way around something, just use your handy-dandy doodad to manipulate the ground around you and make it. Sounds cool right? Wrong. This game was the epitome of lame. Actually the only shooter I liked less than this one was Haze (but that loathing is for a later article). This game was hot, steamy crap. The controls sucked, the story sucked, the characters sucked – actually the ONLY thing that was even remotely cool about it was using the ground manipulation tools to fling enemies skyward as you were trying to overpower the crappy controls and actually do something.
Lair
Riding dragons has always been a fantasy of mine. Flying through the sky and burning my enemies to a crisp just sounds like fun to me. So when someone told me about Lair , my interest was piqued. Yet there were a ton of other games out at the time that I wanted to play more, so I resigned to watching the trailers and dreaming. Well, several years later I picked up a copy of the game in the bargain bin at my local game store. I thought that for twelve dollars, I couldn’t really go wrong. The game looked cool and I remembered some of the animation sequences in the trailers being pretty awesome. I took it home and fired it up, played it maybe an hour. I took it out of the system and returned it. First of all, the six-axis controls were wonky at best and the fact that it was nothing more than an arcade shooter with fantasy window dressing was a total let-down.
Dead Island
Zombie games are my favorite way to unwind. As I have mentioned in previous articles I love blasting hordes of the undead after a crap-tastic day at work. So when the trailers for Dead Island started showing up I got a little pumped. You are on vacation and then you wake up to the zombie apocalypse in a tropical paradise; it seemed like a really cool idea. Then they started talking about drop-in, drop-out co-op gameplay. You could actually play through the entire campaign mode with friends. I was already digging the idea, so when the game came out, I was pumped. I stuffed it in my PS3 and started off on my would-be adventure. My best friend got his copy as well. The idea was to co-op our way through the campaign and kill some zombies. Only in the short span of time I owned that game, he and I were never able to link up for more than about 6.8 seconds. Bummer.
Duke Nukem Forever
Duke Nukem was the first game I ever hid from my parents. I remember waiting until they were alsleep so I could sneak off and play it. All the cursing, booze, drugs and boobs a teenager could want-then add in the gory blood-and-guts gameplay and you have a recipe for gaming bliss. So when the announcement was made that they were bringing Duke into the current gen on PS3 and XB360, I got a little rush of childhood glee from it. Granted, the original series was void of any real plot and had no redeeming qualities whatsoever, other than the fact that you went around blasting pig cops and saving big-boobied babes. So I expected more of the same. Except they spent so much time on corny one-liners and innuendo that they forgot to actually make a good game.
Aliens: Colonial Marines
I love Borderlands , so when I found out Gearbox had taken over the production of this game I got excited. Also being a huge fan of the movie franchise made it even more appealing to me. The idea that I would get to go back to LV421 and see what happened in the wake of Ripley’s departure from the planet was an altogether intriguing proposition. Then I saw Randy Pitchford getting all hopped up about it at E3 and in the promo reels. I started getting more excited. Then they said that there would be online four player co-op, just like in Borderlands. Naturally my excitement built even more. Then the game came out. The glitchy, stale feeling controls were the first strike. The story was pretty lame, and the online co-op was plagued with more issues than I care to discuss. Two words: Epic fail.
Brink
Bethesda poured a ton into the media on this FPS/Team Fortress title. They showed us incredible trailers of a vast and deep world where the rich and the poor are locked in a struggle for survival. They showed us awesome ‘in-game’ footage of intense traversals and parkour-style aspects of the game. They sold us on the eleventy-billion ways you could customize your characters and weapons. But they forgot one very important thing: to make a good game. Clunky controls, crappy servers and weak gameplay plagued this game. Then there was the match-making that was always slanted and gave one side the obvious advantage. Honestly, we had more fun with the character creator than the actual game.