For me it’d be Starfield and Diablo 4. I do have faith that Blizzard will turn the ship around and reel me back in to D4 later down the line. I have zero hope for Starfield ever being good, though. It is a fundamentally broken game I have no hope Bethesda will be able to fix, ever.
The only game that was kinda a bummer was Tears of the kingdom. The sky world was just copy/pastes with nothing but some robots. I wanted the hot bird people up there or something.
The underground was dead and had a few POIs but was basically just those same annoying ninjas from the first game who disguise themselves as civilians. I liked the story and characters in botw2 better. The map was largely unchanged from the first game. Some of the missions were better. Gannon actually getting a plot was cool. The enemies were better this go around. The gmod bits were cool, but caused the game to run like shit. The game also ran at like, 22 fps the entire time anyways. The shrines were as meh as the first game, which were already so dull I’d look up guides just to get more hearts/stamina.
…it should have been a $25 DLC instead of a $70 game.
It was a solid 4.5/10 for me, mostly just on the amount of rehashed stuff for a $70 game, which should have blown my balls off for waiting six years and $70 later. I hope the next Zelda game is more like Twilight Princess.
I was going to contest, but I actually emulated the game and didn’t have the framerate issues. Everything else held up for me though. In terms of the civiskyzation, it has been thousands of years. They all dead. I don’t disagree with the underground being empty, but it is an unknown underground. It made sense for the POI’s to mostly match up with the overworld elements.
I think these are fair lore reasons when it’s like this because of the hardware the game runs on. Maybe there could have been more underground but it affected the performance.
Disagree on the DLC though. It was a pretty fully fledged game. I also agree that it shouldn’t have been $70, though lol.
I think had they released it on PC, it would have been a bit better, since the vehicles could be built larger and have a further despawn distance without big frame drop penalties. (And frame drops in certain environments). I’m glad for the enemy variation and liked the bosses better in totk. But next game, I hope the gameplay is wildly different and they take some risks with the story. I’d love to see parts where you play as Zelda or something.
Nebulous Fleet Command is cool, but not finished and maybe just not my cup of tea, but definitely very much knows what it wants to be and is very good at that.
And the rest are well known good games not released this year.
Dunno if I’d call it a stinker, but my excitement for Starfield waned very quickly as I played. 20 hours in, it was still fun. 30-40 hours, I’m like, eh. Past about 60 hours I was completely disillusioned with it. The perk system is a nightmare, leveling up gets really difficult really quickly. Making money (especially after they hid all the vendor chests), getting materials, etc. is a tedious slog. The UI/UX for ship building and settlement building is painful. Settlement building in general is a pointless waste of time and takes way too long to get the perks enough to make it even remotely worthwhile.
It also doesn’t help that there’s not a native version for the Xbox One, and Cloud Play is miserable. Constant disconnects, jitters, long load times, long wait times.
SPOILER BITS
The main quest is completely pointless. It has no effect on anything. Outside of Constellation and the other Starborn, no one even knows anything is happening. Your choices don’t have any impact on anything. Side with the Hunter? Side with the Emissary? Outside of the number of dupes you fight at the end, it literally doesn’t matter. And getting to the end does absolutely nothing. Now you have to start over with a shittier ship you can’t upgrade, some armor that’s mostly fine, and literally nothing else. Nothing’s different. Sure, after enough times through, silly things start happening at Constellation. But what else? It’s not worth it.
The faction quests are fun, but then again, have basically no bearing on anything.
The companions are disappointing: ostensibly you have two lovable rogues, a religious zealot, and the most Lawful Good character who will judge you for even the slightest non-Squeaky Clean choices you make, though they all end up being basically the same.
Otherwise, you just keep running the treadmill: get all 10 upgrades to your Space Shouts, ship, and armor? And then what? Just keep going. Do it again. And again. And you still don’t have enough perk points.
On second thought, maybe I would call it a stinker. So fucking disappointing. It had so much potential.
Starfield, Diablo 4, and Tears of the Kingdom for me.
Starfield was a hard pass at 30FPS on my Series X. But also, the gameplay and story just didn’t interest me at all.
Diablo 4 was monotonous. Grinding for hours to get a percentage of a percentage increase on gear was not fun. I’ve played every other Diablo game along with numerous other action RPGs of that style, but D4 is a snorefest. It’s frustrating being chain stunned by all the crowd control, it’s frustrating that a lot of enemies have a lot of health for no reason, and it’s bland when you face the same few bosses over and over again. It wasn’t so bad in the other Diablo games because you could just nuke the bosses, but in D4 each one is a straight up chore to kill.
