Biggest Disappointment in Gaming 2013

While the expectations about some games are low to begin with, some games just plunge us into soul-crushing depths. What was your biggest let-down in 2013?

PS: If your answer is not SimCity, its probably wrong ;)

For me, The Cave.

Jesus, forgot about that, yes, that was something that still left me always hesitant about anything Double Fine. Like they couldn't get the movement and the platforming right, that weird 3d platforming where your off, and man was there are lot of backtracking.

I know i'll get shit for this, but Brothers. I was pretty amped about it based on all the positive comments, and i'm a big fan of Limbo, but I found it extraordinarily boring both in terms of the plot and the gameplay.

Oh yeah, and Gone Home was pretty lame.

Rome 2, shamefru dispray!

Year of the Dawg did not pan out the way I had hoped.

I expected awesome dogs doing awesome dog stuff but well... Nothing much happened with that.

BioShock Infinite. I wanted it to be good. I wanted it to be interesting. But as soon as Elizabeth entered the story the game went on a nosedive and never recovered.

For me, Bioshock Infinite. Was so bored to tears / frustrated by the gameplay that I couldn't even make it to the supposedly super crazy end bits.

But yeah, also Sim City.

My personal disappointment was Company of Heroes 2. It was hard to top CoH 1, but CoH2 feels like a huge step backward. The single player campaign was boring and felt like you were completely out of control of your units, and the multiplayer is so heavily-laden with microtransactions that I stopped playing the game after only a week.

Stalin would not be pleased.

Straight up, Battlefield 4 and all of the problems it's had since launch. I was a huge fan of the series and Battlefield 3 was such a solid game. Frustrating because there is a good game there, just it doesn't work. After a month of troubles, I just don't care to go back to it. Maybe next year sometime.

This entire year has been a disappointment for me. I went from being as into video games as one can be to only playing Dota 2. Yes, Bioshock was pretty good and so was Last of Us, but other than that I really have no desire to play anything that has come out recently. The new consoles are especially disappointing. I might get a Wii U though because Nintendo seems to be the only company making games I am even remotely interested in right now.

Hey I just realized I was not disappointed by anything this year. In fact I was surprised by how good some stuff was. This was a fantastic year!

Lococycle

Im going to second Rome II.

@doctorwelch: eh you just need to play more games! Try something new or something you don't think you like. Happens to me all the time. I say "well that looks really stupid." Then I try it and oh wait it's actually my favorite thing ever.

I'm going to guess Sim City is going to be the answer that a lot of people give. For me personally? Dead Space 3 is a massive bummer.

It's a long freaking list, but at the top are Battlefield 4, SimCity, and Dead Space 3 (which I forgot existed)

These. Sorry. I really, REALLY wanted to like Infinite but I just couldn't get into it.

Yes, I would say Lococycle too. Like Vinny it seemed, I thought a couple of the beginning parts were funny. And it comes from a developer whose pedigree is if nothing else, funny. But the game looked bad, and the funny part way stretched. That woman flapping her arms while being dragged on asphalt was hilarious, though. Otherwise everything I played, like Bioshock Infinite, was decent to absolutely rocked.

Rome II was pretty disappointing, and SimCity was a massive bummer, but honestly Gone Home was my biggest disappointment. I completed that game and I sat there and literally felt like I had been lied to.

No big disappointments for me this year (a first in a long while I think) other than the lack AAA fantasy RPGs to wet my whistle on. I've never been a huge Sim City guy and the BF4 issues never actually effected me for whatever reason. I feel all the disappointing games of this year were ones I never intended to play anyway.

Also Bioshock Infinite is my personal GOTY and Brothers came a close second, so there. I know personal taste huh...

Dead Space 3 was huge disappointment. I loved the previous game equally for different reasons. Dead Space 3 failed at being either a tense survival horror game or a Uncharted-style action game. It died a slow death of reused content and god-awful storytelling. What a painful slog that game was.

This is the first console generation where I couldn't give a shit about any of the new hardware.

Probably just going to end up getting a Wii U for the exclusives.

Its seems EA really dropped the ball this year. A really huge drop in quality on all there games this year it seemed.

Dead Space 3. Especially since I absolutely loved 2. :/

For me it was Ni no Kuni. The gameplay bore me to tears, the characters, particularly Oliver, sucked, and the story was far to generic. I was really ready for a JRPG and Ni no Kuni didn't meet my expectations fir the genre. Also Tales of Xillia for the same reasons.

The Bureau is mine, the concept for that game just drips with potential, and then I found it to be mediocre in almost every way possible.

I haven't been disappointed at all! How could I, with all these amazing games this year.

• Last of Us
• GTA V
• AC IV (huge surprise to me)
• Bioshock Infinite
• Brothers
• Injustice
• DMC
• Tearaway
• Rayman Legends
• A Link Between Worlds
• And many more!

Be more positive duders.

@jasonr86: I was having a hard time thinking up a disappointment until you reminded me of Ni no Kuni. It great presentation, and I loved the super stupid puns like "Your Meowjesty", but the combat was disorientating and it feels like it still has all the worst parts of old JRPGs. But I still feel bad for not forcing myself to play through it because of those things I did enjoy.

My experience with Mario and Luigi: Dream Team was similar. I own all of these Mario and Luigi games, but they never keep me captivated long enough to finish them. The amount of hand holding through dialogue was particularly annoying in this game. A sense of rewarding discovery is lacking when the game tells you what to do every step of the way.

