1y ago

Is there a game that you've been very patient for, which turned out to be dissappointing when you finally started playing it?

Personally there are a few games which left me very dissappointed, after hyping myself up for years in certain cases.

Divinity Original Sin: turns out I prefer more streamlined, less packed games (love Pillars of Eternity) and that coop play in a CRPG stresses me out.

Wasteland 2: I actually managed to finish this one but secretly I admit I was hoping for a better Fallout which I didn't really get. New Vegas did the cowboy theme much better.

INSIDE: while the design was cool, it was just a ton of boring, easy puzzles in comparison to LIMBO, its predecessor.

249 comments

RDR2, I eventually caved and bought it after months of friends telling me how good it is. But the movement and control scheme are just so bad it instantly ruined the game for me. Even qwop has better controls.
- YES!
  I've been a PC gamer for 25 years, and RDR2 is by far thebmost annoying control setup. Everything feels laggy due to the emphasis on fluid and realistic animations.
  Plus it suffers feom the same issue as GTA5: "Press Key to progress story". They both seem more like open world tech demos to me.
  Good graphics, though. But graphics don't matter if the gameplay is good.
- Same here! It seems like a great game otherwise, but I just couldn't get immersed in it because of the controls. Didn't feel like I was playing as Arthur so much as watching him and hoping he'd do what I want.
- That tops my list. I started out maybe 4 or 5 times and then decided I had better things to do with my time. Like housework or getting a root canal.
- I think this was why I started playing it for a while but just dropped off and never went back. I was always fighting the controls.
- If the controls are even remotely close to the first game (or GTA:IV) I totally understand what you mean.

Cyberpunk 2077 CD project red was the golden boy after Witcher 3 and the dlcs. They could do no wrong. Of course their next game was gonna be critically acclaimed GOAT right? Nope. Dumpster fire. Couldn’t play it for more than 30mins without it crashing. Unimmersive and confusing. That’s when I learned corporate greed has no limits
- Honestly the worst about CP2077 wasn’t even the bugs. I also pre ordered it and while the performance was kinda shit and there was a bug or two, it was still playable. Yes we shouldn’t let it slip but unfortunately it’s also kind of the standard these days.
  However the game was shallow af and not at all matching what we had been told for years. The whole, create your own story from scratch? Yea you choose some background option, have a 1 min cutscene and then that’s basically it. We had been told that would be hours of gameplay depending on the option and it was a short cutscene.
  The whole city was supposed to feel completely alive and you were told that you would be able to do whatever you wanted. That wasn’t close to true either. Plenty of stuff like that.
  Luckily I had bought it on GOG to support CDPR because I had loved the Witcher games. Was able to refund it entirely and never locked back. Not even looking to play it anytime soon and maybe ever.
  
  I only played the beginning of the street kid and was so disappointed when the cutscene kicked in. Like that was it? 3 separate pathes that connect to themselves after what? Like 30 minutes? Was totally borked on Linux in the beginning anyways. I am waiting for the new patch. Hopefully this one is gonna be good
- God I hope I don’t add starfield to this list!
  
  It’s a modern bethesda title. Not to be pessimistic, but you should probably lower expectations for it. It has a high chance to be 1. Buggy. 2. Shallow and derivative in both mechanics and story. 3. Full of DLC and shady monetary models. Bethesda succumbed to corporate greed and formulaic design principles a long time ago.
- I was hoping Cyberpunk 2077 would be an answer closer to Deus Ex than what we got with Deus Ex: Human Revolution. But the skill tree and upgrades weren't doing it for me. Not to mention the game running like shit and being rushed out the door.
  
  Still salty that we lost out on the conclusion of the DeusEx trilogy because Eidos Montreal ended up doing the Avengers game that no one even remembers or talks about now.
- To me it was immersive af, except the Johnny Silverhand levels, even though I played on a weaker rig that I have currently and the framerate wasn't great. What I did was focus on the story and largely ditch the open world aspect, since I hadn't been fond of this type of games for some time anyway. I played it almost a year ago and don't remember it notoriously crashing, or at all tbh, but maybe I was just lucky.
  I'm very curious about Phantom Liberty, although being a patient gamer, I'll probably wait a bit before buying it to see if it's any good.

The Outer Worlds.... Hyped so much for it... Even snorting through my nose at the outer wilds..... Thinking they use to similar name just clicks
Now the outer wilds is one of my favorite games of all time. And the outer world is currently sat in my steam library with less than 10 hours. Just couldn't engage me.
- How did they manage to take many of the elements that could make a good game and just make it..... forgettable? I played it to the end, because I like walking around shooting things. I think that is about it.

I'm not disappointed at the game but on myself.
I patiently waited for Elden Ring to go on sale, excited to play it. But the reality is i don't have enought time to play.
So what happens is I die a few times, restart my progress, die a few more, then my IRL game time has ran out. And I'm still where I started, no progress made,.
If i consistently evade enemies just to get far on the map, then what I've done is stunt my character progression and just horse around the map. I mean that's not playing, it's being a tourist inside the game.
- May I offer some unsolicited advice.
  Your damage output is as important if not more important than "getting gud". The more damage you do, the fewer attacks you have to dodge. That's kind of the secret to all these Souls games.
  Damage output and damage mitigation come from stacking many small, incremental bonuses. The most important upgrade for damage output is upgrading your weapon with ores. Pick one weapon (eg. Longsword) and invest all ores into it. Any weapon is viable for the whole game as long as you upgrade it. Don't be afraid to commit ores into your chosen weapon as you will eventually have an unlimited supply.
  It's possible to suicide-run into dangerous areas for powerful items since you don't lose items upon death. You can collect mid and high-tier ores this way even at low level.
  It's perfectly okay to farm exp from higher level, non-bosses. It's low risk since you'll be near a rest site. A good example is killing Vulgar Militiamen from the Farum Greatbridge site in the most northeast area of Caelid. You can horse yourself there ignoring everything. There are plenty of ideal spots that people have found, just look them up.
  If you're still having trouble, do each step in the following video as you see fit. Notice that most of these improvements are obtained by acquiring items, and not obtained by leveling up. https://youtu.be/GYI5Z3jhKB4
  
  Thank you so much! I'll try this on my next play through.
- A lot of them you are meant to run past, you don't get meaningful xp from mobs until you get to late game secret areas, early game just Google where dungeons are, ride torrent to them and kill bosses for levels
  
  You mean, grinding on mobs won't give me meaningful xp? So it's the bosses that I need to kill.
- More unsolicited advice. Consider an easy mode mod (if you have it for PC). There's a few good ones that rebalance it to be a "normal" dodge-and-hit action game instead of a full on soulsborne. I also like a "keep runes on death" mod to take away that terror of actually leaving your little stomping grounds and exploring the beautiful world.
  The game is so much more fun when it isn't forcing "play it this way" down your throat.
  
