How many and which bad games did you play this year?
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100h is not a stinker game playtime but I see what you mean :))
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 “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.
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 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.
Elite dangerous is so fucking good.
One: Starfield.
Not much I can say about it that hasn’t already been said, it was just so bland.
The only one that really sticks out is Starfield. Most other games I played I knew what I was getting into. For some reason Starfield surprised me, probably because it was on Gamepass (so effectively free) and because I trusted Bethesda. Oh well.
Considering the number of great games this year, that’s not too bad.
Maybe it’s just me getting older, but since Skyrim, Bethesda games have failed to capture that magic for me. They’ve been leaning on the creation engine for too long, to the point that so many of the features, not the least of which being the goddamn shouts, are all carbon copies of one another, the base building is literally just a fucking resource sink, the gunplay sucks and the enemies are all bullet sponges unless you dip into late game planets and filch a late game gun, the jobs are 90% basic bitch fetch quests, and the core gameplay loop of “go place --> grab shit --> sell shit” has not evolved since Morrowind.
I stop playing games when they start feeling like a second job, and for me that point in Starfield was about three hours in when I was trying to complete survey data for the homesteading program and I was wandering around this deserted planet, looking for samples of flora and fauna, and I scoot back from my desk as I realize, for 20 minutes, I have done absolutely nothing meaningful or engaging. The closest I’ve come is, I’ve pointed a scanner at a bunch of procedurally generated animals hoping they don’t land a hit on me because they’re too spongy for me to kill, so I can fill a meter, so that when I’m done filling meters I can go back to BDG and tell him this place is suitable for people to live. That’s not fun. It barely qualifies as gameplay, and it is an aggressive waste of time.
Maybe it’s just me getting older, but since Skyrim, Bethesda games have failed to capture that magic for me.
It is not you. Standards for the genre have been raised since at least 2015, and Bethesda has not kept up, for all the reasons you stated.
Agreed and Starfield wasn’t even that bad. I just don’t have any time to play a mediocre game when BG3 is sitting right there.
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.
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.
- Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown:
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I loved every other Diablo and went hard on 4. Then one day I just put the controller down and never picked it back up. I might play more later, but I’m so tired of games that are just nakedly obvious about being nothing but a grind and a job. I wasted so much money getting PSPlus for just this game. All told I spent about $150 on this and the only thing of value I got was a few hours playing with some old friends who also stopped playing and made me realize I wasn’t getting anything else out of it.
I’ve played a hell of a lot of BG3 and it feels completely the opposite. There is so much content that motivates me to do it for roleplay reasons. It doesn’t feel nearly as grindy. Some of the dialogs are a bit much to slog through after seeing them a few too many times, but they were all great the first time through, and it motivates me to try different options to get different dialog. But everyone knows BG3 is good.
Guess I’ll round out my list.
I really enjoyed Jedi: Outcast. Like BG3, the story is as good as the action, but there’s really only one storyline and if I recall you can get pretty much everything on a single playthrough so there aren’t really even mechanical decisions to make other than how to approach a combat.
Horizon: Forbidden West was pretty fun. I put it down for other games and haven’t gotten back to it but I will. Seems to share a lot with Jedi. Similar gameplay, similar linear storyline. It feels like mechanical choices are more meaningful and maybe you can’t do everything on a single playthrough but again I haven’t finished it.
Hogwarts Legacy: my wife wanted this because Harry Potter, but then it made her motion sick. So I felt obligated to play it to get our money’s worth and I didn’t make it very far at all before putting it down. Maybe there is more there further into the game but it didn’t grab me enough to find out.
Jedi outcast, as in the original from like 20 years ago?
Or Jedi survivor that came out last year?
Survivor. I can’t ever keep any of them straight. Jedi: Foo the Last.
