Which game has been the biggest bummer for you this gen?

For me, it's Shadow of the Colossus, the 2018 remake, and Ratchet & Clank, the 2016 movie tie-in/remake.

In SotC's case, it felt to me like a soulless shot-for-shot remake that traded the original's timeless visuals for on-the-nose modern sensibilities using today's techniques. The result was a thoughtless and emotionless facelift that lacked much of the artistic vision of the first game.

As for R&C, I never played the original but I've played the PS3 games and the 2016 game felt like it was just going through the motions. They didn't commit to any of the jokes, they just read them like other recorded lines which made the game feel like it lack passion and effort. As if the developers were bored, knowing some of their co-workers were working on Spider-Man in the next room.

I don't have a problem with remakes. In fact, I might be into them more than I should be. I loved games like REmake and REmake2 and currently having a terrific time with Pokemon Let's Go. It's just I felt SotC and R&C might've been developed for the wrong reasons, whether it's pure cash grab or as stop-gaps, if the right desires aren't there, in the end, I think it sullies the series, the brand, the memories.

@liquiddragon: I could not possibly disagree with you more on Ratchet and Clank. To be honest, that’s probably my game of the generation. After I played it, I played through it again immediately to get the platinum and still had fun...and missed one of the trophies, so I played through it again TWICE MORE and had a ball each time. The thing about those games is, the writing and acting? Never that good. It’s corny and hammy and probably some other food-related descriptor, but the gameplay is beyond reproach. That remake was the pinnacle of Ratchet and Clank gameplay, at least in my opinion. It was cheerful, challenging if you wanted it to be, and rewarded you for exploration. I’m sad you didn’t enjoy it. If you’re a fan of the series, I implore you to try it again.

Most disappointing for me is Red Dead II. I expect you’ll see that a lot if this thread gets replies. They made a great Wild West Sim, and I’m hoping at some point they release the “fun” dlc that turns it into a game.

Star Wars Battlefront. I love Star Wars, specifically the original trilogy and I love Battlefield. I liked the original two Battlefronts but they never had the depth of the DICE games so when I found out DICE was making a modern one it was the pefect match. Then they somehow managed to create something nothing like their DICEs previous games and absolutely shallow. If DICE just made one of their own games with a Star Wars skin it would be my perfect game. Instead it is a beautiful boring videogame.

@ltcolumbo: Hell yeah, I loved that game and got the platinum as well. I understand superfans of the series being let down since it is "tamer" than the original. But when people act like it's a tragedy or something, I just have to wonder if they played the same game.

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For my biggest disappointment, I would probably say Star Fox Zero (if that counts as this generation). Star Fox 64 is one of my favorite games and to me nothing after has topped it. It's a retread of 64 with little understanding of what makes that game great. The gamepad controls are at best functional and at worst infuriating and don't add anything worthwhile. The split paths are an afterthought and may as well not exist. The second screen means the graphics are handicapped.

It's a shame that a developer as prolific as Platinum failed to make a good Star Fox game in my opinion, though they aren't the first to do so. The worst part of the whole thing is that the series is probably back in hibernation for the time being.

At least Ratchet was fun to play!

Probably Mass Effect: Andromeda? It was supposed to revitalize the series and instead we got a bunch of soulless gameplay, bugs, terrible writing, and Donkey Kong memes.

Read Dead Redemption II let me down in a way that only Mario Sunshine had previously. Going rom a personal top 10 all time game to a sequel that I actively dislike wasn't even something I had considered going into it.

@ltcolumbo: Well I got to credits and I even did some trophy clean up afterwards. Currently sitting on 51%. I feel like I gave it a fair shake as I really try to give every game I play their due. It reviewed well and the coverage seemed overwhelmingly positive so I certainly wanted and even expected to like the game. It just didn't click for me. I wasn't looking for high comedy or anything but I always thought they usually nail what they're going for. R&C2016 however, to me, lacked enthusiasm in its delivery and fell really flat. I don't regret my time with it or anything. I just was left pretty disappointed. Definitely wish I had your experience with it.

Fwiw, I wasn't much of RDR1 guy but RDR2 probably ranks pretty high in my games of gen so to each his own!

Mass Effect Andromeda

Runner-up: Destiny 2

Friday the 13th: The Game. I've never seen a game become MORE broken with every patch. It released feeling like a beta, and now it feels pre-alpha.

I know it's not fair and i'm probably going to get a lot of hate for this but Apex: Legends. It's a perfectly competent game and probably one of the better free-to-play games but I loved Titanfall 1&2 so much and this had nothing I liked from those games.

