The Top 5 Disappointing Video Games

I can get fairly excited about video games. Sometimes I’m watching an E4 demo or a trailer and suddenly my mind is a whir with all the awesome things that the game is going to do and what a fantastic gaming experience it will be. Sometimes though, when you buy and play the game you realise that it will just join the line of disappointing video games; games that never fulfill their promises or are filled to the brim with bugs or bad choices. Throughout this mire of disappointing video games, there are some which have sunk further than any other. These are my top 5 disappointing video games.

Sims 4

Sims 4 suffered from having to follow its very successful predecessor Sims 3. It also, as a by-product of the franchise, had to release a product that would in no way include anywhere near the sheer level of stuff that Sims 3 had once you had added all the expansions. However, side-stepping that and looking at the two base-games alone, Sims 4 just felt unfinished. It had some fairly cool new stuff like multitasking and emotions, but they didn’t compensate for what we’d lost. No Swimming pools, and a limited amount of content meant that many people just stopped being bothered to play it.

SimCity

SimCity promised to be what Sim City fans had craved for after Sim City 4 (Let’s not count the kindergartenesque SimCity Societies) However when SimCity was finally released it  was released with an anti-piracy method whereby you had to always be online to authenticate your product. This was pretty damn annoying especially as the game was still considered by most to be a single-player game (despite there being social elements in the game). However, what made this worse was the flakiness of the SimCity servers themselves, for the first few days and weeks after SimCity’s release, players found unstable servers and long queue times. When questioned EA were adamant that there was no technological way that the game could have an offline mode. Interestingly enough several months later, an update was released that made the game available offline. Still, it’s a hell of a long time for players to wait, and many didn’t.

No Man’s Sky

The most recent game to join the most disappointing video games list, No Mans Sky arrived on less of a hype-train and more of a 300 foot mecha-godzilla that stampeded its way through the media limelight and grabbed our imaginations and excited us like a Viagra-doped bunny. However, when it did arrive the content we got was pale in comparison to what the players were expecting.

The E3 trailers promised lush and vibrant planets filled with wildlife all co-inhabiting in a procedurally generated random universe. What we got was a hollower version of that, and every so many hours many players realised that the repetition within the game was to boring. Some have even tried to claim their money back via steam, and trade standards are investigating the No Mans Sky adverts.

Without any of the hype that most video gamers believed No Mans Sky would still have been a fairly ok game, it just didn’t tally up with our expectations.

(edit: The game has since been updated with the No Mans Sky Foundation update, and some consider it a game change.