Games, I'm afraid, don't always age like red wine. Sometimes, if overlooked enough, they can age like milk. These are the games that make me wish I never had to use that overused simile the most, games in a Great Series that ended up getting Disappointing Sequels (also keep in mind that these are mostly games that I personally played or have seen gameplay of, so don't get iffy if I didn't mention something that needs a good hankering) (I might also update this list with more entries if I find any more sequels that I don't like) (yes, I changed the title so this article looks a little less confusing) (and finally, to add more unnecessary parentheses, this list is MY OPINION ONLY. I'm sorry if you think I'm an idiot or an asshole if I diss on a game you hold dearly beloved to your heart, but I'm also not sorry. Take my opinion with a grain of salt and maturity, please)
Showing 1-10 of 39 items
This was the first game I put on this list, and before everyone lashes out at me for jumping on the CoD-hate bandwagon, I have news for you - I actually enjoy most of the modern Call of Duty titles. The plots are still vapid and trite, of course, but you can't fault them for trying new things, especially with the recent installments focusing more on futuristic set pieces and environments. However, with that said, there are no redeeming qualities about Modern Warfare 3. While the franchise being guilty of a highly copy-paste business model was nothing new to the series, it was especially prevalent in MW3 - a majority of the guns were the same, a majority of the characters were the same, the 'plot' of this title was essentially Modern Warfare 2: The Director's Cut, and even the multiplayer was largely undisturbed, with the only remarkable new feature present being a new deathmatch game type that didn't particularly revolutionize the multiplayer scene. The game tried way too hard to one-up the 'No Russian' scenario of the second game by *SPOILERS* essentially blowing up half of Europe and showing a scene of a little girl being trapped in an exploding van, amongst killing off the protagonist of the first two titles, Soap MacTavish, which meant hardly anything to me considering I always just considered him another faceless expendable grunt.*SPOILER END* I was hoping Infinity Ward would be able to make me retain faith in the series, but after giving it a rent a while back, it made me pretty much swear on my grave not to buy into another Infinity Ward Call of Duty title, a creed I hold close to my heart to this day.
Games do not have to be bad for them to be massive disappointments, and Nuts and Bolts is the prime candidate to back up that statement. I waited SO LONG for a third sequel to Banjo-Tooie, which was hands-down my favorite platformer of all time, and instead of being rewarded for my loyalty, I was presented with a fucking vehicle-based puzzle game. Of all the things in the world they could have done to Banjo-Kazooie, they decided to flip it on its head and switch genres entirely, the ultimate crime towards my childhood and the childhoods of many others out there. And, like I said, Nuts and Bolts is a genuinely interesting game. It has a very unique mechanic in being able to build vehicles and use them to complete a wide variety of missions, utilizing different pieces and vehicle types to your advantage. That sounds just grand, actually, but in turn, they had to sacrifice what was arguable the best platformer game anyone had ever known. The trade-off is so severely unbalanced, I'm surprised the world hasn't fallen out of orbit yet from the fallout of this... this heathen of a successor.
Deadlocked? Hah, more like Deadlocked-to-one-gimmick-that-isn't-even-particularly-satisfying-by-the-series-standards. I liked the gladiator game modes in the main series Ratchet and Clank games, but did we really need an entire game revolving around them? And where the hell is Clank's name in the title? Why does Ratchet look like a generic space marine now? Is this really the direction the series is heading in? I really hope not...
Destroy All Humans!, despite a few technical hiccups every now and then, was an extremely addicting sandbox game that placed you in control of Crypto, a mind-bending alien with a stash of devastating weaponry. Once the series hit the 3rd main entry, though (let's be honest, Big Willy Unleashed never happened, but at least that was kind of a spin-off), everything just felt... off. What little environments there were just looked way too similar to each other, the physics were screwed with even more, and the whole experience felt lackluster compared to that of DAH! 1 and 2. Poor sales pretty much spelled doom for the franchise, not to mention Pandemic's untimely demise. What a tragic end to such an underrated gem.
Before Skylanders came and resuscitated the franchise, Spyro had a nasty fall from grace since his reign on the Playstation One, and it all began with Enter the Dragonfly. It was a traditional Spyro game, all right... when it actually worked properly. My copy of the game, which was barely scratched, often had trouble loading large swathes of levels, resulting in giant voids popping up in the middle of play, not to mention the controls felt quite slippery, too, all while having to watch the game run at a quite miserable framerate. When I wasn't being agitated by the glitches, I was being agitated by terrible voice acting, confusing level design, and intrepid minigames bereft of any semblance of entertainment. Sadly, Enter the Dragonfly was but one of many games that contributed to what I like to call the 'Downward Spy-ral.' I would list them here, but I have yet to subject myself to their horrors, so that will have to wait for another day.