Not just in terms of the gameplay, obviously it's a battle royale game, it would be hard to balance all the cool shit you can do in those games with so many people, but the art style and the universe and even the hero-shooter attitude all of it feels slapped together to create some kind Overwatchfortnite monster instead of something that stays true to the other games that are apparently set in the same universe.

Just to be clear this is biggest bummer, not most disappointing. I had no expectations for the game, it came out of nowhere, and as soon as I heard it was another battle royale game without Titans it already had a pretty low bar to hurdle and it even failed at that. It probably didnt help that I won my second game the day it came out, and much like the game it kind of just happend and wasnt very satisfying.

I guess this counts since it was released on the Wii U but I was pretty disappointed by Xenoblade Chronicles X. Really enjoyed the first Xenoblade but X felt like it focused on everything that made the first game tedious and didn't have any of its charm.

Going to get a ton of disagreement for this, but it's Battlefront 2. Thing is, Battlefront 1 is solid, it just lacked content. I bought the complete version a year later or so and had a great time with it. Even if it wasn't what the original games were, it was fun in it's own right, the characters and maps were all great, the guns felt good and I really didn't mind the pickup system at all.

Battlefront 2 managed to introduce entirely new problems while bringing over nothing of what made the first one fun. The gun play was worse, the progression was worse, they ruined Heroes Vs Villains (by far the most interesting mode), even the graphics were worse, and then of course there were the worst microtransactions ever seen in a game you have to pay for.

@bowl-of-lentils: Did you play Xenoblade 2? I completed that recently and came to the conclusion that I think the only reason I like these games is because of the world, music and combat. I couldnt stand any of the characters and the story was JRPG nonsense 101. I get why fans of the first game might not like XCX but I devoured that game, i've said it before but in a weird way it was kind of what I wanted out of ME:A & Anthem.

Probably Mass Effect: Andromeda for me. I did bail on RDR2 after 20-30 hours but I was impressed with the game even if I ultimately couldn't stick with it, so it's hard to say it was a bummer for me. But ME 2 is one of my favorite games, I like both 1 and 3 a whole lot, and as Vinny said, "They killed Mass Effect."

@boozak: I did play Xenoblade 2 and I liked it quite a bit. I'm not going to say that Xenoblade 2 is without flaws (or even the first game for that matter) but I felt that X was all about grinding away at dozens of fiddly little systems and I really didn't enjoy it.

Not an individual game, but a system: the PlayStation Vita. Persona 4 Golden is great, Senran Kagura: Shinovi Versus was a gamble that fully payed off with Estival Versus, and Killzone Mercenaries was the first-person shooter that I wanted on a handheld since the PlayStation Portable, that's kind of about it. Sure, I'll still keep my OLED 3G model (that came with The Walking Dead) for the sake of having access to the best version of Persona 4 for the foreseeable future. But between the surge of mobile gaming on smartphones at the time and the prices for the proprietary memory cards, there was a lot of potential that unfortunately ended up going unused.

Oh dear. There’s a lot of games to consider between 2013-2019 and no single game jumps to mind as being crushingly dissappointing, but let’s mention a few still.

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. I really enjoyed HR, but this one just didn’t click for me at all.

Hotline Miami 2. Loved the first game, the sequel was a huge let-down, even if it still had some good moments.

The Order 1886: Style over substance. Like, a whole lot over it.

Ratchet & Clank was disappointing to me after the excellent Future trilogy, but mostly because the story was bland and also chopped to hell because of the movie. I still enjoyed playing it, even if was just playing through the old levels.

This might seem out of left-field. But it's obviously Videoball. Not because it's a terrible game, (it definitely has its flaws,) But rather because there is zero chance of actually accessing the supposed fun and depth.

I don't think I've ever seen such a disparity between critical and popular reception. I doubt most people even remember it exists.

Probably No Man's Sky. They've recovered massively, but I remember the first 5-10 hours as it dawned on me.... That game was half-baked as fuck.

Tempted to say Mass Effect Andromeda. However, I did finish that game and I didn't hate the gameplay.

I was a disappointed by Star Wars Battlefront 2 because they promised to fix all the issues in the first game. Which they did, by adding a bunch of other issues. Then they started fixing stuff and I would honestly say their recovery compares to that of No Man's Sky. SWBF2 now sits as my favourite multiplayer game of this generation, maybe.

