One step forward, two steps back
When a franchise hits the scene for the first time or when it establishes a level of quality that’s hard to beat, a lot of the times the successors of these games fall short. Be it from cut development times, layoffs or just plain laziness, some sequels might be so bad that they destroy the series or split their fanbase in two.
Here’s a list of 10 games that didn’t deliver the quality that their predecessors set for them.
10. Dragon Age 2 (2011)
Dragon Age 2 | Launch Trailer
Dragon Age: Origins was a good game. It developed its own system of rules which was like a light version of D&D and it did it well enough. The game had a unique starting location based on the race and class you picked for your main character and the game offered a good amount of choice and consequence and a solid story.
Dragon Age 2 thought that all those things needed removing. All the things that define a good RPG - gone. It went so far that you couldn’t even change the clothes of your companions. That, coupled with a short story, lack of exploration opportunities, not seeing the consequences of your actions and the fact of the game trying to force you into a violent solution above all else, earns Dragon Age 2 a huge thumbs down.
Violence is how the game wants you to solve most of its dilemmas.
Just good graphics do not a great game make.
9. Resident Evil 6 (2012)
Resident Evil 6 Gameplay PC Max Settings HD 1080P Gameplay
While Resident Evil 4 was praised for the fresh direction it took the game in, Resident Evil 6 fell flat on its zombie face without a pulse. And while the AI is actually pretty good, you wont be able to appreciate it as you’ll be cursing through the hundreds of QTE segments that the game throws at you.
It’s clear that Capcom wanted to lure in a bigger audience with this game and so it suffered on all fronts. The game suffers from an identity crisis, because it doesn’t know if its a pulsating action film or a zombie killer game. Ultimately, it fails at both, because it’s neither.
Cinematic after cinematic is not good gameplay.
The game does manage a few good frights, but not enough to make the game actually good.
8. Duke Nukem Forever (2011)
Duke Nukem Forever - Gameplay (PC)
The game that we waited for so many years and the title that went through so many engine changes as a result, was ultimately a primitive adventure that couldn’t capture the essence of the original. Duke Nukem Forever was a game we waited for more than a decade, and it’s gonna take just as long to forget.
The game feels like it took all of the things that made Duke Nukem 3D great, and made stereotypical versions of it and making you play over those stereotypes over and over again.
It was as if the developers thought that what makes this game great is a bunch of guns and primitive, grade-school one-liners. Newsflash: it doesn’t.
The game is actually pretty fun for the first 5 minutes, then it just get’s stale and repetitive.
The game has some downright childish decisions.
7. Deus Ex: Invisible War (2003)
Deus Ex: Invisible War Gameplay [PC HD]
The only quality that somewhat transfered over from the original Deus Ex, was the story which was kinda OK. All the rest of the RPG elements, like having a skill tree or some minor stuff like, oh I don’t know, having an inventory, have been blatantly removed from the game.
What’s left is an average shooter with minimal exploration qualities and an uninteresting world that wouldn’t even be worth exploring even if there was the option to do so.
This is the closest thing you will get that resembles an interface.
You’ll be mostly crawling through apartments in this game.
6.Shadow the Hedgehog (2005)
Shadow the Hedgehog (GC) Story Mode Part 1
One of the reasons that certain sequels bomb the way they do, is because they try to fix the things that aren’t broken. One of the most painful ways they do this is by taking gameplay-focused games and giving them a story and trying to make the game overly serious.
This is what happened to our beloved hedgehog, Sonic. His re-imagining featured a gun toting, motorcycle driving hedgehog with a serious storyline which misses the point of this character so much, that it killed the series for many of its fans.
Making Sonic a serious character with a serious story was one of the worst gaming decisions.
Guns. In a Sonic game. Why, oh why.
5. Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 (2009)
Marvel: Ultimate Alliance 2 Gameplay (PC HD)
While the first game combined a ton of characters, an interesting story that takes place in a ton of varied locations, intense, simple but addictive combat, coupled with a coop mode, the second game actually tried to expand on this formula, except they did it horrifically bad.
