Games That Disappointed Me This Gen

This current generation (PS3, Xbox 360, Wii, PSP, and DS) has stretched far longer than most of us could imagine. New franchises giants have sprung up and games have become increasingly more refined. While much of the industry has changed, there will still be those games that were hyped too much and just couldn't deliver on what the developer set out to do.

What follows is a list of those such titles for this generation of consoles that I found to thoroughly disappoint. By no means do I found all of these to be terrible games, however, but I do feel that they could have been better given what was expected of them.

List items

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  1. Metroid: Other M

  On paper, it seemed like a great idea: give Metroid back to one of the original creators, reign it back to its roots in third-person, and have it developed by one of the best action game devs, Team Ninja. What came out, however, was a mess.

  <br>Barring the concerns of misogyny aside, it featured long, unskippable cutscenes of a rather poorly-written story with one of the most disinterested voice cast ever. The game controls awkwardly with the d-pad in a 3D space, but what's worse is the always-disorientating switch to first person when firing missiles, which is quite frequent in some spots. For a game that came out in 2010, this should have been handled better than that.

  <br>Gameplay itself was largely unremarkable and the graphics made everything look like plastic action figures. If this had been titled anything else, it would've been quickly forgotten. Unfortunately, as it is now, Metroid: Other M is a dark mark on an otherwise stellar series.

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  2. Perfect Dark Zero

  What should have been a glorious return to a fan-favorite FPS series turned out to be a misfire. It was an Xbox 360 launch title and it shows with some poorly textured 3D models. Everything from movement, aiming, animation, and combat felt unnecessarily slow. The only gun you ever needed was the SuperDragon which frequently dominated the multiplayer. I can't remember a single thing from the singleplayer besides the story devolving into mystic garbage. <br>Though it's just wishful thinking now, I hope that one day Rare tries again with this series.

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  3. Halo 3: ODST

  If this had come out as an expansion pack as originally intended, it wouldn't be so bad. Since that didn't happen, it just seemed lazy. Co-op, especially in the later levels on the banshee, was an exercise in frustration. The story was a throwaway filler piece in the Halo cannon. The multiplayer was literally a carbon copy of Halo 3's except with the required "horde" mode thrown in. Halo: Reach outmatched and outgunned this game in every way possible. Only die-hard fans should bother with Halo 3: ODST.

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  4. Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Double Agent

  After Chaos Theory, most people would agree that Splinter Cell had gotten too complicated. So, in response, they dumbed it down too much. While the gadgets were still there, they were significantly lessened. Spy Vs. Merc, the flagship multiplayer mode since Pandora Tomorrow, was just too distilled to be anything more than a passing novelty and was eventually removed wholesale in Conviction. While Double Agent wasn't a bad game, it was the beginning of a downward trend with the series that grew increasingly action-oriented and less popular.

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  5. Red Steel

  Launch titles tend to either have high anticipation to show off the new hardware or low expectations as the developers are still unfamiliar with the limitations of the system. In all promotional material, Red Steel was going for the former when the reality was the latter. The end result looked nowhere near as good as the videos, which made this feel like a bait-and-switch. The story was told in comic book panels that looked like they were ripped out of an N64 game. Aiming was atrocious and could be likened to being horribly intoxicated. <br>It was surprising that they chose to make a sequel to this game. What wasn't surprising was that Red Steel 2 sold poorly, and I can't help but feel that the quality of the first one had something to do with it.

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  6. Crackdown 2

  Crackdown helped to establish some modern conventions of sandbox-style games and well-received in the community. Three years later, after titles like inFamous and Assassin's Creed coming out in the in-between, Crackdown 2 didn't feel the need to do anything majorly new. I thought I'd be okay with more Crackdown, but I guess having quite literally MORE of Crackdown was the last thing I wanted. And would it kill them to have a plot that doesn't just bookend the gameplay?