Either way, both were good
I had a really solid year, all things considered:
- ⭐ Hi-Fi Rush – Love it, hands down. This game’s like if Jet Set Radio, Scott Pilgrim, and DMC got into a fist fight and then that fist fight had a baby with Jack Black
- ⭐ Pentiment – I’m still playing through this one but I can already tell it’s a new favorite. Major Return of the Obra Dinn vibes
- ⭕ Against the Storm – This game innovates on the citybuilder genre so hard and I can’t get enough of it. If you love a challenge and hate the late-game, this is THE ONE
- ⭕ Psychonauts 2 – Fun and bursting with creativity… but I had to set it down after a certain point because I stopped enjoying the gameplay loop. Can’t put my finger on why…
- ⭕ Peglin – Yes, Peglin. The Peggle Roguelite. I like it and you would too if you gave it a chance. It’s not a forever roguelite, but I guarantee you’ll have a blast with it for 5-10 hours
- ❌ Deep Rock Galactic – I bounced off of this one. The game has so much charm… but I just couldn’t click with it. I think co-op games just may not be for me
Honorable Mention: TF2 – Definitely not a “new” game to me, I own TF2, I bought it with money! Even so… this year marked my return after a looong hiatus. Coming back was a total revelation – I thought I’d grown to hate FPS games – as it turns out, what I’d actually grown to hate was the modern antisocial MMR grindset. Game developers: I beseech thee… abandon matchmaking and return to 2007. Return the slab or suffer my curse
I treat Deep Rock the same way I treat rogueli*es and arcade-style games – I can just hop on when I’m in the “dwarf mood”, play one or two missions and be done with it for the day. It’s very good for short sessions like that. Also, you can play solo no problem – you get a drone instead that can mine and shoot things.
Also, TF2 community servers FTW
When it comes to Deep Rock/co-op I think my issues are more associated with the underlying gameloop design. I find it hard to perform well when the “tension” ramps up and these games are kind of tailor-made to create high-tension situations. When a round ends I’m left feeling tired/deflated rather than joyful. I had the same issue with Left 4 Dead, but oddly not so for Payday 2.
In any case, I’m right there with you when it comes to TF2 community servers. I sorely wish that more games emphasized these sorts of digital “3rd places”. I have TF2 servers where I can go anytime and just… belong for as long as I please. Games should have more permanent places like that, where play and community come before any imposed win/lose dichotomy. People would be happier.
Ayy someone else who’s been enjoying Against the Storm.
I played over 140 hours now! I’m currently trying to climb the difficulty up to P20.
Goodness gracious you’re far further along than me! I haven’t touched it for a bit because I’ve been busy with other games, but I’ll get back to it eventually because it’s super fun. (Also GL on P20 I believe in you.)
It’s nice to see people talking about it. I caught a streamer I follow playing it like a month ago and it looked like a lot of fun.
I don’t have enough time to game to justify buying it at its most recent sale price, but I have my eye on it for the first time it gets a deeper discount or gets bundled.
A fellow Xbox gamepass User IT seems. Pentiment is one of my All Time favorites (probably top3 at least)
This was after my First playthrough. Now, with George putting out his video, im back in. My god, its marvellous.
Hifi Rush was great, but felt too formulaic for me, so i abandoned it after the first or second Boss. Too much running arpund, No real banger music between Bosses.
On a Side Note, its kinda similiar too with Lies of Pi. I can See the great soulslike It is (3/4 in) but my interest vanishes. Too many repetitive encounters. Too linear. I feel Like Elden Ring really innovated the genre through its semi Open world approach.
A fellow Xbox gamepass User IT seems.
Nope, I’m just someone who waits for sales and has a bit of an indie streak.
This was after my First playthrough. Now, with George putting out his video, im back in. My god, its marvellous.
I see we follow similar creators! I only just picked Pentiment up last week – Jacob Geller’s recent 2023 video is what originally put Pentiment on my radar and then George’s video gave me that final push into playing it for myself. I’m extremely glad for having done so because Pentiment has quickly become quite special to me. I already look forward to making subsequent playthroughs despite still working on the first.
Hifi Rush was great, but felt too formulaic for me, so i abandoned it after the first or second Boss. Too much running arpund, No real banger music between Bosses.
