Biggest surprise and disappointment from this year?

Hey, I haven't played many games from this year so I was wondering what was the biggest pleasant surprise of the year for you and which title disappointed you the most?

I've only played through 3 games from this year and I wrote off God of War completely but recently played it and couldn't believe how good it was. I know it reviewed ridiculously well but Idk, I just couldn't buy into any of it. So I know it may sound weird but GoW was an amazing surprise for me.

On the other hand, Idk if disappointment is the right word but the Shadow of the Colossus remake didn't do anything for me and I found it to be utterly forgettable. After I beat it, I played the HD Collection version and just liked the visuals better.

I was extremely surprised by how much I am enjoying Assasssin's Creed Odyssey, I never liked a single AC game before this one. The last one I played was Black Flag, and I gave that one up about 3 hours in. As for the most disappointing, I'd probably say Spider-Man. The combat does nothing for me, and I hated the sections where you were playing as other characters. The whole game kinda felt like those last 2 Rocksteady Batman games just with a different skin on it.

Not 2018 games (I’m behind on things, these days), but I loved Fire Pro Wrestling World and Yakuza Zero, both of which I played this year.

Edit: Saw others mentioning Monster Hunter. The garbage co-op requirements suck and hurt longevity, but that game was great.

I've always wanted to get into Monster Hunter, tried Tri and thought it was a clunky mess. (that might have something to do with using a wii-mote) World really clicked with me though, i've spent over 200 hours playing it and would go back in an instant if they added a new monster or even a dumb costume/event.

Nothing really let me down too much this year, i'm not loving the new Fist of the North Star game but I am enjoying it so I cant be too mad about that.

Theres nothing left this year that i'm hyped about, i'm more curious about RDR2 than I am excited. Same with Fallout 76. (although i'm not sure i'm getting that one)

I didn't expect to spend 130+ hours playing a Dragon Quest game this year, but here we are. It really proves that you can still do a very traditional JRPG if you give it a great cast of characters, snappy combat and load it full chalk full of charm. It's actually inspired me to think about going back to the JRPG's that I missed out on. Chrono Trigger, FFVI, Earthbound, SMRPG. I've never touched any of them.

In terms of disappointment, Battle for Azeroth was a huge stinker. Played that for a month and than let my sub end. So many bad decisions, so incredibly unfinished. Coming off of Legion, which was very good, they really had to nail it. They did not.

I was really looking forward to Kirby: Star Allies and that game just didn't do anything for me. I thought it was shockingly bad for a Nintendo title; boring and unfocused and incredibly easy without being all that charming. It's not a terrible game but it's like a 6 or a 6.5 and that's not good enough for Nintendo.

In general I think the Switch has had a very disappointing year. It's had some great indies released for it, no doubt, but they're on other platforms (though not portable) and its exclusives have been basically Wii U ports or mediocre. Smash Ultimate will change that, but it's just one game and I don't really love Smash.

Immortal Redneck came to console in 2018 and I enjoyed that a lot more than I thought I would, though I didn't come close to beating it. Just like Flinthook it's a roguelike that I enjoyed and appreciated but didn't feel the need to put in enough time to finish.

Biggest disappointment for me is Rise of the Tomb Raider. I liked TR2013, bought Rise on sale because news of Shadow started to come out and I was all like "hmmm, I could go for some more Tomb Raider!" and I walked away without even finishing it. I'm really curious to know why they went so far with the somber tone. Good god, it makes an SMT game look like Mario Party. At least characters in SMT smile and laugh and those games are grim as fuck. I got so tired of listening to Lara go on and on and on about her dad, Trinity, the Prophet, and whatever other dumb bullshit she has to say. Then open world sucks. Traversing the environment got old. Survival Instincts is crutch disguised as a mechanic to make up for the fact exploring the environment is more of a chore than anything else. I just did not find it to be a pleasant experience at any point after maybe the first few hours after the excitement of a new game wore off.

As for pleasant surprise, the only one I can think of is Bomber Crew. Everything other game I've bought/played has turned out pretty much like I expected which has been good for me. Bomber Crew though I tried on a whim because it was on Gamepass and although I haven't played a lot of it, I had a great time. It's got a great look and deceptively deep gameplay that's presented in a manageable way. Like there's a lot going on, but I never felt like I was fighting with controls or fumbling through menus or anything like that. It's a neat little game that I wholly recommend if it looks like it might be your thing.

