While the games on our list might have turned out pretty well on the whole, we've selected the titles that had the highest expectations on them to begin with. We're talking about epic development cycles, big franchises and ravenous fans. So - even if they scored well, we were disappointed these games didn't quite achieve all they could.
Which games made our list of shame? And what about the runners-up who didn't quite make the cut? Read on!
10. Sonic the Hedgehog 4: Episode I
After years of waiting for a true sequel in line with Sonics 1 to 3, fans collectively nerdgasmed over the purported return to the series' pure 2D roots. No silly side-quests, no lame characters – no awful voice acting, even – just the purity of high speed racing, jumping and ring collecting. How could it go wrong?
To be fair, Sonic 4 was completely playable – and it never went wrong, per se – but it also wasn't the perfect, shining example of how to do the 2D modern Sonic game that fans were expecting. Being merely very good isn't enough for a character like this; even saying 'this is the best Sonic game in years' doesn't have the kind of weight to it that it probably should. The controls and perspective, short length and limited replayability both held Sonic 4 back in our eyes.
9. PlayStation Move
Sony isn't exactly new to alternative gaming interfaces – EyeToy has been around for years, the Sixaxis controller took a couple tentative steps into the Wii's court, and now PlayStation Move takes another significant stride towards a motion-controlled future. The tech works very well, blending the EyeToy's personal, full-body and voice activated interactivity with the accuracy of Wii MotionPlus.
However, we're disappointed with the overall experience so far. No game – compatible or specifically designed for Move – has convincingly shown the platform to be anything more than a me-too answer to Wii's motion control. There is no killer app yet, nor will there be until 2011. Given that it's the games that ultimately decide the success of the peripheral, Move is still unproven and a bit disappointing in our books.
8. Lost Planet 2
There was a lot to like about the original Lost Planet – pace, verticality and an emphasis on pure-action gunplay that succeeded far more than it failed. As such, after a couple of years of teasing us with tempting snippets of co-op gameplay and revamped presentation, Lost Planet 2 was high on our most-wanted list games. Capcom fumbled this ball.
Not only did Lost Planet 2 fail to deliver the initially promising gameplay premise, it actually took a backwards step in several respects. The gameplay itself was hampered by an overly complex control scheme, the game's difficulty proved badly balanced and the online functionality was severely flawed by poor and short-sighted design choices.
7. Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days
Another sequel that looked to address the sins of the father, Kane & Lynch 2 was immediately visually striking. The handicam grain, disrupted video playback look and hyper-realistic lighting and colour scheme immediately turned heads – to the point where we hoped the team had similarly reworked the gameplay, polishing and tightening along the way.
Sadly, by 'reworked', Kane & Lynch 2 merely tosses together a cover system that never felt reliable along with enemies that took far too many rounds to put down. These grunts also poured out in serious numbers, which killed the realism and upped the repetition. In short, it was a flawed and repetitive shooter that, despite great art direction, never breaks free of being mostly mindless in execution. Once again, all that potential went to waste.
6. Crackdown 2
Hey— if you had nine months to create and deliver a full game, you'd probably look at ways to cut corners too. Crackdown 2 is a sequel of the worst kind, delivering a nearly identical city, barely reworked beyond the colouration, and gameplay that is largely identical to the first game. Why does this game exist? Why?
Short answer is, it really shouldn't – or, at least, not in this form. Sure, adding a mutant infestation might've darkened the tone and upped the bloodletting, but the lack of story, structure and identical gameplay made for one of the biggest disappointments of the year. There was nothing fundamentally wrong with the gameplay, but a true sequel to Crackdown deserved more.
5. Microsoft Kinect
Oh, Kinect. You and me – we need to have ourselves a frank little discussion before things go awry. Sure, you're making buckets of dough, and that bottom-line probably justifies the means – but that doesn't mean you're not a massive disappointment. When you were first unveiled, you were a sophisticated and impressive piece of hardware. Almost two years on, you're a sketch of the original idea; a watered down version of the idea we fell for.
