This story is familiar to every gamer by now. You wait years for a video game to come out just for it to fall short of your expectations. It can be heartbreaking, but even top developers push out lackluster titles these days. Over the last year or so, these are some of the biggest video game disappointments.
Madden 21
The Madden series is known for pumping out updated versions of their football simulator games on an annual basis. Unfortunately, this release felt like a step back in many ways. Popular review site Metacritic received a bombardment of negative reviews, ultimately ending in the 0.2 rating that it sits at today.
Many of the common complaints included glitching graphics, broken gameplay, and promised features that failed to live up to those same promises. Even the player and team ratings that are normally accurate to their real life counterparts were troubling.
For instance, the Buffalo Bills quarterback Josh Allen premiered with just a 77/100 rating. However, if you look at the NFL picks and parlays, he is considered one of the best quarterbacks in the league and his team is consistently the favorite in their matchups. With the upcoming release of Madden 22, the developers have a chance to make this right to their fans.
Marvel’s Avengers
Released this past October, Marvel’s Avengers was a major disappointment for superhero fans around the world. There was some major hype behind this release, and the finished product greatly failed to meet our expectations.
Everything about this title felt unfinished and if you followed the development, it was clearly a rushed disaster. The game was clearly designed with microtransactions in mind and if you do not surrender to this system you will be stuck grinding endlessly for the best gear. After you accept this, you are faced with a slog of a game that is essentially just a boring beat ‘em up that you have played thousands of times before.
Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2
The original Vampire: The Masquerade from 2004 is a certified cult classic that has legions of fans and a dedicated modding community that is still thriving to this day. When the sequel was announced, many gamers were hesitant but after seeing the first trailer, our excitement got the better of us.
The sequel appeared to be everything we were hoping for and more. While it was more of a stylized walkthrough that showed off the elements at play, it was still stunning for what it was. Then we received the first actual gameplay footage and that’s when things started to unravel. Everything about the gameplay looked very stiff and lackluster.
After journalists started to dig into the project and begin asking questions, the developers seemed to panic. They first released a statement and announced that they game would be pushed back to 2022, then later in March it was cancelled altogether. Whether another developer picks it up in the future is uncertain but all hype is effectively dead.
Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance
It had been a long time since we had seen an official Dungeons & Dragons game and most were excited by the possibilities this title presented. Upon release this past June, we were immediately stuck with countless negative reviews. Unfortunately, there was no classic RPG flavor to enjoy here, just an endless grind of rehashed combat and braindead enemies mixed with bugs everywhere.
Cyberpunk 2077
It would be a sin to make a list like this without mentioning the most monumental failure in recent gaming history. Of course we are talking about the often delayed release of Cyberpunk 2077. This title was promised to usher us into the next era of gaming but it ended up failing to even run on current-gen consoles. By all accounts, this was one of the biggest faceplants we’ve ever seen from a major developer.
Cyberpunk 2077 fails on almost all levels. While the main storyline does have some high points and interesting missions, there is little else to enjoy here. Aside from the absolute encyclopedia of bugs and glitches here, the actual content was exceptionally dull. The AI is braindead, the vast city is empty and devoid of life, and frankly the way developer CD Projekt Red handled the backlash was appalling.