My biggest disappointment was Into the Breach. I really liked FTL, even though I always intended to spend even more time with it than I got around to. With Into the Breach, I can see how impressively tightly-designed everything in it is, but I don't get any enjoyment from actually playing it. It's as though the design is so incredibly tight from enormous amounts of design iteration and optimization that all of the room for player expression, play, and scenario imagination has been wrung out of it. I just feel like a an emotionless computer when I play it.

My biggest surprise was Dragon's Crown Pro. I hadn't played any previous version of the game, and I've never been much into Vanillaware's art or games (I liked GrimGrimoire though). I only gave this new version a shot on a whim, since it was less than full price and I happened to be in the mood for a brawler at the time. I was a little slow to warm up to it, but once I got a good grasp on the differing classes' capabilities and how to customize my playstyle with various skills and items, I found the game easy to pick up and play while still being deep and rewarding enough to put dozens and dozens of hours into it. Plus there's the RPG progression trappings of quests, leveling, and loot, as well as secrets to find in levels, and co-op to add teamplay dynamics and more chaos on-screen. I don't think I could ever get tired of using the dwarf to grab enemies in mid-air and hurl them across the screen into a group of enemies to blow them all up--it's like rocket jumping with quad damage and invulnerability and your enemies are also your rockets. This game is now my favorite brawler since the genre's heyday in the early 90's.

Biggest surprise so far has been God of War. I really liked the original trilogy (but didn't 'love' them). I was relatively excited for the new release, but had tempered my expectations. It was a far better experience than I had anticipated - it was the first game that I've ever platinumed - mainly because I wanted to stay in that game world so much.

Biggest disappointment(s) have been Ni No Kuni II and Octopath Traveler. Ni No Kuni II was a big letdown, because I really enjoyed the first game - grindy gameplay and all. The gameplay systems in this one don't really do anything for me, the story is a whole lot of nothing and I stopped after about 15 - 20 hours. Octopath Traveler is the same in terms of the story. The gameplay is really good, but I have no reason to want to actually go through that world and explore.

Subnautica! thought it would be a storyless survival game; turns out a fairly intriguing story got me to see it to the end.

Biggest surprise is the Burnout Paradise Remaster. It was fantastic to get back into that game. Easily the best game of last generation, Mass Effect 2 be damned!

Biggest disappointment was the Burnout Paradise Remaster. I had previously repressed the realization that there will never be another Burnout game, but this brought it all back.

My biggest surprise might be this RPG maker game that just came out called Jimmy and Pulsating Mass. It is easily this years Undertale or LISA but sadly does not seem to have captured the same zeitgeist. It's pretty incredible though. Very charming, very funny, occasionally terrifying.

Biggest disappointment, probably Octopath Traveler. I think that game is pretty terrible and I was certain it was gonna be right in my wheelhouse.

I'm gonna cheat a little bit. Biggest surprise for me this year has been Total Warhammer 2. Yes, it came out fall last year, but it's been continuously supported and I didn't get around to it before this year, and so far I've put almost 250 hours into it. It's just been my go-to downtime game all year long.

As for disappointment I'm gonna have to go against @savage and say Dragon's Crown Pro. I already played it on PS3 and somehow I forgot I wasn't a huge fan of it and thought I'd have a great time with the remaster. Bounced off that thing in less than an hour.

Biggest surprise for me is from my deep enjoyment of Trails in the Sky SC. It wound up hooking me much more than the first entry, with a hugely likable protagonist and a pretty feel-good story.

Biggest disappointment might be Ni no Kuni 2 which just doesn’t have the heart of the first game. It’s not bad, but it feels lifeless,

My biggest disappointment is, honestly, Yakuza 6. I know the series is known for stories you need a flowchart to follow, but this particular one completely lost me because I do not care about ANY of these characters at all. That might have been salvaged if I could walk around and find weird people and shit to do in Kamorocho, but even that seems lacking. Compared to Zero, its a massive step down and kinda has soured me on the series (though I hear Kiwami 2 is a step up).