Kinect's games and responsiveness have a lot to answer for here. The launch titles are fairly lacklustre, with a couple exceptions, and the lack of a longer-term line-up of more in-depth titles definitely hurts. The hardware itself has a lot of untapped potential, but the removal of a dedicated processor means that finer motor movements in the body aren't detectable and that really limits what can and cannot be done down the line.
4. Fable III
So here we are again: another Fable game that has failed to live up to the tremendous hype generated by its parent company, compounded by comments from Lionhead CEO Peter Molyneux that drove expectations into the stratosphere. Such hyperbole has been Molyneux's undoing in the past, and Fable III, while completely playable and even very good in most respects, nevertheless disappointed anyone expecting a fresh or progressive experience.
3. Medal of Honor
If you're going ape the tone and presentation of the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare franchise, at least make sure you emulate what really counts: quality of gameplay too. This year's reboot of the Medal of Honor brand probably deserved a different kind of booting – one that critics and gamers were all too happy to apply.
For starters, initial controversy levelled at depictions of the Taliban suddenly politicized the game, stirring up an ugly media frenzy. In an industry that already struggles with clichéd portrayals of violence, this was a messy situation. Then, after playing Medal of Honor, we were simply left wondering if the bigger travesty was, in fact, the sub-standard gaming fare. Consider Medal of Honor a guide on how not to relaunch a franchise.
2. Gran Turismo 5
Six years and millions upon millions of dollars later, Gran Turismo 5 is finally – finally – on sale. Was it worth the wait? For ardent fans, undoubtedly. For everyone else, however, we really have to wonder if Polyphony Digital understands that it ultimately painted itself into a corner. The expectations placed upon Gran Turismo 5, built off the back of years of waiting, refining, teasing, rethinking, hyping and overselling ultimately took its toll.
IGN scored Gran Turismo a very fitting and great 8.5 – but, like several games on this list, we question if six years of waiting for a less-than-excellent game is really worth it. Are we disappointed? Youbetcha. But would we be willing to wait another year for that extra polish? Heck no. At least it's finally out, right?
1. Final Fantasy XIII
Okay. Final Fantasy XIII is, without question, the biggest gaming disappointment of 2010. Square Enix promised fans so much and under-delivered in every area, apart from utterly gorgeous raw presentation values. It's true – XIII is pure spectacle, but the gameplay is so vanilla, linear and unmoving that we really wonder how the design process made it as far as it did without anyone raising some warning flags.
Being merely 'okay' isn't good enough for the Final Fantasy series. These games have a heritage and pedigree to maintain, and thirteen games in, this instalment indeed proved unlucky. The characters are routinely awful and uninteresting, the storytelling is a jumbled mess that meanders through bland subplot – and then there's the gameplay, which consists of essentially moving in a straight line for the first twenty hours, repeatedly hitting X.
Some have praised this entry for signalling a bold departure for the series; a change of direction and a new flavour. Frankly, if this is how Square Enix views the future direction of its major JRPG releases, we're more than a little irked.
Head over the page for a few dishonourable mentions from other IGN AU Editors!
Sure, 2010 had some truly excellent games – games that likely brought you hours of fun, red eyes and repetitive strain injuries of all kinds. But it also brought disappointment. We're talking about broken dreams, wet eyes and a pang in our hearts that not even the strongest alcohol seems to blot out. Which games made our list of shame? And what about the runners-up who didn't quite make the cut? Read on!
Dishonorable Mentions
Dante's Inferno
Stephen Lambrechts: You're probably wondering why I should ever have cared about Dante's Inferno to begin with. It was very clearly a God of War-clone with uninspired visuals, and possibly the most ridiculous pairing of literary source material to video game genre that there ever will be (that is until my adaptation of Tolstoy's 'War and Peace' as a cover-based shooter gets off the ground).