This criticism isn’t mostly aimed on the quality of gameplay which was actually good, but on the fact that the game was released exclusively PS2 until the PC version came out really late and was a horrible, unplayable port, at least in multiplayer, which was really fun in the first one. While it might be an awesome game it is put together very badly. Hopefully a future patch might resolve this yet.
The gameplay is actually good and very reminiscent of the first one, but is mired with technical failures.
The game offers a ton of awesome characters, if only it would offer awesome optimization.
4. Splinter Cell: Conviction (2010)
Splinter Cell Conviction Walkthrough Part 1 No Commentary
The Splinter Cell series tried to capture the intensity of Thief-like stealth gameplay, while giving the player (or players in coop) a ton of gadgets to experiment with. There was a lot of ways to take out enemies and solve situations in the previous installments in the series, and stealth gameplay was tougher, but safer and rewarded the player with information from the enemies that they captured and interrogated.
Conviction instead took the exact opposite route and opted for violence and upped the pace of the game dramatically. If non-violence was a viable solution in the previous game, Conviction instead wanted their players to take out all of their enemies like a hitman. This totaly killed the vibe of the franchise and made Conviction an oversimplified stealth shooter.
Conviction made Sam Fisher into a gun-toting psychopath.
The game isn’t much about hiding in the shadows but more about avoiding bullets from cover.
3. Bomberman Act Zero (2006)
Bomberman: Act Zero (X360) - Single Battle (Standard) - Levels 1-50
The original Bomberman was a ton of fun back in the day. Intense gameplay and the joy of trapping your friends into an inescapable corner was endlessly enjoyable. The re-imagining of this series by Act Zero was an abomination.
They made the playable character into some kind of cyber soldier just for the sake of “cool”. The gameplay is likewise atrocious and not nearly as intense and fun as the first one.
The result is a confusing mess of a game with no sense of what it’s trying to be, but it definitely isn’t fun.
Why would you need to zoom in into a bomberman game this much?
Good luck in trying to figure out what’s happening..
2. Turok: Evolution (2002)
Turok Evolution - Gameplay Xbox HD 720P (Xbox to Xbox 360)
In Turok, you are a time-traveling dinosaur hunter. The game was reminiscent of the old Doom games, with epic weapons, violent gameplay and was tough to beat. How can that not be awesome?
Well, it can’t, if you take that formula and give it a story that makes absolutely no sense, awful controls, terrible optimization and one of the worst villains in video game history. For all intents and purposes it should have been called Turok: Devolution.
This actually looks pretty cool if you can get past the awful controls.
The beauty of its game world is unfortunately overshadowed by the game’s shortcomings.
1. Fallout 4 (2016)
Fallout 4 - Walkthrough PART 1 Gameplay No Commentary [1080p]
Fallout is an established franchise. When Bethesda bought the rights to the game in 2007, they took the turn-based awesomeness of the previous games and moved into a FPS perspective in Fallout 3. While this was quite a gripe among old-school fans of the series, it did capture a good post-apocalyptic atmosphere, even if a lot of things in it didn’t make sense, the quests weren’t as good as the originals and the game suffered from a general over-simplification, it was actually a solid game.
When New Vegas came out, it took all of those imperfections and made a sequel worthy of the title. It brought back the awesomeness of the old Fallouts and fixed what was wrong with its predecessor to a fair extent.
And while New Vegas was developed by Obsidian, Fallout 4 was again developed by Bethesda and they did their best to try and prove that they can make a better Fallout than Obsidian, but they fell very short. The only thing that F4 did better, was that it made gunplay more fun and in the end that’s what F4 actually is: a fairly linear, open-world shooter, with some RPG elements. Not a bad game by any standards, but a travesty to the Fallout lore and quality.
These are your dialogue choices in the game (clockwise from left): continue, question, abandon quest, and apathetic remark.
The only real strength that the game bases most of its quality on, is its improved gunplay.
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