Watch Dogs was a disappointment to me, maybe because of the hype I was expecting more

@bowl-of-lentils: A lot of the systems were poorly explained but i'm just a sucker for a game that lets me loose to explore a world in any way I please. I also liked having 4 party members instead of 3. It meant that I could have a rotating slot outside of the trinity of tank, healer and dps. Xenoblade 2 tried to be more free-form with it's blade system but the best builds were Master Defender, Healer etc so you ended up with the same sort of crew anyway. I also feel like XCX had the best side quests but I do feel like forcing you do very specific things to do the main quest kind of went against the open structure of the game, which was one of my favourite things about it.

Mass Effect: Andromeda, it felt ultimately like a re-skinned version of Dragon Age: Inquisition. And while I liked the latter quite a bit, I was also not as invested in Dragon Age's story and world as I was Mass Effect. Not only did Andromeda feel like it lacked personality and depth, it also managed to feel a lot smaller despite being more open world. I never managed to finish it, my love for the universe could only carry me so far until I was just bored of the whole thing. Which is a real shame and the true bummer, the actual moment to moment action was actually pretty fun. But without the world building and story to really wrap it all together it really just fell apart. And the Mass Effect trilogy is probably my favorite set of games from last gen so it was a real bummer to see it burn.

To a lesser extent, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. Much like Andomeda, the game just felt smaller and less interesting than it's predecessor. Human Revolution not only had fun missions and locations, it also made me contempate the nature of humanity and technology. I found myself researching transhumanism and the potential of future augmentation. But Mankind Divided felt like a step back in many ways. It also didn't help that I still can't get over the idea that something that should be inheritly expensive (augmentation of the human body) is suddenly somehow a marker for the disenfranchised lower class. But maybe I'm glossing over something to where that made sense. Either way, it had it's moments but overall it wasn't the sequel I had hoped for.

@pezen: I forgot about Mankind Divided. That's up there for me, too. I absolutely loved Human Revolution (top 5 of last gen), and MD just didn't do it for me at all.

I've complained about it here before. But Sundered is the game that most aggressively undercut my expectations. I was even going in feeling a little iffy about it. But then it was just so underdeveloped I actually couldnt believe it. My low bar was clearly not low enough... God I actually found it so upsetting. And I'm rarely ever disappointed in games I try, because of my general disposition and awareness of my own taste.

Probably RDR2. The whole fake HDR thing was some real bullshit (I'm aware that they've sort-of fixed it), and I was not a fan of many of the choices they made in regards to the gameplay. It also didn't help that some prick spoiled the game during Alex's drum stream. Granted, I haven't played that much of it, so maybe my opinion will change if/when I do, but right now it feels like a slog that I can't seem to want to play.

Mass Effect Andromeda. Anthem (though I can't say I had really high expectations).

Let me think on this some more, it's been a loooong 5 years...

Can't say anything this generation has been a "massive" letdown for me. There have been a few games that I had wished turned out better. I was hoping DMC5 would be a bigger departure from the classic formula but it's not a massive disappointment or anything. Rage 2 looked like it would be a lot of fun and then kind of turned out to be a by the numbers sort of thing. Just a lot of small "huh well darn" sort of moments.

Bioware.

If I were to say the game that I had the highest expectations for and had the poorest experience with it would probably be Everybody's Gone to the Rapture. For context, Dear Esther was one of my favorite games the year it came out. It's a polarizing game, for sure, and I totally understand why. But its tone, the music, the atmosphere, the art design, the quality of the writing and the narrator's performance all added up to a really good experience for me. But what pushed it over the top for me was the content of the story. It hit on the right keys for me personally and I was touched by it in a way that I can't think of another game's story similarly doing to me.

So when I heard that team was making Everybody's Gone to the Rapture for the PS4 I was pumped. I assumed it would be polarizing again, but I had assumed they would make something that would speak to me once again. And, to some degree, they did. The atmosphere is really good, as is the music, the performances, and the art design.

Dear Esther doesn't have amazing 'gameplay' so to speak. But, I think it has more variability than people give it credit for. Exploration is gameplay to me. But, in Dear Esther, that exploration was often tied to both world-based story-telling and additive narrative, unique to that exploration. The movement in Dear Esther was metered, being slowed, I'd imagine, to encourage observation of your environment. But it was fast enough to get through the environment at a brisk pace if you wanted. Everybody's Gone to the Rapture's gameplay, on the surface, has a lot of similarities to the gameplay of Dear Esther. But, where the two differ is in the movement speed and quality of the exploration. Everybody's Gone to the Rapture is painfully slow, even with the 'run' option. What makes it painful is that a) you seem to move too slow given the environment you are in and b) the exploration is rarely encouraged. There is some world-based story telling with exploration, but it is fairly spartan all things consider and, because of the delivery of the spoken narrative, there is no additive narrative with more exploration. All the exploration does is give a better sense of place, which is a poor reward when the movement is so glacial.