Well, the good news is Yakuza is done. That's my disappointment as well. It felt so slim in comparison to the others. Biggest Surprise might be Fire Pro World. I had it in my head that game was more complex but, aside from the perspective giving me a couple of bothers, it's an enjoyable game like an old PSOne Smackdown.

Also, Max Payne holds up really well.

Biggest surprise for me would be Detroit : Become Human. It got a lot of shit online, and I can't really argue that it wasn't warranted. The story was deeply flawed but I was surprised at how much I enjoyed playing it and didn't want it to end.

Biggest disappointment - Vampyr. Couldn't get into it at all, enjoyed the story aspects but everything else felt clunky. I hear there's a more story based mode available now so maybe I'll check it out again.

Taking sort of a general industry approach here since I haven't played that many new games this year.

Biggest surprise was finally getting into GTA Online after 5 years avoiding it like the plague. Turns out playing with friends in an invite-only session and heisting it up is some of the most fun I've had in gaming probably ever. Runners up are Forza Horizon 4 (the series never interested me before but I am LOVING this one) and the fact that Bethesda just straight-up announced Starfield and Elder Scrolls 6 at E3. I hope more developers take that "here's our roadmap" approach in the future rather than shrouding known quantities in bullshit mystique.

Biggest disappointment is probably Hollow Knight on the Switch. Suppose it's mostly on me since I don't really get along with most Soulslikes, but some of its mechanics are uncommonly offputting (the mapping stuff primarily) and I lost interest after three bosses. Really regret that purchase. Runner up is Fallout 76...granted, it ain't out yet but I love me some janky Bethesda RPGs and I absolutely fucking despise Rustlikes so seeing a dev I'm usually on board with go down that road is a real bummer, even if their future games will probably still be up my alley. I'm also starting to get a weird vibe from Red Dead Redemption 2. RDR1 is one of my favorite games of all time and I'm generally really, really excited for this one, but the previews have begun to make me wary. In theory I love the ridiculous attention to detail, but in practice I'm afraid all those minute systems are going to wind up creating a slog of constant character maintenance and "realism" priority over fun.

Biggest surprise The Missing, never expect Swery games to actually play that well but this one has been a really cleverly designed experience with the bizarre Swery flair.

Biggest disappointment God of War, that game just misses the mark everywhere, awful camera that doesn't even do the basic foreground transparency, boring enemies at best and annoying enemies at worst and way less enemy types than an action game should have, unpolished combat where you and enemies are sliding to connect, pointless stat system, bad characters with forced arcs because of the devotion to making the game in one cut. Just a bad game overall but looks really nice and has some funny dialogue here and there. I think just like GOWII to GOW1 on the PS2, the sequel to this game will be much more worth playing.

Biggest Disappointment: Probably Wizard of Legend. I was hoping Wizard of Legend could be like a mage version of Spelunky where you can use different spells and find the right layout in order to beat the dungeons as well as beat the game. However the game’s plain dungeon designs and punishing economy in never getting enough jewels to properly upgrade my wizard made me like the game less overtime and it didn’t have an appealing upgrade system when compared to Dead Cells.

Biggest Surprise: It was Yoku’s Island Express considering that game manages to merge Metroidvania exploration and pinball gameplay in a shockingly fun and competent way. But now Wondersong might take it. Didn’t realize I played a great adventure game with a lot of heart thanks to its charming characters and witty dialogue. But also the singing mechanic gets some distance in a variety of puzzles. It starts simple by using the R stick on Switch to follow the lead of someone else playing music, but it gets more varied as you might use it to teach NPC’s improvised songs or use your voice to manipulate the environment around you to clear these platforming stages. It’s a really special game that deserves more attention.

Biggest surprise: Well this is tricky. I expected both God of War and Spiderman (my GOTY candidates of the year) to be pretty good even before release, so I wouldn't call it a surprise that they were even better than I could've hoped, or at least not that big of a surprise. So...I don't know? Maybe I'll come back to this later.

Biggest Disappointment: I'm not sure about this one either. As an example of bigger releases, Ni No Kuni 2 I bought out of curiosity and didn't really have high expectations for it, so when the game started to drag and the story/characters didn't seem to evolve, I just shrugged and moved on to other games. If I really had to try and pick something...I guess it'd be Donut County or Guacamelee 2. DC is a fun game, but I had expected it to be a little more meaty. Guacamelee 2 was also fun to play, but for a sequel that came out over five years after the first one, I guess I expected *something* more. Not sure what that something would be.

