Biggest Video Game Letdowns – Mass Effect: Andromeda, Duke Nukem & More
Following on the heels of Mass Effect: Andromeda’s latest failures, we think it’s apt to take a look at the gaming world’s biggest letdown. MEA isn’t the only over-hyped title to screw the pooch when it came to its release. There’s a whole list of cross-platform games that managed to disappoint fans, and we’ve managed to collect the worst culprits here for your convenience. What can we say? We must be masochists and so are you if you take a look at the following biggest flops, in no particular order.
Resident Evil 6
Sandwiched in between some of the best survival horror games in the world, Resident Evil 6 is a game better left forgotten. It wasn’t necessarily a terrible game — it did earn 7.9/10 on IGN— but it just wasn’t what people were expecting. It just had too much to live up to. It was over-hyped, and it seemed to forget its roots. Instead of improving the claustrophobic atmosphere felt in the 4th and 5th, it embraced a Michael Bay-type approach to horror, so players were stuck with unnecessary shootouts and driving sequences. Luckily, the RE team learnt from their mistakes and returned to the survival aspect of their horror series with Biohazard.
Duke Nukem Forever
The classic MS-DOS game should have stayed in the 90s. Unfortunately, a whole slew of people thought it was a good idea to bring Duke to the new Millennium. But like every beloved action star from the 80s, Duke didn’t age well. It’s just too bad no one realized this over the 15 years it spent in development—which is why we were stuck with an outdated title that’s like the gaming equivalent of Andrew Dice Clay: crass, unpleasant, and depressing.
Haze
You’d think with the developers behind Golden Eye 007 heading this title, we’d be sitting on another revolutionary game, but alas, Haze was never able to reach the N64’s legendary status. Too bad we let our expectations convince us otherwise. Most of us tried out the PS3 FPS with the high hopes only to have them dashed. Haze was boring in its simplicity, and it had its fair share of technical problems that resulted in animation and environmental glitches, not unlike MEA — although Haze fared even worse under examination, earning just a 55% from Metacritic.
Call of Juarez: The Cartel
You can see a pattern developing here. Many of the titles on the list are additions to a much-loved series. The Cartel should have made the Call of Juarez a perfect trilogy, but it was never meant to be. Like the other culprits on this list, The Cartel is just plain boring. It relies too heavily on clichéd character tropes and over-simplified, repetitive levels. It also has issues with graphics as characters teleport around the screen and end up phasing through solid objects.
Making a video game is no easy task, we admit it. Making an amazing video game is even harder, so we can sympathize with these developers responsible for these duds. But that doesn’t mean we’ll spend our money on these titles out of pity. Hell no—we have better games, accessories, skins, and consoles that are deserving of our hard-earned cash.
So we don’t end on such a negative note, what are you saving your for? Are you like us checking out the PS4 Pro and a matching PS4 skin from the people at dbrand, or are you waiting for the highly anticipated release of Project Scorpio? Or maybe you’re saving yourself for only those games that earn an 85% or above from Metacritic—in which case, it’s about time you test out The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Until we get the Switch, we’ll be over at dbrand.com designing a custom skin in orange carbon fiber.
If you end up searching out a brand new title for your library, let us know if you scope out any of the best of lists in order to help you make your decision. Because let’s be honest with each other: far more games impress us than they don’t. It’s just easier remembering the titles that really blow it, especially when their flubs are immortalized in .gif form on social media like MEA’s glitches.