But what made the game extra disappointing to me personally is that I only found the story academically interesting. I didn't have a personal tie to it, like I did with Dear Esther. Which, honestly, it's unreasonable to expect a game to have a personal connection to you in order to not be disappointed by it. But, when the gameplay is hard to get through on top of that gut punch, it's hard to shrug it off.

@rahf: Yes, but I always feel that peeking out from Bioware issues is EA pushing games out the door before they are complete.

Anthem and Mass Effect (Andromeda and 3) all feel like they were "completed" per a spreadsheet/plan doc, and not the actual completion date.

I'm also in with Mass Effect: Andromeda. I've never even played it, but it makes me sad when it goes on sale for $7 and I pass on it because I know it will still be a waste of my time. I just bought digital copies of 1-3 (which I already own on disk) for $17 and I feel much better about that than I would for getting Andromeda.

Fallout 4. Didn't really care about the bugs/ jank. I just found it boring.

C'mon duder, you can't just say "game this generation" and then name a remaster and a remake. Feels like it's more the trend that's the bummer in that case even if you made valid points. If I had to name stuff conceived mostly whole cloth from this gen:

Nuclear Throne is a big one for me. For the record I think it's one of the best games I've played but I wish this concept could have been gifted upon better developers than Vlambeer. As it stands their inability to provide quality assurance across multiple versions of this amazing game pretty much ensures that I will never buy another one of their games and would caution anyone against the impending Switch version. Sure you can point out issues with the coding and the engine but at the end of the day we've been living in a 'games a service' future for a while now and they're one of the somewhat noteworthy indie studios who quite frankly can't hang in this consumer space.

While I generally think it's a good game I have to say Horizon Zero Dawn. I was kind of baffled by the hype around this game after playing it. Sure it has an exceptional look and pretty good main story but it is like a C+ open world game. Say what you want about the derivative design of Ubisoft's open world factory but those games are still made competently and iteratively. Horizon feels several steps behind even that in it's open world design despite the breathtaking visuals and cool lore. On top of that it has one of the most dull skill trees in a AAA game I've seen in years, and that's saying something when you take the aforementioned Ubi-games into consideration.

I'm a bit confused by this one. I love Videoball for couch co-op, and still play it when I get together with old friends. Are you upset by the lack of online, or is there something I'm missing?

I liked Battlefront 2 (after they took out the pay-to-win cards), however I feel that I am in the minority. I don't think many people would disagree with your feelings, particularly with regards to microtransactions.

@mezmero: I agree with you on remasters and ports but I think remakes are fair game. For me, it's not the trend of remakes I have an issue with, like I said in my post, I really like games like REmake2 and Pokemon Let's Go. Is REmake2 not eligible for GOTY this year? Because I think it might pick up that honor at many publications & sites.

As for SotC2018, I see where you're coming from. I don't see that as a remaster tho. It's a half remake to be fair, as I said, a shot for shot remake. Remasters, to me, have a particular meaning and it's usually about higher rez/higher frames, remaining totally faithful to the original release while providing the most optimal experience of it. The visual is a big part of any game and when you re-do it top to bottom, it's a new experience, a different experience. I see why you'd draw the line there but I think you're letting it off the hook when you call it a remaster. Anyway, it's cool if you can't count SotC but I think R&C definitely does.

@wardcleaver: Weirdly enough, it really is the gunplay that bothers me the most, not the microtransactions. I liked how all the blasters in Battlefront 1 had fairly slow projectile speeds, it looked exactly like the movies and made the gameplay unique. Battlefront 2 made the projectiles all so much faster, and it was a fundamentally different game because of it.

Toss one more hat into the ring regarding Ratchet and Clank 2016 being exactly what I want out of a Ratchet and Clank game. I still remember getting the original for Christmas and absolutely devouring it. The 2016 remake was a hard dose of nostalgia straight into my veins.

As for most disappointing this generation, it is definitely Red Dead Redemption 2. I had almost the exact same trajectory with that game as Dan, and many others it seems, where I was completely enthralled by it for the first 20 hours or so. I realize now that's because I was engrossed by the world and its complex systems, while I ignored the actual story. Once I actually started churning through the story missions, I found myself evermore frustrated by the mission design, the clunky controls, and the games seeming desire to keep me from having fun. I adore Arthur Morgan as a character, I love westerns and slow burns, I enjoy games with complex systems that I can poke at, and the first Red Dead Redemption is one of my top 5 favorite games ever. I SHOULD have loved RDR2, but there were just too many flaws and poor design decisions for me to enjoy the game beyond anything other than a good hunting and camping simulator.