Maybe I'll come back to this by the end of the year, when a bunch of games on my waiting list have come out.

Biggest surprise will probably go to Into the Breach for me. Even all the praise around it couldn't prepare me for how much the game was my jam. It's a shame that I've blown through all the achievements already because I'd love an excuse to keep playing it. Runner-up would be Prey (2017). Yeah the game came out last year but boy do I feel like a dunce for not playing it sooner because I loved it.

Biggest disappointment will likely be Yakuza 6. It doesn't help that Yakuza 0 was my favorite game to come out last year. I just found a lot of the content to be lacking. Not to mention the main story was a big let down for me. All things told it is a well made game and it will probably still be in my favorites of this year. Aside from the framerate the production values are insanely high across the board. The cut scenes are well acted and directed, but fuck me they take a long time to convey little to no new details in the plot. If anything this game just serves to make me glad that Kiryu's character arc is done because I didn't much care for it even in the PS2 games. Runner-up for disappointments would be Gintama Rumble not having a proper release for the western audience. In this digital future we live in I shouldn't have to import it and I'm not creating a fucking PSN Singapore ID just to download it.

Suprise: Yakuza 0 / Monster Hunter World

I play foremost on PC, both series I have followed loosely over the past years but never picked up an installment myself. Now I find myself in the situation where I regret not having done so earlier. Probably the most fun I had since a decade.

Disappointment: Ni No Kuni 2

This game made me come to the realization that I have probably moved on from classic JRPGs. I found the story very predictable, the characters very stereotypical and the fight system shallow. Ni No Kuni 2 basically made me not pick up Dragon Quest XI being afraid I would have a similar experience.

Disappointment: Into the Breach I still play FTL. I found ItB too easy/methodical and boring because of that.

Surprise: Subnautica I am not a fan of survival games but I am of Sci Fi. I wasn't going to play this so I started watching somebody play through it on youtube. I then played through it twice in a row and I never do that. Honorable mention: AC Odyssey First AC game I made it more than 2 hours into without quitting from boredom. It is currently in my top 3 games for the year.

I wrote of God of War the first time I heard about it as childish, stupid, one-note and unnecessary. I bought in in spite of my self when the few reiews I read started talking about a lot of surprising tings like actual feelings and great story and I just couldn't believe it was right.

But it was. God of War is now one of my favorite games because of a lot of reasons. It's just... on a different level than most othe games, it touches on themes in a way I never saw coming. It touched me.

Biggest Surprise: Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon
Didn't expect a game that came of a Kickstarter stretchgoal would turn out to be one of my favorite non-Castlevania Castlevania games.

Biggest Disappointment: Ni no Kuni 2
I was really looking forward to Ni no Kuni 2 as a fan of Level-5 but it just felt like a game stuck in the mid 2000s.

Most surprised by Spider-Man. It hit a sweet spot for me that few games ever have. I never felt frustrated or bored. I never got tired of swinging through the city. The only thing I would change would be to put in a nemisis system after the story so I could just keep going. But I want that for all open world games.

Most disappointed by Hollow Knight, in that it isn't my cup of tea like I wanted it to be. I kept hitting a wall and the effort to push forward outweighed my joy in playing. No shade on the game, it's beautifully designed. I might love the idea of retroidvanias more than ever playing them.

Biggest surprise? Super Mega Baseball 2. The game wasn't on my radar at all, and I'm not a huge baseball guy, but I've over 150+ hours in that game and have come back to it multiple times throughout the year and had fun with it each time.

Biggest disappointment? I dunno, haven't played any super disappointing games this year. I thought the end-game of Subnautica was a let-down, but that's compared to how amazing the rest of the game was - it'll be high on my end of year list, if I bother to do one.

I was surprised by how much time I ended up putting into Vermintide 2, and probably would've put in a lot more time if I hadn't injured my arm. It feels like a very smart progression of that first game's (and thus Left 4 Dead's) formula in a way that actually made me want to replay all of those maps.

