Tell Us Dammit: Your Biggest Disappointment

Given that I was writing about No Man’s Sky earlier today, it’s hard not to think of all the fury and rage people had in the weeks after launch. I think the “most disappointing game of the year” train has probably moved on, but it got me wondering: what’s the most disappointing game you’ve ever purchased or played?

The first cab off the rank, surely, would have to be the trainwreck that was Aliens: Colonial Marines. I feel like it’s going to be a long, long while before people forget how appallingly bad that game was.

But one that I bought myself, many moons ago, was BRINK. I even had an AMD graphics card back then, which made the experience all the more painful. The ideas around movement were certainly ahead of its time – just look at games like Titanfall and how Call of Duty has co-opted parkour – but the execution, the atrocious performance, bafflingly bad AI and the regular crashes were hard to forget.

Other suggestions:

  • SimCity (2013): Pretty hard not to include the game that basically popularised provisional reviews because its servers were so hideously broken at launch. Hell, EA even won a Shonky award over their support hotline that year.
  • RAGE: Why Megatextures Never Became A Thing.
  • Evolve: What was a really good concept ended up being let down by a bad business model, matchmaking that took forever at launch and the fact that most games you ended up in were far too one-sided, which blew the tension right out of the water.
  • Assassin’s Creed 3: In so, so many ways.
  • Dragon’s Lair Time Warp: Because you couldn’t actually input the commands on an Amiga joystick, so you just got screwed over repeatedly.
  • Any Mario Party after Mario Party 3: This one’s from Hayley (although I reckon 4 and 5 weren’t too bad).

What’s your most disappointing game?


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