Dragon Age: Inquisition would be a close follow up. Again, so much that should have gone right: open world, gorgeous graphics, and an overall grander scale, all marred by baffling game design decisions, regressions in game-play, and awful writing.

ME: Andromeda is definitely number one for me.

RDR2 was also very disappointing for me, but it at least has some ambition and really took a swing at something. It's a game that I can understand some people really liking.

Dark Souls 3. I never liked the series, but after enjoying Bloodborne I briefly thought that I might like Dark Souls games. Nope.

Mass Effect Andromeda for sure.

Fallout 4 was another huge letdown but I did replay it eventually and enjoyed my time with it. Burnt out not long into the first DLC though.

Deus Ex Mankind Divided is a great shout. I'm not sure why. I also loved Human Revolution but something about MD felt off for me.

Not sure if it was "this" generation, but the only real disappointment I can think of is Dragon Age: Inquisition. I like the first game quite a bit, although I never got to finish it because my hard drive crashed halfway through, and I was in a mood for a big new RPG. But I found DA:I frustrating on both a story and gameplay level.

The story was far too convoluted - unnecessarily complicated with political intrigue. I felt that they were trying to ape the success of Game of Thrones by putting everything on a massive scale - but unlike Game of Thrones, it felt unearned and disconnected from the characters. You're just thrown into the midst of political jargon with little reason to care about any of it. Not to mention I'm pretty tired of being The One Who Is Destined to Save Us over and over. I don't want to be that important. I don't want to command an army. I just want to exist as a small person in a big world.

On a gameplay level, I felt that the combat was really unwieldy. It felt as if some RPG nerds on the team created a deep, complicated ruleset, and at some point the higher-ups told them to make it easier, so they put all the rules behind the scenes automated everything to the point where you could just repeatedly click on stuff until it died. As a consequence, you get the worst of both worlds - it was not satisfying as either an action game or RPG. It's totally possible that I misunderstood something fundamental here, and the combat is excellent once you figure it out - but my experience of it was just clicking spells and watching flashy things happen on screen that may or may not be connected to what I just clicked. The interface was terrible at giving you any meaningful feedback on what was happening on-screen.

Mass Effect: Andromeda and Anthem - both baffling in how they were released in the state they were in

For me it's gotta be Witcher 3. It's hard to get excited about any other game when I've played something so good.

Probably could name a fair few titles but the original Watch Dogs was the first one to come to mind, mostly from being taken in from the early E3 footage and the slow realisation as I went through the game that it wasn't what I expected/wanted.

It's partly that (The online was there, but it was dead on arrival.) But it's a combination of the quality of the game, the critical reception, apparent bad publisher advice and weird development decisions that ended up building the game up to let me down hard. Some of the big ones:

• Non-functioning/empty servers at launch permanently starved the game of the one thing you need, people to play against.
• The commitment to having only one action button actually made the gameplay much more complex than it should have been and extremely complicated to play. It also made the menus a nightmare to navigate.
• You couldn't quit the fucking game.
• The 2v2 arcade mode did not give you a CPU teammate in single player so you had to play 1v2 (Other single player modes did give you a teammate.)
• Insisting that the game as it was is a "sport" of its own due to its immense competitive depth is the sort of thing someone who doesn't pay any attention to any sports would say.
• Between the prototype/development start and release, Rocket League and Sportsfriends happened and did things like "simple 2d aesthetic competitive game" or "putting a ball in a goal" much better. Videoball felt like a massive step back
• A tonne of useless features (including online multiplayer probably.)
• Positive reviews all took place in settings that 90% of people could not easily replicate.

Again, this is "biggest bummer" not worst game. Videoball for me sits in the category of "OK, but not great, one of those", but that doesn't gel with the pre-launch hype.

I have to agree. Mass Effect: Andromeda is definitely the biggest bummer of this generation.

I have no goddamn clue how anyone at Bethesda thought Fallout 76 was a good idea, and it still baffles me as to why that thing exists. I'm one of that series' biggest fans and even liked Fallout 4 for the most part, but 76 shows a complete lack of understanding on their part as to what makes the series great and is a complete and total disappointment to me.

good shooters being a rarity.