I've honestly not been outright disappointed by anything from this year. The closest thing to a disappointment is maybe Dead Cells, which I put a dozen hours into, beat the final boss once, and feel zero inclination to revisit. That's more a thing with me and run-based stuff though. I was really hot on Into the Breach for about a week and also have no interest in going back.

Biggest surprise, Lei being added to Tekken 7.
Biggest disappointment... The lack of a single player campaign in Black Ops 4 i guess.
I'm also disappointed Destiny still has an audience.

Biggest surprise is a tie between Hollow Knight, Celeste, Into the Breach. Hollow Knight and Celeste were games that from that from the outset held little interest for me... 35 dollars and 160-ish hours later, they're two of my favorite video games ever. Into the Breach excited me from day one, but the fact that it came to Switch so soon was the surprise.

I haven't had many disappointments this year; the vast majority of my gaming time has been with indie games on Switch, and 2018 has been a pretty uniformly great year for that specific category of games.

The biggest surprise to me was We happy few. No doubts! It's similar to Bioshock, but narrative and lore are so great. I'm just completely addicted to play it. Highly recommended!

So far the biggest surprise was just how amazing God of War was. I like the previous games and all, they were fine, but God of War this year was just so damn good. I could not put it down and wanted a sequel as soon as I finished it.

Biggest disappointment is the Switch. Nothing bad per se, its just a portable port machine at this point, which is fine I suppose.

In terms of playing the game, stinks to be boring but while I'm a pretty devout Sony first party guy I had no reason to expect they'd pull off God ofWar's transition as well as they did, or make a Spider-Man game that wasn't just fun but a legitimate contender for game of the year. In retrospect, of the two I suppose God of War is actually the bigger surprise because I loved the hell out of Insomniac's Ratchet & Clank reboot but hadn't played a game Santa Monica had a direct hand in since God of War II.

My actual, personal biggest surprise is actually being able to resist the temptation to buy NBA 2K this year. I still enjoy just booting up a simple franchise mode and playing full 12 minute quarter basketball with realistic slider settings, but the malicious design of all their other modes (and determined focus on them at the expense of the core game) has just become too much for me to ignore any longer. I've purchased that game every year prior to this one since 2004; there's a chance I still get it when it goes on sale around the All-Star game, but so far I've had a pretty strong will here.

Biggest disappointment? Honestly, I've only played the aforementioned Sony first party games and MLB The Show 18 from this year. I loved Pyre, finally finished Bioshock (I adore Infinite, but have never clicked with this game's combat system, even after finally completing it...on Easy), finally figured out how to get hooked on Bloodborne, finally got to enjoy the spectacle of God of War III Remastered, finally enjoyed the Titanfall 2 campaign for what it was and had a dark, dreary, curious little time with This War of Mine: The Little Ones...so, on the theme of looking backward, I suppose I was pretty disappointed with Infamous: First Light. I loved Second Son as much as the first inFamous (ie. totally-fine-whatever story, awesome style and gameplay) and remember people praising this DLC but I always thought Fetch was a terrible character and being restricted to her (admittedly 2nd best) power exposes how far open world games have come since the launch of the PS4.

Second biggest disappointment would be Assassin's Creed: Freedom Cry, a spin-off everyone that likes that series seems to love unconditionally but just further cemented that series as something definitively not for me. Possible, actual 2018 biggest disappointment based on hearsay could be Shadow of the Tomb Raider, but being as I haven't played it yet and am ready to wait for a holiday sale at this point, all I can say is that the not-quite-as-bad but still disappointingly rough around the edges like Mass: Effect Andromeda was scuttlebutt makes me sad as someone who wrung everything I could out of the previous two Tomb Raider reboots.

Biggest surprise goes to Yoku's Island Express -- I never heard of it before it released and I had a lot of fun with it. Just a tight little game.

Biggest disappointed in 2018 is Steam. It is now a straight up unbrowsable mess. Perpetual sales of the same set of games, lazy themed 'big' sales, the non-curation shit show, feature bloat of the steam client … the list goes on. I find the store pretty much unusable these days (thank god SteamDB exists).

Surprise - Monster Hunter World

Disappointment - Telltale tanking

Monster Hunter World has been my biggest surprise and yet my biggest disappointment at the same time.