Tears of the Kingdom… it’s a fun action adventure game, but if it has The Legend of Zelda on it, it needs to be held to The Legend of Zelda standards. And it, just like Breath of the Wild, is an awful Zelda game. If it didn’t have LoZ on it, I’d probably rate it much higher.
Not “bad” but disappointing: No Man’s Sky. There’s a lot to be liked here but as someone who has played Elite Dangerous everything is just so incredibly dumbed down.
Fighting is trivially easy, just hold S, shoot and grab a snack while doing it.
There’s absolutely no consequences for anything. It doesn’t matter how much fuel I have because I can just find new fuel anywhere or teleport somewhere completely different. Doesn’t matter where I log out because the game will just throw me to the same system as my coop partner anyway.
Doesn’t matter if the authorities want me, just fly into a station and all is forgotten. Got contraband? Just tell them to get lost and fly away casually. No bounty on my head, no nothing.
Don’t get me wrong, Elite is definitely way too hardcore for casual play but at the same time the only thing No Man’s Sky has done is make me want to play Elite again.
I wanted to like "No Man's Sky," when it was finally available on the Switch (my PS4 had just died when it came out) I was elated to play it. After a couple hours of playing, I wanted those two hours of my life back. An ugly game with very little color, and absolutely no direction as to what you're supposed to be doing, I wasted those two hours trying to figure out what the hell was going on. I absolutely hated it - the only game I ever asked for a refund on.
I’ve often described NMS as Minecraft in Space. The “story”, such as it is, is completely pointless and superfluous. You just fly around, mine minerals, build stuff, and that’s about it. And it wears thin really quickly.
Same here – I’ve been doing exploration exclusively in Elite, and it got kinda samey and boring. Yet, somehow playing Elite was so mentally taxing, it quite often felt like having a second job. So, I decided to try out NMS, after hearing about its redemption so much.
The story of NMS was kinda neat, even though it was presented in a very dry way. The visuals were also not bad. Looking at planetary landscapes sometimes felt like stepping into the world of The Sand Sea and the Plateaux of Mirrors, which is a very good thing imo.
The actual gameplay just wasn’t engaging enough, though, and super janky (making gas/mineral farms sucks). Like, it’s very hard to find meaning in whatever you’re doing in that game. In contrast, doing exploration in Outer Wilds was very fun, because it felt like you were exploring an actual living world. In NMS, you get the same prefab randomly generated building and a sliver of lore. No environmental storytelling, no anything. So, it’s very difficult to connect to NMS’s world.
I can’t actually think of anything off the top of my head. After I stopped buying AAA titles from the obvious scummy companies, pretty much everything has been at least as good as expected.
Not really a “stinker” but I was disappointed with Tears of the Kingdom and have dropped it after 100 hours.
I don’t think it helps that I’ve been playing this whilst sat next to my fiancee playing the Witcher 3 on our Steam Deck. The difference between the two games is like night and day, despite the Witcher 3 being almost a decade older.
Tears of the Kingdom is just okay, in my opinion. I enjoyed it enough to get 100 hours out of it. I dropped Breath of the Wild after a similar amount of time too. They’re just not for me I guess, they don’t immerse me like other RPGs do.
I played a few games that were just really mediocre.
Warhammer 40k: Inquisitor was a super boring ARPG and I couldn’t put in more than a few hours. The levels were super short and just corridors.
Pathfinder: Kingmaker started out ok, but was just far too long, terribly paced, and the last third was a complete slog. This was probably the one I’d call a “stinker” the most.
Crisis Core Remake (FF7 spin off) had a boring story and lame characters. The bulk of the “content” were 300 side missions that were usually less than five minutes long in one of like six stages. I picked it up after I enjoyed the FF7 Remake far more than I thought, but this game adds nothing to the overall story. To be fair to the game though, I did complete all 300 side stories, because from time to time I like a mindless grind.
I’m continuing my four-year-old save of Octopath Traveler, where I got a third or so in. I dunno if it’s the Steam Deck, but there’s just tons of aliasing, shifting sprites and flickering, it just looks bad, and the detailed enemy sprites were the only thing I really liked about the game in the first place. Combat is also a slog at times, so I don’t know if I have it in me to finish the game.
I played a lot of great games this year, but also many that didn’t click with me.
There’s a huge spikes of games that I played this year, because I decided to start tackling my backlog by streaming them, these include games I’ve bought on sale, and those that are on PS+ Extre.