  Thank you for the advice, but my 9 year old son has now marked the computer as his territory and I'm now exiled to the Playstation.
- I can agree wholeheartedly. I found Elden Ring to be a very boring game.
  
  That's not at all what they said lol

Fallout 4....
I was patient on it. Mostly involuntary, but patient still. It was incredibly disappointing. So many amazing features from 3 and NV was gone. Speech is a joke. So you want to agree, agree but be an ass about it, disagree, or disagree and be rude about it.
Those are your options in every single encounter.
It's a good RPG game overall. Just not a good Fallout game.
- I was coming to this thread to answer the same. New Vegas was probably my favorite game of all time, with it's unique charm and creative blend of stories and character mechanics. I couldn't make it past 5 or 6 hours of the FO4 (I really wanted to give it a chance), before I dropped it for good. Bethesda wanted to make an action shooter with a twist, and they did a good job of that, but it lacked the creative "it" factor that made me sink 600+ hours in NV across multiple playthroughs. Just talking about it makes me want to boot it back up right now!
- Ironically, this is my "I don't get why everyone is so disappointed in it" game. I have more played hours in Fallout 4 and Skyrim than I do any of the earlier games in either franchise. Don't know why, and it's not that I came into them recently. I have nostalgia for the others, but I just can't be bothered playing spreadsheet simulator even against Mr. House.
  With F4, I know I can dream a build and it happens, even if as I reach higher levels the builds start to blend a bit.
  Also, I used to work in the Institute Building, which is placed on the squashed Boston map NOT at MIT, but at the office complex called the Arsenal.
- Sorry, between the wine and your reductionist overview I have to respond.
  Unless you want to fondle their balls, lick their butthole, or just fuck off and 69 with yourself, agreeing or disagreeing are essentially the only options one is given in conversation. Or you could just listen and not reciprocate, but that's not interactive.
  If you want something deeper or more varied just hit up ChatGPT.
  I played F3, NV and F4 and I don't see anything so lacking in F4 that I have to return to the previous games. It definitely wasn't limited to "I agree", "I agree, you clod", "I disagree", "I disagree and you smell bad" as you seem to make it out to be.

I'm going to call it now and say Starfield...
- That demo thing they did a while back looked pretty lack-luster.
  "make any ship you can imagine" while they cycle through like 5 premades, 2 of which have the exact same cockpit...
  
  Stiff character models again, too. The lead animator must be the bosses nephew or something.
- Yep...

Spore. 'nuff said.
- Bro! We dont talk about spore...
- I pre-ordered that game 😞
- Yo, that's my childhood you're shitting on, and I won't take it.
  You're right though.

The original Fable. I wasn't yet aware of Moleyneux's reputation as a liar and bought into all the neat shit that was supposed to be in the game. Like at one point he said you could cut a tree and then adventure for years in game and the scar would still be there. Outrageous to think now, but he also said there would be a dragon fight and even back then this wasn't difficult to make happen, yet it didn't even have a dragon.
Also Oblivion. I had found Morrowind and fell in love, went back and got Arena and Daggerfall and loved those, too. They talked about all kinds of things it would have and showed graphics that looked top tier in magazines during development. It came out and didn't look as good, was majorly dumbed down compared to Morrowind, and had even more technical issues. It was disappointing, but it still turned out to be a fun game regardless.
- I was getting pretty sick of the chicken chaser bs until I was doing battle with town guards for shits and giggles. I parried an attack and the game loaded a different zone and auto-saved over my file. There was no way to go back because manual saving and loading were not a feature of the game. It completely ruined the whole thing and I never returned.
  I liked Oblivion but I loved Morrowind. The ui and controls were substandard but the atmosphere and pacing of that game were amazing. Oblivion was Bethesda's turn to mainstream and love for money.

Elden Ring
It's just Dark Souls 3.5. Which is not necessarily bad if you really liked DS3 and just want more of the same thing, but I considered DS3 by far the weakest in the series to begin with, and playing the Nioh series after it has opened my eyes to just how much room for improvement there is in the DS series as a whole. From Soft has basically followed the same path as Bethesda - they used to make varied games until one of them randomly became wildly successful, and from that point onward they haven't had the balls to deviate from the winning formula and have just been remaking that same game over and over with a slightly different coat of paint each time. Which makes sense from a business point of view, I guess, but after this many repetitions, it's become clear to me From Soft is totally creatively bankrupt. Hell, it's been more than a decade since Demon's Souls, and they still can't even figure out a better counter to the "roll behind them and stab them in the butt" strategy than making enemy tracking ever more effective and their movements ever more spasmodic and unreadable in each subsequent game. The end result of this complete lack of willingness and/or ability to innovate is that despite being expertly crafted, Elden Ring feels very by-the-numbers and utterly soulless (if you'll pardon the pun).
- I often describe Elden Ring with the following sentence: "If you gave me this game with no title and told me it's Dark Souls 4, I would have no reason to doubt you".
  It's great for everyone that wanted more Dark Souls, and ER is arguably a good starting point for anyone that hasn't played any of the Dark Souls, but it's still Dark Souls. If someone had tried Dark Souls in the past and realized that they don't like the game, I really wouldn't expect Elden Ring changing that.
  For me personally: Elden Ring is pretty much my favourite game of all time. I feel like it's the "culmination of Dark Souls design", and just happens to be exactly what I was personally looking for in DS games - but even with this in mind, I don't feel the need of getting more of the same.
  But hey, as for Fromsoft just doing the same thing over and over - Armored Core VI coming out next week, and that's quite different. :D
  
  Elden Ring is pretty much my favourite game of all time. I feel like it’s the “culmination of Dark Souls design”, and just happens to be exactly what I was personally looking for in DS games
  I'd probably feel the same way if I hadn't played a few other similar games while waiting for ER. Nioh and especially Nioh 2 showed me how much more Dark Souls could do. Their combat system is much richer and deeper, and I find it baffling that From Soft hasn't tried copying even a few of their ideas. I hadn't realized anything was missing from the Souls formula until I played them, but now I can't unsee it. Maybe my expectations are excessive. From Soft seems incapable of copying even its own good ideas. Dark Souls 2 made quite a few good (if relatively minor) changes to the formula, all of which were erased the moment Miyazaki took back control of the series.
  I also recently replayed Blade of Darkness, which I consider the forgotten true originator of the souls-like genre. Being more than twenty years old, it's much simpler than its spiritual successors, but it showed me that Dark Souls also does a bunch of things it really doesn't need to do, such as bullshit artificial difficulty. I used to think BoD was really hard back when I played it for the first time more than two decades ago, but after several thousand hours in Souls and Nioh, it feels easy. And you know what? That makes it great fun. Enemy attack patterns are quite basic and easily readable and predictable, there are no surprise ganks and no spoiler enemies (which is what I like to call annoying enemies specifically added in order to spoil what would otherwise be a fun combat encounter). Hell, there's even friendly fire among enemies, so it's much harder for them to gang up on you, and you get none of that toxic and abusive encounter design based around ranged enemies shooting you through melee ones that From Soft seems so very fond of. Nioh showed me what the Souls series is missing, and BoD reminded me that sometimes less really is more.
  Seeing that ER is just more of the same has really sapped my motivation to play, and I haven't gotten very far in it as a result. I'll probably finish it someday, but I'm definitely not going into the NG+ cycle and PvP for hundreds of hours like I used to do with previous Souls games.
  as for Fromsoft just doing the same thing over and over - Armored Core VI coming out next week, and that’s quite different. :D
  Ah yes, the sixth game in a series. More than halfway to double digits. Such innovation. ;D