I'll give Arkham Origins honorable mention here. I love the first two games and was down for more of the same. I felt the loss of the Riddler challenges that had you searching the environment and taking photos. Little things like that made this entry in the series relatively lifeless.

Bioshock infinite.

I forgot about Dead Space 3. What a downer. The first game was so good. The series has always had dumb payed cheats and skins but #3 was just a joke.

It's been a weird year. Nothing really grabbed me. I ended up playing some 1 and 2 year old stuff. The new consoles are great at least.

Watch Dogs. The fact that the game didn't come out this year killed all my excitement for next-gen.

Kinda shocked not to see Gta V in here yet. While aesthetically pleasing, I just didn't care about anything happening in that game. I think I'm just overwhelmed in open world games. Especially after playing Saints Row I, I found myself just wanting to run super fast around Los Santos and became disappointed at how long it took to do anything.

Maybe an odd choice but i guess it would have to be The Pinball Arcade on the PC...mostly because i was super excited about it and waited (what felt like) a long time for it to come to the PC but when i played it i couldn't bring myself to buy any of the tables because of how shitty i think the camera choices are.

Rome 2 :(

@jasonr86: Same here except I really enjoyed Tales of Xillia because it was just more Tales of^^

But man Ni No kuni. I rarely quit JRPGS but I had to stop playing this game after 15 hours because every time I tried to play it I fell asleep

Dead Space 3. The game dragged on for far too long. Also, the PS4 launch games were all super disappointing (will probably end up playing the Wii U and Xbox one a lot more over the next few months)

the fact that I haven't played episode 2 of the wolf among us yet. =( but I guess that's only a testament to how much I really liked the first episode.

Sim City by far. God, I just wanted a new Sim City 4.

This might be mine too, but that's mostly because I haven't played Sim City or any of the other big disappointments in this thread. I actually enjoyed Brothers but it never had the emotional punch that I got from something like Journey. I agree with @matt from his GOTY post. The main narrative was lacking, but the storytelling within the environments was pretty good. And the game was pretty, minus the couple of graphical hiccups I had on the PC version.

SimCity was a goddamn mess.

The Cave, so many expectations; I was let down by this one. I actually forgot it came out this year, that's how much I tried to forget about it.

Also, State of Decay ended up disappointing me. I liked the ideas this game has, but the game is full of bugs and framerate problems, that it's barely playable. It's one of those games that could've been great with more polish.

I would have to say Killer is Dead. It was actually one of the better playing Suda games, but in exchange it seemed to lose everything that I like about his games. Just no soul in it whatsoever, and no real reason for me to go back to it.

gears of war judgment and god of war ascension

This a thousand times. CoH was amazing and I didn't dislike 2 just because it was the same... like you say it really just wasn't good. In about all areas. It's pretty amazing and too bad because I'm a big Relic fan.

There was lots of bad this year, but my rock bottom expectations going into most games means I'm rarely disappointed as I more often than not pleasantly surprised or validated in what I thought was going to happen. The one exception I can think of was AC4. After all the talk of how great it was and how different it was from AC3 on this site that one week where it seemed like they did nothing but talk about it, I let myself get excited and into that game. What made it worse was that the first few hours of the game made it seem like it had lived up to that and then I just started getting terrible mission after terrible mission. There was a good 3-4 hours where everything I did in that game was those frustrating/annoying trail a guy missions -and don't get caught or you gotta do it all over again!- and it just took all the wind out of my sails. I ended up powering through it, but so much of that game is still just more of the same crap. Which was a huge bummer to me and I was really hoping they would have expanded on some of the mission designs. Guess it was my own fault for letting myself think differently. Especially for a franchise that's being milked yearly and at the end of a console cycle.

I was also really bummed by Rome 2. The Japan one they did before was the first time I was finally able to get that game to click with me and I really liked the series. As much as I love me some Japan, I have had a thing for the whole ancient Roman motif and I love everything about it. So I was super excited going into that game. I can't really put my finger on it, besides the terrible AI, but I just never had fun with it. I'm thinking of giving it another try again here soon, but I'm not expecting much to change from the 13 hours I put into it the first time around.

Sim City goes without saying.

Not sure if you play on PC ever, but there is a PC version (you may be able to buy it now? not sure) that should be able to run a lot better and hopefully get more immediate support.

How about review events that EA keeps putting on that IGN, GameSpot, and Polygon keep attending, giving these games great reviews and having them be buggy, unplayable, pieces of shit. Two times this year with EA. At some point I have to stop trusting reviews right?

I was actually disappointed by quite a few games this year that I had really been excited for-- this might have been the year that has finally gotten me to temper my expectations for all game releases.

Battlefield 4 is a big let down, especially since the game itself is a ton of fun when it works properly. Unfortunately for me, that's about 50% of the time right now.

GTA V did nothing for me at all and I just stopped playing about 7 hours in.

Rogue Legacy seems like a lot of fun, but I just can't get a handle on the controls for some reason. I haven't put a ton of time into this one, but at 2 hours in I feel like I shouldn't still be struggling with the controls.

Killer is Dead was an abomination front to back.

But most disappointing of all for me was Bioshock Infinite. So much wrong with that game, and so much about what stinks about it has been discussed, so I won't retread old ground.

But, MAN.

SimCity made me question all of my life choices