Can't finish because of difficulty spikes- Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown: - Dropped it after that mission where you need to protect a car, while manouvering between buildings in a city, as expected I kept crashing into buildings - Shantae: Risky’s Revenge- It was fun at first, but then there’s some precisioin platforming part, which I just wasn’t in the mood for - Super Mario 64- There’s a level where you’re first introduced to flying mechanic
Dropped it because of technical issues- Assassin’s Creed Origins- The game crashed within the tutorial area - Call of the Sea- I got motion sickness - Kena: Bridge of Spirits- Again, I got motion sickness, supposed to be an okay game. - Tardy- Weirdly because the game has lots of reading, but the fonts are way too small for me - The Ascent- Too much clutter on scene when you reached the first city / settlement. The first section feels okay, but again, some items / objects are just way too small for my failing eyes
Dropped it because it's not clicking- Gnosia- It was supposed to be fun at first, but then the rolls I got was not advancing the storyline - Grime- This feels like the moment I dislike souls-like metroidvania. It might be when I realized that I’ve picked the wrong upgrade path, and there’s limited resources for upgrading your character - Gungrave G.O.R.E- This is not a good game - Horizon Forbidden West- The combat feels worse than the first one. There’s so many more things to do that has way too many writings that I barely care enough. I’d rather have smaller number of sidequests with good writing, than a large number of them where everyone has so many stories to tell. This feels like it’s becoming a ‘forever game’, which might be good, but the combat is just not satisfying at all. - Mafia: Definitive Edition- Dropped after the racing section, was not feeling it. - Mass Effect: Andromeda- Dropped while in the first area. Something about the movement not clicking. - MediEvil (Remake)- Dropped after the 3rd or 4th area. - Moon: Remix RPG Adventure- This is supposed to be great, but I just got tired of the slow pace - NEO: The World Ends with You- I talked about this before, the game keeps on interrupting you. Walk to a new area, fluff dialogues, walk to another area, more inconsequential fluff dialogues. This seems to be a (bad) trend among JRPGs or anime style game. - Oxenfree- Character dialogues just don’t gel with me. Also there’s a time limit when choosing replies. - Root Double: Before Crime * After Days - Xtend Edition- The slice of life part is atrociously slow, most of them are inconsequential ‘look at me, i’m a cute anime girl’ - Sea of Stars- The combat is way too slow, and requires you to do timed button presses. Also for the part I was in, the story feels generic. - Shadow of the Beast- JUst not good - Star Ocean: The Divine Force- Arrived at port town, overtly anime character came in, dropped the game. THe combat was fun, but the character / story are not clicking - Tchia- This is supposed to be good, but I burned myself out for trying to collect everything available before advancing the story - The Adventure of Little Ralph- Feels kinda repetitive - The Wonderful 101: Remastered- I don’t think this game works well without touch screen - TUNIC- Sadly another indie trend that I dislike, difficult combat encounters that don’t feel satisfying. It’s supposed to be a very good game. - Unpacking- Played it on PS5, I dropped it after rotating object for quite a number of times. I think this game is probably better suited for mouse and keyboard - Vernal Edge- I wanted to like it, but the combat is not fun. You have a dedicated ‘Pulse’ button to heal, which throws your sword at the enemy, and you need to press attack + direction to launch an attack that could heal you, which is already a roundabout way of healing (the mechanic is not fun). Then you have enemies that need to be stunned by X number of charge attacks, and the game throws you into small combat area with 4 - 5 enemies that doesn’t get knocked back without 3-4 charge attacks.
Finished it, but it's kinda not good- Root Film- Root Letter was okay (but arguably ruined with the updated version with multiple endings), Root Film is just plain boring, especially the ending. The story was enticing at first, but nope, it became bad by the end of the game. - Shenmue II- Shenmue. - The 3rd Birthday- I like the combat, considering that it was on PSP.
Hellboy: Web of Wyrd. Huge Hellboy fan, got it day one. The art style is fantastic, but that’s the end of the good. Uninspired combat and clunky controls completely ruin what would have been a mediocre game. As great as a voice actor as Lance Reddick was, he wouldn’t have been my choice for Hellboy.
It's weird that as I continue to want to play more of it, I'm annoyed by just about every design decision they made along the way. I want to get into the gun design thing even, but the perk tree system puts a roadblock in my way.
The skill tree stuff makes me feel like Bethesda finally listened to all those players who bitched about it being too easy to become “overpowered” and blamed it on how easy it was to level up and not the poor balancing with how level scaling works. So now, all the actually good, fun and useful shit is all the way at the top (or rather the bottom) of the tree, with a bunch of “milestones” you have to hit in addition to simply being the right level and/or having the previous skills in the tree.
I don't even think it's that. Lots of RPGs have had "do X more to level up X", including old Bethesda games, but it's riddled with problems, which is why most games don't do it anymore. As for level scaling, at least they finally got rid of that, but the way they guide you through the galaxy in line with your level involves basically being equally far along in each faction quest line at the same time instead of having low level factions and high level factions.
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