When I finally played Red Dead Redemption 2. I usually don’t play this type of big budget game, but my friends loved it and kept talking it up. I waited for years for a steam sale until it was finally about $20. Also, I loved outlaws (1997) and was pretty keen for another cowboy game.
An hour of listening to guys walk through the snow and I was out.
- I finished the prologue because I was told the prologue is slow. But the whole game is slow. I think people just get used to it. But I couldn't. It's too slow. I was chasing a bear and I was so bored that I put it down and never touched it again.
- People complain about slow games?? I love that in not just rushing from A to B and to do stuff in the open world
- This resonated with me. The prolog is so long I didn't finish either. I also tried Red Dead Online which was quicker to getting to the action, but just didn't take with me.

Mirror´s Edge. 9/10 on Steam. I bought it during the last sales. The gameplay is playing again and again and again the difficult jumps until you make it. It's boring.
- I recently replayed that game after 10+ years. I think I could count the number of difficult jumps that required more than two attempts on one hand. The game is like $1-2 on a sale and you can beat it in 3 or 4 hours. I thought it was fun, but I could see how it would be disappointing if your expectations were higher than minimal.
  Mirror's Edge: Catalyst was much better IMO. Actual story. Decent characters. Free roam. Side quests.
- ME has some cool first few levels, and then it barely evolves from that.
  
  Yeah initially it felt really cool, but got old really fast. It just felt like doing the same thing over and over again.
- I agree, ME wasn’t for me either.

The Elder Scrolls IV - Oblivion is probably my best answer. Remains the only modern Elder Scrolls that I've only played through once with no desire to return to. Feels clunky and sluggish, the world is washed out and bland, the enemy scaling is a slog, itemization is not interesting or impactful, the UI is uncomfortable, etc. While it does a lot of things better than Skyrim, I just can't bring myself to enjoy the experience like I did Morrowind, and I admit I've sunk far more hours into Skyrim as well.
- This one is wild to me. Oblivion very well be my favorite game of all time. I love the world it is set in so much. Skyrim is actually my answer for this question because I was expecting the game to to be as good as Oblivion.
  
  Yeah, I realize it's an insanely unpopular opinion. Oblivion, on paper, is an objectively better RPG that is truer to the Elder Scrolls formula than Skyrim, but I just don't know, man. I've always had great difficulty liking it and tend to come up with nothing but gripes. I will give it another honest shot if this remake I've heard wind of ever comes to fruition. I owe it that much.
  
  I was going to say the same thing. I've still only played Skyrim once, but I've played through oblivion at least a few times. I played through Morrowind even more, but oblivion surpasses Skyrim without question for me.
- You ain't the only one. To this day, it's the only proper Elder Scrolls game I have not completed. I've even beaten Arena.

For me it's The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. After Breath of the Wild I was super hyped for a successor. When they announced they were gonna reuse the same exact game world I was a bit worried but thought it could work if they do it well.
Well here we are with like 90% of the content being reused. The gameplay is more interesting than Breath of the Wild and the dungeons are better and so is the story. But my main draw for Breath of the Wild was exploring the world. All this fun is missing in TOTK. The new parts of the world like the sky and underground are pretty bland and not quite as much fun to explore as an entirely new game world would be.
- I really wonder what it is about TotK that makes for such wildly different opinions. Everything about TotK was a vast improvement over BotW for me. Up to and especially including revisiting the same locations to see how they’ve changed and exploring all 3 levels of the map to their fullest extent. I stopped playing BotW the moment I beat it after 90 hours of play time. But I’ve continued to return to TotK nearly 300 hours in now, after beating it in about the same 90 hours originally. It’s just endlessly interesting wandering and getting sidetracked and finding / figuring out side quests.
  I have a couple friends who beat it for the sake of beating the next Zelda game but the majority of my small circle continues to play, some even putting off beating it just to explore more. It’s very interesting seeing such different approaches, hearing what people focused on and how they tackled the openness. I’m not sure I witnessed the same phenomenon with games like Skyrim. Something about this one feels different at least. Hard to describe.
  
  I think what confuses me most is that the majority of posts knocking TotK say things like "it's exactly the same as BotW" or say it's using the "exact same map".
  Having poured over 100 hours into each I just don't understand this take. It's objectively untrue. Yes, the core topical map is largely the same, but the content of it is extremely different. Having put so much time into BotW I've been very surprised at how few things are the same and like you have enjoyed seeing what has changed and where.
  And that is to say nothing of the sky or the depths. The sky is somewhat limited but has such a sense of verticality and focus on flight that BotW didn't have. The depths are gargantuan and chock full of things to explore, including some fun ties to the upper world if you can find them.
  I've also found the enemies to be more varied, and more difficult to defeat across the board. This has been a fun challenge for me as well.
  So yeah. I don't know. It's just a much, much larger game. If people simply don't like it, or played BotW too recently for the core mechanics to feel fresh, then I kinda get it. Similarly if you are more into discovering more and more map and don't care what's in the map, then I can see how it could be a bit boring also. And overall maybe the open world style just isn't for you. Fair.
  But I don't understand the criticisms I see most often about limited new content vs BotW because that is just very untrue.
  
  Personally, a lot of the "content" in totk feels like busywork for me. With botw I didn't know that to expect so I was willing to explore. But now, I know there's only so many things I can find - a shrine or a korok seed. Totk just adds more of those tiny rewards (like bubblefrogs) and it just doesn't feel worth it. At best, you sometimes get an armor piece but I barely even used any of those. There was one interesting side quest I found on the great plateau and I kept wondering what I would find, and it was just a heart container.
  If any of the exploration lead to something other than a marginal reward, I think I'd enjoy my time a lot more. Maybe it's just because I played outer wilds between the games, and find story to be a much more interesting thing to find than an item.
- Lmao, thank you. I said this yesterday and had people screaming at me. It's a glorified standalone expansion. I thought the game was really good overall, but the fact that it was so similar to BotW really detracted from how good it was. If BotW didn't exist and it was only TotK, it would have easily been a 9.5/10. But the fact that I had literally just played BotW made it feel more like a 6/10.
- While I am currently enjoying the hell out of this game, I don't know why it took 6(?) years for this to come out. The sky stuff isnt that expansive, the depths are pretty basic, and the main world isn't changed all that much.
  After about 50 hours I realized that I was only going to play this game once, so I better try and get the most out of it.