Speaking of gimmicks, some geriatric fuckwit thought it would be a good idea to advertise the waggle-powered, blatant-Wii-Mote-ripoff Playstation Move controller by coding a ridiculously boring tie-in that should have been the best fucking thing ever. They seriously brought together the three powerhouses of Sony's platformer action-adventure titles and somehow managed to mess it up by handing it off to an untrustworthy, shovelware developer. There is no diversity to the gameplay - you're stuck, quite literally, on one hallway, usually with enemies in your way that you dispatch by waving your controller around like a dork. The only time the gameplay becomes anything unique is when you're playing minigames, which involve wretched controls and painfully-slow gameplay. That's all this game is, by the way, just boring, vapid minigames with no substance and no exploration to them. It's the video game equivalent of the third Expendables movie. They have an all-star cast with hardly anything else to back it up.
The original arcade classic Rampage got several home console adaptations that, quite honestly, could mostly be seen as decent at best. For Total Destruction, however, not even that much can be said. The massive roster is just about the only thing this reboot has over its predecessors - combat and movement are all criminally slow, the controls are difficult to comprehend (especially on the Wii port), and the levels somehow managed to appear even more drab than the Nintendo 64 iterations. Worse still, monster unlock conditions are seemingly random, and the game has frequent framerate stuttering issues, especially during firefights. Total Destruction is just about as apt a title can get, as far as this franchise is concerned. I don't think we'll have to worry about another monster attack from these guys any time soon.
Again, the quality of the original Flatout games can be argued about, but as a whole, they were relatively decent driving games with hilarious ragdoll physics-based side games. Then the series got picked up by Team 6 and we got this atrocity. If you haven't seen Simon and Lewis' video of the gameplay in this version, I'll summarize it for you - Flatout 3 is a shitstorm of unplayability. Cars constantly glitch, embed themselves in the ground or even fall out of the map entirely, with the worst cases leading to entire server resets, and the variety of minigames was utterly molested by an awful physics engine that barely works. I'm guessing all the chaos and destruction that this game gets its name from stems from the development cycle, because this series is flat-out dead in the water. Puns!
Okay, when I did a review of this game, I'll admit, I was absolutely pent up with frustration and had to blow off steam by writing a long, angry play-by-play of Pokemon Channel. Yes, I'm pathetic, and I will admit, I was quite harsh on the game overall since I did have some fun with it as a kid, but it still doesn't hold a candle to Hey You Pikachu!, the game it was based off of. Hey You Pikachu! wasn't groundbreaking, but the activity variety and the voice commands drove it home. Here, going outside is hardly ever required, and the television takes up most of your time. While most of the channels are at least somewhat entertaining, some get old rather quick, and the only reward you get for playing through the game is a crummy Pichu Bros. short that, as I said before, could have easily been shoehorned in as a bonus feature on one of the millions of Pokemon films on the market. I expected so much more from Pokemon Channel (although, come to think of it, I don't know why) but it managed to remove a lot of what Hey You Pikachu! enjoyable, which I didn't think was possible.
Armageddon holds the title of being the Mortal Kombat game with the largest amount of kharacters on the roster, with a whopping 62 playable kharacters. Unfortunately, size doesn't matter in komparison to the dumbfounding changes made to the series' staple formula. Gone were klassic fatalities for each kharacter, replaced by a krappy 'Kustom Fatality' mechanic that barely invokes any sort of kustomization. You input kommands and watch as your fighter does several stilted, lazily-animated attacks rather than simply watching a gruesome kutscene. Other modes are rather silly additions as well - there is a Mario Kart klone, a single-player kampaign focusing on a newcomer named Taven that hardly anyone kares about, and other silly minigames such as Chess Kombat. What a rather unexciting amount of kontent for an otherwise promising sequel. Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe shortly followed, which was pretty much the polar opposite of Armageddon... yet it sucked as well, since the violence was meddled with due to the DC Heroes' 'Thou shalt not kill' rule, and the gore of the previous games was nearly non-existent. Thankfully, Warner Brothers and Netherrealm Studios managed to clean house with the excellent Mortal Kombat 9, and with Mortal Kombat X on the horizon, things are looking up for the world's most violent fighting game franchise.