There were some great games released in 2014, but there plenty of stinkers as well. In fact, several of the biggest critical flops had been highly anticipated up until the day they launched, enticing gamers into believing that the new generation had finally arrived. Not all AAA titles are destined for greatness, and the following list is proof of that.
FROM EARLIER: The 10 most wanted games on every console this holiday season
These were the five most disappointing games we played in 2014:
Destiny
The worst offender of all, Destiny had the pedigree, the trailers, the hype — all the makings of a monumental event in the world of gaming. What we got was a shoddily pasted together story and some of the most repetitive missions in the history of first-person shooters.
Bungie is doing its best to course-correct with regular updates and the recently released expansion, The Dark Below, but it’s fair to say that no one got what they thought they were getting with Destiny.
The Crew
Another game that promised the world and came up short, The Crew should never have made it to market in its current state. There are enough bugs in Ubisoft’s open-world driving game to frighten an exterminator, and even the basis of the entire game, the driving, doesn’t feel quite right.
But The Crew didn’t have anywhere near the same expectations as our next game.
Assassin’s Creed Unity
I’ve never had much affection for the Assassin’s Creed series, but Assassin’s Creed Unity is the only entry that has genuinely shocked me. Ubisoft Montreal all but abandoned a storyline that it had been building since 2007, backtracked on several major gameplay additions that had become staples of the series and apparently failed to put Unity through basic quality assurance.
Then there’s the offensive microtransaction system, the lack of refinement and the fact that A BETTER ASSASSIN’S CREED GAME CAME OUT ON THE SAME DAY. That’s right, Assassin’s Creed Rogue on PS3 and Xbox 360, which came out on the same day as Unity, is more worth your time and money than the current-gen exclusive.
The publisher has been extremely apologetic, promising to be more open with fans and to patch as many bugs as quickly as possible, but we can only hope this is the kick in the pants Ubisoft needs to spend more time on Assassin’s Creed in the future.
Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze
I know that most of you won’t agree with me on this one, but as a enormous fan of the Donkey Kong Country series on SNES and its fantastic revival on the Wii U with Donkey Kong Country Returns, I just couldn’t get anything out of Tropical Freeze. All of the ingredients are there, it just didn’t come together like I’d hoped it would.
Ok, you’re now free to explain to me why I’m an idiot in the comments section below.
The Elder Scrolls Online
I don’t even know where to begin. Bethesda outsourced its legendary franchise to an untested internal development studio to make an MMO spanning a world which was once only partially represented in a game that featured 62,394 square miles of terrain.
The Elder Scrolls Online was a disappointment waiting to happen, and by that measure, it was a huge success. There are those who have made peace with the fact that TESO is not a massively-multiplayer version of Skyrim, but for the rest of us, we’ll sit back and wait for The Elder Scrolls VI rather than pay $15 a month for the ZeniMax Online Studios debut.
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Did we miss anything? Were you thrilled by every game on this page and think we totally bungled the list? Let us know in as cordial a manner as you can possibly muster in the comments below.