The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. It was so tedious to get through the opening area that by the time I got to the first dungeon I was getting tired of it. It did get better after that dungeon and the game opened up a lot more, but it one of my least favorite Zelda games.
- I had forgotten how long the twilight princess opening is until I read your comment. I've played pretty much every Zelda game there is and tp is my favorite of all the 3D games, but man can that first part of the game be slow.
  
  I'm playing Skyward Sword and the beginning also felt quite long. I just finished the first dungeon, which is way better than anything Breath of the Wild offered, so I'll forgive the initial slow pacing.

Planet Zoo.
As a kid who grew up playing Zoo Tycoon, I was STOKED for a new Zoo management game. I even built a whole new computer to run it.
Turns out it's more of a 3-D modeling program than a management/simulation game. And I don't have the time or patience to figure it out.
- This is the one for me as well. I spent hundreds of hours as a kid playing zoo tycoon and was very hyped for Planet Zoo. I still can't quite place what makes it so unfun but it was pretty heart breaking.
  
  Every. single. action. is. so. tedious. The second I tried to place my first path and build an enclosure, I knew I was in over my head.
  I understand the finicky controls are what allow people to build incredible, elaborate structures. But I don't want to spend 12 hours designing a crystal monkey enclosure.

there's one i'm currently under nda for that's still in testing and man. idk. hoping the next test flight feels better. theoretically close to release atm. sorry for vagueposting.
- Not to be that guy, but I'm not sure if even this post is breaking NDA on its own. Still, hopefully you can salvage the project, even with a day-one patch
  
  to be that guy, i don't actually care. i'm not exactly getting paid and they'd be hard pressed to nail me down without talking about test timings, or the title.
- Can you confirm or deny this game rhymes with Bar Shield?
  
  i can in fact deny that one. would be neat tho, bethesda's only dropped one game in the last decade plus that i was wholly uninterested in (76).
  
  Ah, yes! The very hyped new Garfield game! I can't wait to eat virtual lasagna and complain about Mondays.
- I hope it's not Nightingale. I know there are closed betas running right now.
  
  if it were nightingale the last dev update suggests that things i would probably have submitted a ticket about are being addressed in future playtests.
  however it also suggests that we're a ways off of even an early access release.

Diablo 4
Really loved the first cinematic and enjoyed the Beta. But I'm already bored after reaching lv 30. Haven't played it in weeks. I don't know, the MMO aspect kinda ruined the expirience for me and the combat isn't fun enought to keep me engaged.

Horizon Zero Dawn
I thought this would be right up my alley but I really did not like the protagonist and the fighting and exploring seemed kind of boring.
The Last of Us
This game gets praised all the time but it felt too limited and 'on rails' whilst the gunplay and stealth was not for me.
- Horizon is my answer too. I was expecting an open world that felt alive, but instead it was a jam-packed theme park. You don't hunt, you go to the right exhibit and kill everything within it. The entire herd is within a 50 meter radius, go nuts. Go away and come back later and it'll be full again, exactly where it says so on the map, jammed between other points of interest with extensive, contrived looking plarforming challenges connecting it all. It's like a zoo and a vending machine had a baby but we're supposed believe it's a big open natural world. Great concept, garbage execution. I felt like Bobby Hill hunting at La Grunta.
  
  Lol, I enjoyed the game overall but that really is a perfect description of it's biggest problem. It could have been so much more if they had been willing to take a risk and make it a little less game-y.
- HZD has genuinely some of the best storytelling and worldbuilding in gaming, but the kicker is that you have to play about half the game to get to it and it's all told in flashback because the actual interesting stuff is what happened to get to this point rather than what's happening now.
  If blasting bits off knockoff Zoids isn't doing it for you, then you're going to run out of steam before getting to it.
  
  100% this. I almost dropped it because it took half of the main quest line to do anything interesting. But once I got there I was enamored. My friend and I just played through the game for the first time and we both had the same opinion: the story of what is currently happening is boring. The story of what happened in the past to get to this point is amazing. They did a bad job of making me care about the present day characters.
- The Last of Us is definitely about the story. If you're not invested in that, you're probably not going to enjoy it. There's nothing much in the gameplay that sets it apart from similar games.
- I'm so glad I didn't read about HZD. I got it on sale and saw that it was similar to Assassin's Creed. Being thrown into it without any expectations definitely helped.
  I like the combat (as a person who constantly plays archers). The bows, traps, looting and fighting robot dinos was pretty cool. Figuring out how to take them out and aim at specific weak spots is fun.
  The world is still pretty weird and honestly I would have dropped the game after a few hours too if I didn't like the archery so much. The story as a whole is pretty good after beating it. But the delivery of it all kinda sucks.
- You seem like a mountain dew game fuel and CoD kind of guy.
  
  Mountain Dew sounds good, but I prefer my multiplayer to be local. Online games are a chore.
  I did enjoy the original CoD back in 2003 though.

Elden Ring. I was looking forward to a more mainstream Dark Souls with a story written by GRRM, but it turns out I just don't jive with those games at all, no matter how polished they are.

Hollow Knight. Finally bought this after getting the stream deck. I just remember thinking: This is it? This is what everyone has been raving about? I think I played it two or three times, then completely forgot about it.
- Interesting, hollow knight is maybe my favorite game ever made. It's always interesting to see how differently other people relate to things
- Hollow knight takes a while to get into, the start is slow and difficult
- i thought it was pretty awesome but dying was too costly and i was backtracking to save way too much. i think thats what my beef was, it was only for a few sessions at my brothers place years ago. plays great but exploring felt risky in a tedious way.
  shovel knight... now there's a knight who gets me.
- Whenever I played Hollow Knight I maybe got an hour or two in and just stopped because I didn't know what to do. I wasn't really given directions and I didn't know where to go. I swear I spent an hour just looking for where to go and I fought only a couple enemies in that time.
  I had just finished playing Stardew and Enter the Gungeon, and I was really tired of tabbing out to look something up in the wiki or a forum, so I just wasn't willing to commit to another game without instructions.