I can see where you’re coming from. From a macro perspective, the game’s essentially just a series of battle arenas stitched together by corridors and platforming challenges… nothing incredible there. What makes Hi-Fi Rush special for me is the novel fusion of rythm mechanics and spectacle fighter mechanics – they complement each other extremely well. (Forgive me for explaining at you like this. I just can’t help myself when it comes to talking about this game)
Normally, I can’t stand DMC-likes because of the requisite rote memorization. HFR flips this dynamic on its head by making the memorization incidental – it happens naturally as you practice playing the combo on-rythm. Perhaps even more importantly; just as mastery of a combo string comes within reach, the underlying musical qualities all suddenly spring into focus and turn the sequence into a musical phrase. It clicks together in a very intrinsically satisfying way IMO. Naturally, this all compounds in on itself and gets double-fun once you start improvising your own “melodies” during real combat. You like Jazz? Because it’s like Jazz if Jazz killed people.
Now, obviously this isn’t going to hit the same way for everyone (nor should it!)… but if you’ve not yet buckled down in training mode and truly mastered a string or two for yourself, then I would very emphatically encourage you to give the game a second try. I actually had to do the exact same thing myself before I really “got” the game and my mindset shifted. Hi-Fi Rush truly is the Dark Souls of 3rd-Person Action videogames
I liked Peglin but after a while it feels like the game is really unbalanced with too few useful builds.
Yup, that about sums it up: fun, but shallow. Nevertheless I think it’s worthy of a recommendation because it has a great honeymoon period before falling off.
I liked Deep Rock. I started playing it during the pandemic with some friends instead of doing in-person board games (and Jackbox and boardgame simulators got old). I definitely ended up playing more single player than multiplayer. Buuut I probably haven’t played it in a year? It just got really samey after getting through a lot of leveling up and unlocks.
The deep rock board game is so fun. And I hate board games and inwardly groan when someone suggests a board game, lol.
Same for me, really enjoyable 150 hours, but now with the slow updates I just already seen everything.
I moved to Darktide, despite its flaw I’m still playing it after the same amount of hours since then.
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.
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Intraveneous. Game got a lot of love and as a huge stealth fan I was really into the idea. Got it and hated every second of it. It’s tedious and punishing even by stealth game standards and the story wasn’t great either. Mechanics were poorly explained and it felt like the keymapping was made by a person who had never played a keyboard game before. ugh. I was really disappointed too because it was marketed as a stealth game that didn’t punish you for failing stealth which is true but the issue is that it’s so damn easy to fail stealth that you might as well just go in guns blazing anyway. It wasn’t like MGSV where both options make sense depending on the circumstance. It was more like “stealth is nigh impossible so we made guns-blazing a fail safe for people who aren’t nuts at this game”
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Atomic Heart. Yes I bought this game and I am ashamed of it. No it wasn’t for the robot porn. I thought it looked like an interesting Bioshock / Wolfenstein mashup and both of those are my favorites. Game was just… slow. Combat, stealth, everything felt like you were moving through syrup. The character’s english voice acting is also horrifically cringe. Like, just awful in every sense. Made me hate the MC more than the villains.
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Dying Light 2. I loved the first so I was seriously disappointed by this. Main issue was really with the movement. Gave me motion sickness dozens of times with how the camera is set up, and I was expecting something like Mirror’s Edge (Catalyst) but it felt just awfully floaty. The game also did… fuck all… in terms of explaining what you… do? so I just was super confused. Uninstalled after like 10 hours in frustration.
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Ghostrunner. Played this in December of 2022 but I wanted to add it in as a hot take. Overall great but the boss fights are pretty terribly designed after the first one and pretty much ruined the game for me. Plus there’s useless parkour sections that added nothing. Surprisingly little time spent being a ninja badass for a cyberpunk ninja badass game.
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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.
I have PlayStation Plus. Most of what I play are stinkers.
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I picked up Red Steel on the Wii for £1. It has not aged well.