Biggest Surprise is a tough one, but I'll have to go with Battletech, because that game wasn't on my radar at all, and then suddenly there was this awesome game about a mercenary company that uses giant fucking mechs to do mercenary things with. And that's rad.

As for biggest disappointment, I'd have to go with the fact that Metal Wolf Chaos XD was pushed back to mid-2019. I've wanted to play that game for so very long, and now I have to wait even longer. But I've waited this long, I can hold out.

Secondary (and actual "this is related directly to the game itself") disappointment is Black Ops 4 not having a campaign. The first was pretty good, and I really enjoyed the second, and the third was crazy and interesting and fun, and a fantastic co-op experience. I really wanted to see what they'd do for the next game, and then that turned out to be nothing. Good for those who enjoy the multiplayer, I guess.

Biggest Surprise: Hollow Knight. I am not really big into metroidvanias, and nothing I had heard about it made me feel excited. But all of the praise made me give it a shot at only $15, and I fell really deep into it.

Also big surprise: God of War. Never played any of the previous ones (didn't have a PS2 or PS3), and the over the top sexuality also seemed really immature. The new one was getting a lot of hype, so I decided to finally try one on the first system I had that could play it. I really liked the tone change, and I was not expecting the story to be so good. I got completely wrapped up in the lore, that I can't wait to see more in that universe.

Biggest Disappointment: Ni No Kuni II: I heard great things from many people who said it had greatly improved on the previous iteration. Also I really liked the idea of the city building. I played quite a few hours (only just opened the city building) and found the combat fairly simple, and the story didn't pick up enough to make me want to continue. I feel like I am probably on the cusp of it picking up and getting good, but I just can't find the motivation to get back into it.

Biggest Surprise: Assassin's Creed Odyssey. I'm really digging this game. Sure, there's a lot to it, and it would have been better off if they cut back on one or two systems and just fleshed out the remaining systems a bit more (each system is like 75% of the way there, but nothing totally lands it). Still though, I'm enjoying the game a lot and love just romping around Greece doing side quests and talking to various city folk.

Biggest Disappointment: The Switch in 2018. I had one obsessive fling with Mario Tennis Aces for a single weekend and then stopped playing it after that. That's been the only time I've played my Switch I think. The whole, 'play this game again, but on the go' schtick just doesn't work for me. I've already played most of the games getting ported to Switch, and I also don't travel that often so there's zero reason for me to get any of those ports. I really hope Luigi's Mansion, Metroid and Pokemon deliver on my expectations, because at this rate, it really is just a Zelda machine (I thought Odyssey was extremely overrated).

Biggest Surprise: Fallout 76

Biggest Disappointment: Ni No Kuni 2

I've only played a handful of releases this year because very little has interested me. So I guess you could say that my biggest disappointment, up this this point, is a lack of games. Seems like that's changing for the last quarter of the year, though.

I would say the biggest surprise for me is OnRush. Bought it on a whim after watching the QL and having heard nothing about it previously. I found it to be a refreshing, unique, and completely bombastic experience. It's a shame that it got basically no promotion and that it released at full price, severely limiting its potential audience. It's so incredibly fun and breezy. I haven't touched it in a couple months but I think I might jump back in soon. Hopefully it still has a playerbase.

My other big surprise is Black Ops 4. I haven't bought a Call of Duty since the original Black Ops, I think. I've only played them for the campaigns since. BO4 doesn't even have a campaign, and I still find CoD multiplayer to be one of the most fundamentally terrible and unfun gaming experiences around, so why on Earth would I buy this? The Blackout mode. I got it to play with a friend so I wouldn't go insane after moving out of state to a place where I don't know anyone. We've both been obsessed with it all week and I can't stop thinking about it. It's like a really polished PUBG with maybe a few less features and a slightly faster pace, but still has all of the high-stakes tension. I fucking love it. Formulating strategies, stalking other crews, getting into crazy movie-like shootout scenarios when shit just pops off out of nowhere. Yeah, that's really the basics of any good battle royale mode, but having it play as smooth as CoD makes a huge difference.