Oh, quite a lot over the years, but to pick a few I can readily think of:
Cyberpunk 2077: My one big prepurchase the recent few years. And it turned out to be laughably bad. I mean I was expected it to be fairly buggy, but even given that it far outdid even my worst imaginations. Not only was the game insanely unbelievably buggy on release (and frankly it still is, they only patched the actual breaking issues not the constant barrage of weirdness), but it is just... not very good? It has pleny really good components, but the sauce sticking it together is devoid of any design or soul, leaving it to feel like a can of ravioli with too few actual ravioli in it.
Doesn't help that the main quest was, IMO, bad to the point of caricature. At least the handful of amazing secondary quests more than made up for that one. Still, overall one of my biggest disappointments of my 30 years of video gaming, especially in how underdesigned it is even ignoring all the bugs.
Divinity Original Sin 2, specifically co-op: I don't know. This got hyped so much for that particular feature. Yet while the combat moment-to-moment gameplay is hilarious in co-op, following the actual story - basically why I play these kind of games - felt supremely irritating, more so because of how frequently characters get forced into conversations the other player then has to opt into no matter where they were at the time or what they were doing. In a lot of ways I wish co-op would have been more restrictive, to more readily support co-op story consumption.
But it's also weird, because like I said, combat-wise the co-op is amazing. Still, was quite disappointed overall.
Overwatch 2: Feels like a cheap pick, but wow was this a disappointment. Between the dropped PvE, the frankly insulting replacement they're now rolling out for it and their complete unwillingness to acknowledge the switch to 5v5 in hero reworks and balance changes - and hence how half-arsed the entire balance feels - this makes me long for an OW1 clone that really just freezes OW1's state, as clearly trying to modify it didn't work out.
Ultima IX: I don't know how many here are old enough to remember this. It was so hyped. It looked so gorgeous. It was so amazing to see it all in this 3D. And then when it came out, not only could it at best run at glorious 10FPS on my machine (and I had a beast of a PC for the time), it was also buggy and underdeveloped enough that I figure it might just have been CDPR's inspiration for how they worked on CP2077. Plus, in U9's case, there's the extra insult that the story and dialogue is quite inconsistent with the previous games, which was a real head-scratcher. Just a disappointment all around. A really big one.
The Dig: This is a weird one to remember. Because in a lot of ways, I also would say The Dig is one of the best point&click adventures ever made. But it was so bewildering and disappointing to younger me, I just came off the supremely accessible and clever Fate of Atlantis having played it late, and there was so much hype for The Dig, so naturally I got it. I was so disappointed.
Now to be fair, looking back upon it now I can recognize that a mix of my hype and the way FoA went against a ton of industry standard for the time was priming me for said disappointment. It's a good game in a lot of regards, in particular in selling the actually alien vibe of it. But it also has "logic" that would make Sierra Games proud. At least I didn't have to use a necklace on the moon (IIRC) 😂.

Torment: Tides of Numenera
But I think I’m mostly disappointed in myself for not sticking with it. I joined the kickstarter, followed all the updates and was genuinely excited to explore the world being described.
When it finally came out I only played it for a few hours before losing all interest in it. Too much text and everyone seemed to have their life story to tell. Which is odd, because usually I love text heavy games with tons of lore.
Every so often I tell myself to give it a second chance, but never seem to be able to muster the energy to follow through.

I don't really understand the premise. The point of being patient imo is to avoid the hype.
So I'll just answer the question if disappointment in games generally:
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. It knew it was different, but it still didn't feel like Zelda to me, so it didn't scratch that itch I had. I'm enjoying Skyward Sword much more than BotW, the first dungeon just feels like I'm back in Ocarina of Time, the forest feels like Minish Cap somehow, and the premise reminds me of the original The Legend of Zelda (get the sword and go off on an adventure without knowing where you're headed). BotW is my least favorite Zelda game, mostly because of disappointment. When I heard Tears of the Kingdom was much the same, I didn't bother getting it. Maybe I'll get it eventually, but I have no desire to play it.
Borderlands. I had avoided the game so successfully that I knew nothing about it other than that it was a shooter RPG, but I knew it was popular among friends. I missed the window when it came out, so I figured I'd give it a shot. After about 15 minutes, I realized it was just a looter shooter and noped right out. For some reason, I absolutely hate the genre and was disappointed that's what my friends were so hyped for.
Lords of the Realm III. I loved Lords of the Realm 2 as a kid and played the original at a friend's house and enjoyed that too. So when Lords of the Realm III came out, I naturally wanted it. However, they threw out pretty much everything I liked about the previous games (strategy around county/resource management) and doubled down on everything I didn't like as much (sieges) and it just felt like a worse version of the Total War games. Because of this game, one of my life's goals is to remake Lords of the Realm by preserving the good parts of each game in the series, essentially to make the Lords 3 game I wanted.
So these days, I watch gameplay footage before diving in to a game, because that would've avoided my problems with each of the above. There isn't really a game I'm waiting for, I just have a big wishlist of games that looked interesting at one point that I'll review when I'm looking for a new game to play.
- I thought the same about BotW. Between the lack of story by default (you have to search it out through specific pictures that you damn well be able to know the landscape and match it up) and the sparse music and themes of previous Zelda games. It felt like the SMB2 of Zelda games, you could have titled it something else with a different protagonist and it would have been its own game.
- What's an example of an excellent game?
  
  Here are a few that really surprised me with how good they were (tried to grab different genres from my recently played list):
  Yakuza 0 - imo, the mix of serious story and silly side content worked fantastically
  Ys 1 - one of my favorites of all time; the combat system really made the game feel urgent and it flowed really well; Ys Origin is close and more modern
  Black Mesa - good enough graphics, great pacing (except Interloper, that dragged), high quality gameplay; I didn't expect much from a fan-made recreation
  The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past - dungeons were a ton of fun, and side content was enjoyable as well; I originally played on GBA, and replayed on SNES emulator
  INSIDE - clever puzzles, but the real kicker imo was the feeling at the end
  Slay the Spire - one of the few "rogue likes" that I actually ended up playing through; I finished a run with each main character at least once, and I enjoyed it thoroughly
  GTA IV - my favorite GTA, from the compelling story, interesting MC, and relatively realistic feel of driving, it narrowly beats GTA SA for me; V was a disappointment (hated the story and the characters), III is just too dated (though i enjoyed it at the time), and Vice City didn't feel good to play imo
  And some that are probably less well known:
  Recettear - interesting mix of dungeon diving and store management
  Stacking - you play as Russian stacking dolls, and the game doesn't overstay its welcome
  Abzû - super relaxing, and the story was surprisingly emotionally impactful

Assassin’s Creed III. I know it’s considered one of the weakest entries in the series, but I absolutely love the time period it’s set in. That alone had me excited. Decided to finally give it a try recently and quickly found out that all the criticisms are valid. It’s not very fun, the story is extremely bland, there are multiple glitches throughout, and the modern day sections are just the absolute worst. I don’t ever expect much when it comes to the AC series (especially the titles from that time) and can usually find something enjoyable in them. Not the case with III.

Outer Wilds. I just don't understand why everyone loves it so much. I thought it was boring.
- There's moments in the game that really hit. Just a amazing wow experience. Its been a few years and your comment still makes me think about it.
  And if they didn't, totally understandable.
- How far did you get?
  
  I played a few hours. I thought the idea and the art design was cool. It just didn't wow me. I do plan on giving it another try though.
- Same. I think it's okay. I'll give it another try eventually but nothing has really hooked me yet.

Cyberpunk 2077. I waited a year for the bugs to be sorted out, got it for half price, and it was just a very blah game. The Ascent is a way better game both in terms of being cyberpunk-y and also just being a fun game.

Supreme Commander 2. Threw out all the things I respected from the first game and swapped in a bunch of trendy bullshit that I did not. A crushing disappointment.
- Now that's a name I haven't heard in a while. What came of the series anyway?
  