I'll tell you why Dante's Inferno always managed to keep my interest (at least until I actually played it): Visceral Games. Coming hot off the heels of Dead Space, a game so magnificent, that it practically filled black holes with its awesomeness (that's what she said), Visceral was on top of the world in my eyes. Why the studio chose to make a 3rd person hack'n'slash game based on a 14th century epic poem is anybody's guess, but even worse than that is the level of laziness applied to the actual gameplay.
Absolutely no attempt was made by the developers to make the game stand on its own. God of War had red and green chests full of XP and Heath? We will too! Quick-Time Events? Let's make them identical to Kratos' adventure. Huge bosses and cinematic camera sweeps? Let's throw those in as well. Gratuitous boobs? Well, I'm actually not going to complain about that too much.
Even moving past that, the sheer amount of stupid and illogical decisions made in the game makes me wonder how on earth these are the same guys that made Dead Space such a classic. From the very opening boss battle where for absolutely no reason you have to battle the Grim Reaper in order to steal his Scythe, you just knew you were in for some relentless idiocy. You're thrown into a (ridiculously long and boring) battle with Death even though he's supposed to have the power to instantly kill a person with a single touch, yet you can take a round a hundred hits from his Scythe without losing very much health at all, and then once you do kill him, you take his weapon because… I don't know, I guess it's the only weapon strong enough to take down an army of demons or something. Funny, considering it was barely powerful enough to even scratch you.
Pokemon HeartGold and SoulSilver
Cam Shea: Before kicking off my rant, let me just explicitly state for the record that HeartGold/SoulSilver is a very well-designed game, with plenty of depth, a heap to do and a huge amount of playtime contained within its humble casing. It's a great redux of the GBC Gold/Silver game, and if you've never played a Pokemon game before it comes highly recommended.
But here's the thing, I HAVE played a Pokemon game before. Several, actually, and I just can't do it again. I tried. I really did. I sunk a few hours into HeartGold to try and capture that old Poke-fever again, but the burn is just too slow. Simply put, this experience is so familiar that starting again isn't fun, it's just a soul destroying grind.
I don't want to go into a random battle every two steps in long grass, I don't want to flitter about the world, gradually unlocking new abilities and new areas, and I don't want to have low level Pokemon again. I've done my time, man. Was my 50+ hours in Ruby for nothing? Yes, I know you can transfer Pokemon across from previous games, but even that's a protracted process that feels less like a reward for effort invested and more like some kind of elaborate obsessive compulsive punitive measure. What's that? The Pokewalker? It's a cute idea, sure, and a neat way to level up your roster, to get items, to trade and to find Pokemon, but it's hardly an integral component, and certainly not enough to keep me interested.
I still have a soft spot for Pokemon, but playing this game made me realise that until Nintendo really tries to reinvigorate the series, it can count me out.
Alan Wake
Tristan Ogilvie: Being a big fan of the Max Payne games, my excitement for Remedy's Alan Wake was steadily building over the five years from when it was announced at E3 2005 to when it was finally released in May 2010. Five long years to wait for a game that played as though it should have come out three years ago. That's not to say there wasn't anything to like about Alan Wake – it had a bitching soundtrack, for example (Roy freaking Orbison, people).
But although the much vaunted episodic gimmick was ultimately pretty uninspired in its implementation, and the enemies were essentially the same subset of shadowy villagers throughout, the actual defining moment that I realised that I was truly disappointed in Alan Wake was when a particularly tense sequence in the game was suddenly and quite inappropriately interrupted by a television commercial for a mobile phone.
Hey – remember that scene in Taxi Driver when Bobby De Niro asks "Are you talking to me? Are you talking to ME? Well you would be if you were on Verizon Wireless!"? No? That's because Microsoft aren't in the movie making business.
I've got no major problems with product placement – I personally find that Snickers really does satisfy – and had it been a commercial for No-Doz tablets or something, that would at least have been contextual. Instead it totally disconnected me from the character and game world, and left me feeling angry. I haven't been so disappointed with a Remedy since I tried to cure my athlete's foot with a hacksaw and a bottle of whiskey.