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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