My biggest disappointment, as opposed to being everyone else's surprise so it seems, would be God of War. Not for the gameplay, which is by and large excellent for being such a huge departure from the rest of the series. The story is severely lackluster in a lot of areas, though. It doesn't really use the Norse mythology backdrop to its full advantage, choosing to set up a much more exciting sequel than getting right into it here. The main story beats are too few and far between for how long the game is, and the cast of characters is small enough to the point that the world can feel rather lifeless. To top it off...where the fuck are all the cool boss fights? The opening was really cool, and so was the dragon fight, but those are really the only moments that invoke what God of War is known for. The last boss encounter is lame, doubly so because it felt like there was more game leading up to something cooler afterward. But nope, it just ends after that and it feels very anti-climactic.

I still loved the game overall, but these aspects were disappointing to me because of how good the rest of the game was, and because all of those glowing reviews the game got before release failed to mention how lacking it is in the story and boss fight departments.

@sparky_buzzsaw:I might give Trials in the Sky a go. I tried out Trials of Cold Steel and hated almost every single character in the party, particularly the player character.

Biggest disappointment would have been Dissidia Final Fantasy NT for being a 3v3 fighter, but I knew that going into the demo and never bought it as a result. Actual biggest disappointment was Sea of Thieves. My friends and I spent a whole weekend trying to ring some enjoyment out of that beta weekend. We all thought the game would be so much fun and it actively worked against us at almost every corner to stop us having fun. Such a massive let down.

Best surprise was God of War and how much I ended up liking that game. I was never big into those games but this new one is something special and I'm looking forward to seeing where it goes.

Big surprise: Got back into No Man's Sky...

Biggest Disappointment: I gave myself no time to play some of the single player, story based games I loved.

@killem_dafoe: I am pumped that they added OnRush to game pass. I think that was a smart business move on their part. I haven't tried it yet, but I have it installed, and definitely want to give it a whirl soon. I'm thinking it'll be a nice palate cleanser later this year once I finish these massive open world games that are coming out in October (RDR and AC: Odyssey).

@big_denim: Did they? That is definitely a good move. I know they already knocked $20 off the price tag within the first two months of release, but even then I thought that might be too little, too late. If Sony can follow suit now and include it with PS Plus soon, the game might still have a chance.

Biggest surprise is Kingdom Come: Deliverance. This game looked like a bad Witcher 3 knock-off. Everything I saw on the run up to release made me laugh out loud. Then it came out and the reviews were okay so I checked it out, as there was a bit of a lull at the time. Turned out to be one of the best and most realistic roleplaying games ever made, in my opinion. Not to mention absolutely stunning, visually.

Biggest disappointment. This is a tough one, because I haven't expected much from any game this year (so far). I feel like my natural choice is Sea of Thieves. It looked like it could have been okay, a decent adventure game with a world full of shenanigans, at the very least. It had the best sailing mechanics EVER and the best looking water EVER, but absolutely no depth (no pun intended) beyond that. I'm just glad I didn't have to pay for it.

Surprised that I love cod blop4. I haven't put much time in any cod since mw2 apart from campaigns but I'm digging everything about blops4

Also surprised I have 0 interest in bf5. Dice used to be one of my favorite devs but since BF4 they haven't done anything good.

Biggest surprise was God of War. I had almost no interest in this game whatsoever until I saw Tim Rogers' video preview that made it seem amazing. Turns out it was pretty great! The story was very well-done and absorbing. My only complaints are that the combat gets a bit repetitive, and the side-stuff was not too interesting.

Runner-up surprise was Celeste. Also one of the best-told stories in a game in recent memory.

Biggest disappointment was Splatoon 2. Okay, not 2018, but it was for me. It didn't seem like my kind of game, but after all the raving about it I finally picked it up. Found it very boring and dropped it after only a few hours. I did not like the basic weapon, and not being able to switch out my loadout mid-battle. I didn't want to spend the time to unlock new weapons, either. Game seemed pretty repetitive. I don't normally play multiplayer shooters, but when I do I need fast-paced action and variety in weapons like in Unreal Tournament, still the gold standard for me. I'll admit that the art design and music was killer, though.

Biggest surprise is Dead Cells and biggest disappointment is Octopath Traveler. I was so hyped for that game after the demo but the story just wasn’t substantial or interesting enough to keep me hooked.