  It ended? Planetary Annihilation came out, but I didn't care for it.

Yeah, unfortunately:
Horizon Forbidden West
God Of War Ragnorak
I was extremely excited for it on PS5, however when playing them - I felt bored after a few hours. Quit playing and never went back.
Don’t know whether it was just overhyped for me or just not my type of game anymore.
- I wasn’t the biggest fan of GoW 2018 when I played it on PC. The combat is quite bad, especially compared to the PS2 titles. Not sure why they thought it was a great idea to give the game third person shooter controls and place the camera right behind Kratos’ ass so you don’t see a damn thing.
  Lost count of the number of times I’ve been hit by insta kill projectiles I couldn’t see because Kratos is blocking the entire view. It felt like I was fighting the camera controls more than the actual enemies.
  
  Weird. I suck at games and didn't die very often in GoW 2018. I do play on easy, but oh well.
  Also, definitely far from the worst-camera game for me. I do recall a few moments, but nothing that stuck with me.
  Maybe it's the PC version that sucked bad? I had the PS4 version.
- As someone who just played horizon zero dawn and wound up loving it, what was your issue with Forbidden West?
  I know at the beginning of Zero Dawn I wasn't really digging the story, and it unfortunately took a while to get better, but when it did it was really good. I was glad the mechanics were enjoyable for me or else I wouldn't have stuck around long enough
  
  The biggest issues have already been mentioned by others but I'd just like to add - there's a lot more climbing in Forbidden West, but the mechanics feel a lot worse (to me anyway). I found the climbing in HZD boring but serviceable; in HFW it just feels awful, Aloy never does what I want her to do and I regularly plunge to my doom for unknown reasons. Also the pullcaster (basically a grappling hook) is super clunky to use and adds essentially nothing gameplay-wise, just some random superfluous interaction points. It feels like there might have been some cut content there.
  I enjoyed Zero Dawn quite a bit - the hunting and fighting mechanics in particular - but Forbidden West is kind of a sidegrade at best. It just feels like a sequel for the sake of a sequel.
  
  Forbidden West's story is a bland and predictable after coming from Zero Dawn. It feels cheap. They introduce tge bad guy early on, and while the characters are all trying to figure it out, it's really obvious to the player.
  There's a lot more interaction with Aloy's friends, which is fine on its own, but they also brought in the main hub trope, where all your friends gather at the base and you keep going back home after every mission. It makes the game feel a lot more like a level-based game than a real open world game.
  Where ZD would have you go from A to B to C to D, FW makes you go A-B-A-C-A-D-A.
  There are some other criticisms, but these are the ones that bothered me. That's not to say it was a bad game, but I don't have any desire to go back and play it again like I did with HZD.
  
  The issues I had with Horizon Zero Dawn continued in Forbidden West unfortunately.
  Characters continues to stay quite dull
  Side missions not very fun
  Open world that’s quite empty besides some beasts here and there
  It’s quite much: Go to A, B, C then go back to A. You’re finally at A, go to Y! Which felt quite a drag and a waste of time (for me).
  The only thing that I loved were the graphics and that was it sadly.
  I really liked Zero Dawn because it was new and the story still had to be unfolded but after that magic is gone, it’s for me – just another open-world game.

Dead Cells. I played for ~60 hours, but could not get the final boss down. It's a tiny stage with a huge boss that has very quick combos that can 2 shot you. I tried a dozen times to figure him out in the training area (where you can practice boss fights) and I still couldn't get it. It's probably me though, my reflexes aren't quite what they used to be.
- Honestly my biggest problem with Dead Cells is that in Boss Cells 0 (BC for short) the game feels fun and fast but once you go to 2 and above it really feels like a slog to play for me.
  Call it a skill issue but I have more fun on lower BC/difficulties than on the higher ones

(don't hurt me)
So far it's been Baldurs Gate 3. I've found it clunky to play and it doesn't run well on my machine despite far surpassing the recommended hardware.
I'm definitely going to do some trouble shooting and give it a much more in depth try, but it's way easier to just play another game than figure out why this one is broken lol.

Yoshi’s Island for SNES is a game I have picked up multiple times but never really finished. It has some of the most beautiful visuals in any SNES game and the music is equally iconic. I always fall in love with it when playing the first levels, but somehow I always grow tired of it about halfway through.
I think the levels are overly long, and the collectathon aspect becomes annoying. It turns more into a chore than an enjoyment. It’s frustrating, because it’s a game I really want to love throughout.
- Huh, same here! I have it on GBA and have been periodically playing it since I was a kid, but I've never actually been more than 2/3 or so in. I was never able to put my finger on why - it seems like an amazing game with its charming aesthetic, good controls, it does a lot of things well - but now that you say it I think you're right, the level design and emphasis on checking every nook and cranny really does make it kind of a slog. I just booted up my last save and played a bit of the next level, and the amount of backtracking, secret side areas, and mini puzzles is kinda overwhelming.
- I can't stand baby Mario.

For me it was TLOU pt 1. I was so excited for it to come to PC, but it ended up being completely unplayable, and I wasn't really a huge fan of the third-person cover-shooter gameplay. I played about 3 hours (and 4 hours of waiting on the menu) during the first week, and haven't touched it since.

Yes, but also no.
I didn't play the Halo franchise until late 2015-early 2016, but I thought 3 and ODST were disappointing, and I stopped one mission into Reach. These days, Reach and 3 are my two favorite Halo games and ODST gets an honorable mention for its campaign. So what changed? In retrospect, it's because they were running on a 360 with an ass framerate, ass resolution, and ass FOV with a weird crosshair that made me subconsciously raise my head and controller-based controls that I was bad at. They were uncomfortable for me to play on the hardware I had to run them on, and as soon as I had them with all that QOL improved, the experience was completely different.
This experience, along with plenty others, has shown me that it's often not the game itself and could be several other factors, from the port and the platform to my expectations and my attitude. So while I've had a bunch of "disappointing" patient experiences, a good amount of them stopped being disappointing when I gave them another shot

There’s so many but the I think the biggest disappointment award has to go to Death Stranding.
A brand new by the creator of Metal Gear without the shackles of a publisher looking over his shoulder, it had the makings of an epic game.
What did we get? Amazon Prime simulator with such a convoluted and nonsensical story it barely makes sense.
- Implying that metal gears story makes sense lol
- Completely opposite reaction for me. One of the best games I've ever played.
- All of his games have this convoluted story that is supposed to be wacky af. Could it be better, yes? But you can’t really say it wasn’t expected.
  Also saying that Death Stranding is Prime simulator is reductive af. I’m not even in the camp that the game is amazing. Heck I don’t even know if it’s good. However I do know that it’s interesting af and I’ll definitely recommend it to people. It’s such a different “game” that more people should experience at least to see if it resonates with them.
  I’m very happy that I played it.
  Plus that sound track alone is worth it for some moments in the game. Literal chills.
  
