2020 is a special year for the gaming world. Not only because of the lockdowns and the increased hours we spent playing our favorite games and the fact that the next-gen consoles are arriving but also because some great games saw light.
The Half-Life franchise came back to life, the Final Fantasy VII remake was one of the most successful revisions of an original game, the Animal Crossing phenomenon proved once again that not everything in gaming is about shooting, assassinating people and modern warfares, Doom Eternal was magnificent on each platform it landed on and the list goes on.
Hype is the path to the dark side…hype leads to high expectations…high expectations lead to hasty and bad decisions…and those decisions lead to disappointing games. Yes, the dark side of the gaming world is here. Disappointing games exist and we just have to live with them.
We are giving you a list of the ten most disappointing games of 2020 so far, and we don’t mean you should skip them, just keep your expectations low, because the bigger they are the harder they fall.
Bleeding Edge
A Cyberpunk-ish Battle Royale….smells like Apex, Overwatch…? No, Bleeding Edge had the ambition to be something different and rather interesting. Being developed by Ninja Theory, who brought us gems like Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice and Devil May Cry, it is hard to imagine that it would disappoint us. We were offered a stylish world, great 4 on 4 third-person combat with shooting, melee combos, unique skills, customizable characters to be augmented, and even a cool Irish grandma! And all that was there, just most ideas ended up short.
Instead of being a good simulation of what the greatest sport in the future would be, Bleeding Edge suffers from a bad lock-on camera, lifeless ranged combat, too much button mashing, lazy character writing and you can feel it being an Overwatch-clone (this would be ok if it was the only game to copy stuff from there and we know it’s not).
Resident Evil 3 Remake
Resident Evil 3 Remake is coming right after a brilliant remake of the second original game and was a wonderful opportunity for a…failure. It actually happened, but not to the point where you could say that Capcom became Crapcom.
Fan expectations and nostalgia are what doomed this game to feel subpar to its predecessor. The whole transition from a 1999 game to present gaming technology and demand did not feel smooth enough. Even if it’s just a remake there should have been a sensible improvement, not just the graphics. It’s like the original feels vast and mysterious, unlike the somehow limited remake.
Even worse…some segments of the original are cut, like the Clock Tower segment or the Gravedigger boss fight, just to name a few. Nemesis encounters are boring, shallow and not scary at all. Even the gore in the game is not as much as it was in the original. Are we censoring something?
Crucible
Everybody wants to make the A-cut when developing an eSports game. To make it you gotta keep up with the current trends, which is not a bad thing necessarily. See how Call of Duty: Warzone took inspirations from here and there and became a mammoth in its league.
Crucible is a 3rd person MOBA Sci-fi Battle Royale shooter. It does not sound really bold at first sight to make such a game, you already have a solid basis from other titles and their mistakes. Talking about unoriginality. Apart from being gorgeous on the looks, Crucible suffers from many other things – it does not encourage teamwork, has bad communication in-game, a bad ping system, no synergy between the characters, unbalanced gameplay, bad match pacing, and the list goes on and on…Such a shame, it could have been the next game-changer. Maybe next time, guys!
The Outer Worlds (Nintendo Switch)
The Outer Worlds is not a bad game! Let’s clear that up first. It is still that awesome GOTY contender of 2019 and a brilliant title on its own. What we want to say is how disappointing the Nintendo Switch port of 2020 was. So many games got ported to the Switch even though its specs are nowhere near the PS4 or Xbox One, and they did the job. The Witcher 3, Doom Eternal, Mortal Kombat 11 – just to name a few.
Whether created to make a quick buck or ported hastily (and having in mind the compromises that have to be done when porting to the Switch), we do not know the reason for sure but The Outer Worlds for Switch is a buggy mess with blurry graphics, lifeless zones, that on other platforms are bursting with life, frequent framerate drops, textures with resolution from PSX times and…it’s a trainwreck. And yes, of course, it might get patched and fixed one day, but why waste our time?
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 Remastered
Remaster alert!!! You know what’s coming, right? As if we were not getting enough Call of Duty games already? Our favorite annual franchise is “surprising” us with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 Remastered. Hey, this is not too bad, actually, we will go back with sweet nostalgia for some multiplayer battles with pals. No, you won’t, this is just the campaign. Wait. What?
Released as a timed PS4 exclusive, it is just as good as the original, but with a dropped multiplayer mode. Which means worse…Milking the cow huh? Increased framerate, higher resolution textures, better lighting and…nothing more.
Watch Dogs: Legion
Talking about the cow, we have Ubisoft’s next try at the Watch Dogs franchise. Watch Dogs: Legion was freshly released and following the sequel that improved on the original, we hoped that it would finally bring us the gaming revolution that Ubisoft promised us back in 2012 with the franchise’s first trailer.
To a certain level, the game is truly something new. You won’t be having a main character. Instead of that, you will have the chance to play as every NPC you encounter in-game. All the excitement ends quite fast after you get a good hold of the gameplay mechanics. The uniqueness of your legionaries gets worn out quickly and all their powers and skills suddenly feel not that special anymore.
Watch Dogs: Legion has its moments but it will ultimately feel repetitive and boring after spending 6-7 hours with it. If you’re still down for some time to kill anyways, get some PlayStation Gift Cards and get the game!
Mafia II Definitive Edition
Mafia games have always been like an offer we can’t refuse. This great GTA competitor was always offering superb gameplay and most of all great storytelling. Unfortunately, Mafia 2 Definitive Edition is a rushed and buggy flop that wasn’t an improvement (albeit the graphics maybe) but a degradation of a game.
Bad frame drops, glitches, stupid AI and illogical game physics is what killed this game’s worth and its great story-telling. Sometimes even if you have a great story it will inevitably be ruined if you are telling it the wrong way… Ahh, who are we kidding. Mafia 2 Definitive Edition is a disaster on all levels. Well, at least Mafia: Definitive Edition turned out alright.
Predator: Hunting Grounds
“You cooked up a story and dropped us into a meat grinder!”. The meat grinder we wanted to be dropped into was nothing like Predator: Hunting Grounds. We always wanted to bear witness to a game that really has the 1987 movie atmosphere. Alien: Isolation brought us such an atmosphere and we were expecting that this would be a similar animal. But no, we were left bitterly disappointed.
As a brave asymmetrical FPS Predator: Hunting Grounds could have been so much more. Suffering from repetitive and imbalanced gameplay, the title really tried to pay tribute to its original source – the movie, and to some level it actually did but it was too shallow. Playing as the Predator himself was probably one of the few interesting things here. But due to the imbalance of the game, the Yautja (the Predator’s race, you’re welcome) became the hunted rather than the hunter. This is unheard of!! Maybe one day we will have a great Predator game…
Marvel’s Avengers
After Marvel’s huge success on the big screen, it was just a matter of time until they tried to hit big on the gaming scene. Despite some decent titles in the recent past, the real gaming incarnation of the MCU has yet to arrive. Many gamers were holding their breath and hoping this to be the real deal. Guess what? It’s nowhere near that.
The game is poorly optimized, has bugs, the gameplay is just plain boring and the enemies and the bosses are not encouraging you to do anything except button mashing.
Marvel’s Avengers was highly anticipated and it failed on almost every level, but if you are a die-hard Marvel fan you might find home here. Characters were well written, many famous characters from the comics and outside of the MCU might bring tears of joy to you. But then again if you are looking for a good Marvel game, quit wasting time and play Marvel’s Spider-Man instead.
Warcraft 3:Reforged
Let’s get straight to the point. Warcraft 3: Reforged is probably the most disappointing game of 2020 and was another nail in Blizzard’s coffin as they screwed up yet again. Being nothing more than a regular remake of one of the greatest RTSs of all time it seemed that nothing could go wrong. Blizzard tried their best to prove us otherwise!
The game was supposed to be the new home for the already big community of Warcraft 3 players and newcomers alike. Blizzard literally lied to us with promises of better graphics, made the UI even worse, missing gameplay features, connectivity issues (are we in the 2000s?) and all that led to this abomination of a game.
The real downfall of this is that it was a completely useless remake and true fans were the ones who hated it the most. Do yourself a favor – spend some time with the original, a better game by miles! Oh, that’s right, you can’t play that anymore because of the remake.
To Conclude
Do not get overhyped for a game that hasn’t come out yet. This is the moral of the story above. No one wants you to start enjoying games that are not worth it, just don’t put the fish in the pan before you even caught it. Some might find the games above to be quite good, and they’d be right. If it’s the other way around – a game that you really anticipated comes out as a disaster, do not lose hope…another title might surprise you!
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To give Predator Hunting Grounds some credit, it’s getting better support than Marvel’s Avengers, which is saying a lot.
Some low hanging fruit there, but, a fairly accurate list overall.
I merely take issue with your claiming that Warcraft 3 is “…one of the greatest RTSs of all time….”. Ahem, that honor belongs to Dune 2.
Carry on. 🙂
Well, multiple games can hold that distinction. It’s one of the best, not necessarily THE best, though I’m sure some might see it that way.