  I gave it around 8 hours before I decided I was done being bored.
  It really is a Marmite game isn’t it?
- I had them same thing at the start however 2nd time was a complete change.
  Played bit different though. Played on PC with a Trainer and made it entirely easy for myself. Strictly played for the story and the gorgeousness of the mountains, snow and the whole chaotic mess that unleashes eventually.
  Really glad I did because it was a great experience and can’t wait for the sequel. Will do the same thing.
  After all gaming should be for enjoyment!
  
  Same experience! Dropped it the first time. Too slow paced. And I was trying to min-max, play on medium, read a bunch of walkthroughs and then gave up.
  Decided to go all in during the Directors Cut. Turned it on easy so I was one hitting everythhing, ignored all the walkthroughs and just absorb myself into the world.
  And it's great! Who would have thought that in a game where you fight ghost babies, and bring supplies to random famous-y people, my favorite thing would be to build a interstate highway?
  Easily 100+ hours and it's a "I totally understand if you don't like it" game.
- I loved being a post apocalyptic mailman, looking forward to ds2!

Overwatxh 2.

Not sure if this counts, but Path of Exile once in awhile. They release new content patches every 3 months and introduce new league mechanic. Some leagues are great, others are less so. It's probably the only game ever played and continue to play on release.

Final Fantasy XVI :/ combat was fun but the RPG elements were pretty bad tbh
- I've been a huge fan of the series for over 30 years at this point. I just wish the last twenty years were as good at the first ten.
  I waited to buy every entry after FF10, and everytime (with the exception of XIV 2.0) I've been disappointed.
  I really feel let down by XVI. None of the trailers made me excited, everytime they showed the gameplay I was betrayed, and when I played the demo I was bored.
  All of the post-release feedback was so positive though, so I ended up buying it 2 weeks after it came out.
  I still haven't finished my, despite having it for almost 6 weeks. It's just so bad. I was able to push myself through XV and I actually enjoyed the XIII trilogy, but this just feels like some Final Fantasy flavored (barely), easy to the point of inducing sleep, action game.

Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit (2010?). Cars felt right due to Criterion working on them to make them like in Burnout, but their Autolog service, plentiful cutscenes, menu, performance issues and a lot of boring lonely sprints on time killed it for me. I loved to drive in free mode, but avoided races like fire.
GTA IV, but it was on me, maybe. They totally shifted the tone of the game, changed so much I felt like I play a different series. While I came to like it more, the first time it just didn't work for me.
TellTale's The Walking Dead after S1. It's either them losing their juice or me and my friends starting to understand the formula and how low stakes it actually is.
- GTA IV is weird compared to the others GTA (it misses the big booms and the big vehicles that are present in the other titles of the series) but it's a good game taken on his own.
  
  It was made in the era of gritty reboots and dark games which made them use the colour grey way too much. The worst offender of this is probably Shadow the Hedgehog, which went so "realistic" that it became comedic.
- I only played S2 after S1 of walking dead.
  I remember the best moment of S2 was a flashback to S1. It was just a simple dialogue dialogue between Lee and Clementine, but just that was way more impactful than any other moment in S2. It was a very human moment. That was when I realized how much better written S1 was.
  Some of the writers of S1 left telltale to make Firewatch, so that probably explains why S2 and the other seasons didn’t live up to S1.
- I haven't liked a Need for Speed game since the original Most Wanted (and that was the first one since Porsche Unleashed.) I've played a few since and some were okay, but none of them have grabbed me the way the old NFS games did. I spent more time playing any of the first five NFS games individually than I have playing all of them in total since MW.

Original deus ex. Yeah I'm sure the story is very good. But gameplay is just not enjoyable to me no matter how many times I try. Combat is annoying unless you put all skill points to X gun skill, then it is boring. In stealth I have no feel how visible I am and gep gun is annoying to use.
I have tried to enjoy it at least 5 times since I like the new ones but at this point I give up. And yeah I tried with mods and shit.

The Saints Row reboot from a few years ago. I loved the first four games, figured I'd love this. It's a game made for 2010 sold in the 20s. A mile wide and an inch deep.
- That was last year yo.

Wasteland 2 i thought i'm getting a Fallout 2 but better, but instead it didn't grab my attention at all, have to quit early in the game but still passed the refund period. I tried to get into it again and again but still doesn't work.
Grim Dawn This one being called a "better Diablo" and i was expecting something that will grab my attention, but really it's kinda boring and uninspiring. I think it's much more similar to Torchlight than Diablo, which i also couldn't get into.
Space Pirate and Zombie 2 it's very different than SPAZ1 and i don't quite like the transition, couldn't get into it.
Dont Starve i'm not sure why i couldn't get into this one, i like survival crafting stuff but my soul is rejecting this one.
Spec Ops: The Line Everyone want you to play this one for the story, but dang the whole game is just so boring. I have to force myself to finish it, story is okay i guess.
- Oh man I thought I was alone with Grim Dawn! It was pretty boring.
  I didn't understand Don't Starve for years. Its constantly rated high for a great co-op experience, so I forced myself to understand it. A few hours in, I get the appeal of why some like it.
  As a crafting survival though... It doesn't feel like you're building anything of real value, and so you're clearly crafting things in a particular linear order to solve the next puzzle.
  
  I think i might try it some other time, i bought it just after i finished subnautica so my expectation just isn't in the right place.
- I really liked Spec ops the line's story, but it doesn't hook you I can see it being boring.
- I haven't played Wasteland 2, but I quite enjoyed Wasteland 3. I've played it through a couple of times. Might be worth giving it a go?

I actually had the opposite experience with Limbo/Inside. With Limbo I felt the puzzles seemed unfair - I died a lot to things I couldn't see. I quit the game not too far in and haven't picked it up again.
But I played Inside and absolutely loved it, it's one of my favorite games now. So idk maybe I should give Limbo a shot again.

Donkey Kong 64. As a kid I loved Rare games and couldn’t wait to play DK64. I was so excited that every time the magazines dropped on the mat at home I would immediately search for any news on the game.
When i finally got my hands on the game I was disappointed within a few hours of playing. The constant retreading with different characters made the game feel more like a chore than a fun platformer. It was probably the first game where I felt so disappointed especially since I bought it with my own money. I think I stopped buying Rare games afterwards. I didn’t even buy Perfect Dark.
- I can't believe I completed the game, like fully completed to 105% or whatever it was as a kid. How?!
  There is an awesome ROM patch that gives you the ability to swap Kongs on the fly by pressing left and right on the d-pad. It makes the game significantly better to play: https://www.romhacking.net/hacks/4961/
- If Rare didn't insanely exaggerate the collectathon thing before DK64, it's definitely the game that completely fucking jumped the shark. It has as many kinds of collectables as other games has collectables in total. The Banjo games on 64 are good, but they pushed it a bit far, too.
  Fun fact: DK64 is broken and was published that way. It contains a memory leak they couldn't get rid of in time, which'll eventually cause the game to crash. It requires the RAM expansion doohickey - not because it's an engine requirement or for textures, like Majora's Mask, but to stall the inevitable crash.
  
  Apparently that glitch story isn't true and they were already using the expansion pack during development. This video goes through all the difficulties the developers had while working on it.

Ark. I have shitty rural internet so no online multiplayer for me. When I heard they were coming out with a single player I was SO excited. I could RIDE DINOSAURS. I could live on dinosaur island with my dinosaur friends!
Turns out it was less dinosaur island and more dying of dehydration and getting my dinosaur friends killed in new and exciting ways. Rest in peace, Tuber, Izzy and No Name, you will be missed.
- Ah, seconding ark. I wanted a couple weeks after my friends jumped aboard the hype train, which lasted only a short couple weeks. A few years later and it's free on EGS, a friend of mine owns a steam copy, and we cannot for our lives manage to connect a private game server between the two platforms. Basically first and one of the very few games I've ever refunded on steam, and not even worth playing for free from EGS.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution...Man when I saw that first teaser trailer I had tears in my eyes. Another game in my all time favorite series so many years later? AND it's a prequel?!?!
But I was pretty dissapointed. I felt the game was pretty watered down vs Deus Ex, which was also a complaint about DE2 (apart from the console favoring nature of it). The prequel aspect was also pretty dissapointing. A couple characters in the game, Gunther Hermann and Anna Navarre, were extremely noticeably mechanically augmented individuals who looked more like mechanical abominations than flesh and blood human beings. Yet in Deus Ex: Human Revolutions you did not become more machine looking as you gained augmentations. You have your limbs put in place at the beginning and that's the change, a very sleek and stylish augment. I expected to see a more grounded take from the high tech in Deus Ex, but instead was met with an entirely different universe like Deus Ex: Human Revolution was the first of its kind. Deus Ex is still and always will be my most favorite game of all time. I really hope something miraculous happens and the original game is done justice, but as long as Square Enix holds the title I highly doubt they will give the universe enough time, care and love that the original got (as a passion project).

Halo. I picked up the collection in the summer steam sale for $10 and it was just ... boring. I guess that's to be expected for a 20+ year old game, the genre has innovated and improved a lot since then.
- I felt this a bit too. I never played it back in the day so I was playing it fresh as each game released as part of the PC master collection. Playing Halo 1 without nostalgia googles is rough as that campaign has not aged well. It’s starts decent but then reusing the same levels made the second half a mediocre slog.
  
  Yep, same here. I found it really strange when the running was much slower than other games too
- Halo is one of my favorite games of all time, and I played the shit out of the first one when it came out. It was absolutely game changing for console shooters. Before that, I hada SNES (skipped N64 era). It absolutely blew my mind.
  Unfortunately, I don't think it really held up. If you played it back then, the nostalgia still hits hard and that's fun. But if you play it for the first time now, it just won't hit the same, unfortunately.
  
  Having just played through the MCC recently the first halo is a bit dated, but 2 and 3 are some great campaigns. Reach and odst have decent stories, but the campaign is more average. The biggest surprise to me was how much worse 4 is than I remember. I knew it was disappointing, but playing it back to back with the others really makes it obvious.
  I had played all the games before though.
- I agree with you. I bought the entire Halo collection on sale. Played it for a while but it got extremely boring after a while. Haven't I cleared this room before? Guess not. Let's see where this leads... oh, another room just like the others. Screw this, I'll spend my time on Half-Life 2 instead.
  Also, finally got Quake 4 (free on Amazon Prime Gaming) and it feels a lot like Halo. I prefer the newly launched Quake 2, thank you very much.

In the most recent history, No Man's Sky. I know it's gotten better over the years, but that initial blandness was rough. Other than that in three days a spiritual successor to jet set radio comes out (bomb rush cyberfunk) and I just have a sneaking suspicion that it's going to let me down. The devs have been so quiet for so long about it... And in three days I get to learn the truth.
- I keep forgetting how lucky I was to get into NMS late. Not that I've put too many hours into it, but it didn't suck when I started playing it. Which is nice.
- So did you play BRC? I finally did and I freaking loved it
  
  I enjoyed most of it. There are a few minor things that I really disliked, which only got worse later in the game.
  The main issues being story and police encounters. The story is definitely a 'point a to point b' tale. I order to get his head back, red must go all city. Yes, the story does take some turns along the way, but it feels too aggressive. Compared with the seemingly lighthearted jsr 'hey man, they started it' style of territory take overs followed by the absolutely overblown police response was sadly missed. I feel like the tiers of police heat were out of tune a bit, especially late game. Tier one being armed cops was jarring. The 'one graffiti per heat' rank also felt bad, especially late game when they intentionally made the 'escape options' very rare. It's weird to write that and mean it when I distinctly remember dying repeatedly in jsr, and only died once or twice throughout the entire story of brc.
  Other than those fairly minor nitpicks, everything else was very much on point.

Master of Orion 3 Played 1 and 2 all the time as a kid with my brother and my father. We were SO hyped that there was going to be a MOO3 and we bought it blind because that's what you did back then. We were in for a massive disappointment. They had some good intentions to reduce Mikromanagement but we never understood how to really play it. We tried it again after a while but came to the same conclusion

SOCOM IV
Waited for a long time for that one and unfortunately they couldn't resist COD-ifying it. It's a shame because they had some cool things in it, loved the bomb defuser escort game mode.

Resident Evil 3 Remake.
I knew the new Nemesis was crap but I wasn't ready for how dull the rest of the game is as well.
- Resident Evil 2 Remake as well.
  Doing away with the fixed camera really kills the vibe of the game. Just being able to hear by not see an enemy has so much suspence.
  Gaining lore from the background objects. Another product of the time but walking up to something and interacting to get an indebth text read out on what you are looking at was great in the original but was absent in the remake.
  It was great that the Tyrant was able to move around more than the original but it's extreamly limited and once you figure out the mechanics you realize that he is just teleworking around close to you, it becomes more of a chore than a threat.
  I was really hoping for a good remake Ala the first Resident Evil Remake.
  
  I disagree, I thought RE2R was fantastic although I still prefer RE7.
  Those games were the entire reason I went into RE3 with high expectations.
  I've never played the original though, that might be why I liked it so much.

Final Fantasy 7 Remake. My god, what a disaster over the original.
I can't bring myself to continue it even though (I think?) I'm half way through the game, because while the Sector 5 reactor in the original is, by good game design standards, just a replica of the Sector 7 reactor with less going on - since you've already done the same thing earlier on, in Remake they decided to make it an enormous labyrinth that you can't find your way out of, just because. I guess they needed to extend the playtime.
That's just one of many, many things wrong with the game despite an amazing original, but it's the spot that completely prevents me from loading it up again to continue on. I went and started a new game in the original instead, just to be sure it wasn't the nostalgia glasses talking. It wasn't.
But I guess it looks really pretty.

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