Once again, sorry to disappoint but this ain’t about titties. This is about the games that we expected to be good (or at least decent) in 2019 that severely disappointed. Are these the 6 worst games of 2019? No. But they carried some of the biggest hype and publicity and failed to uphold the industry standard in 2019.
I feel obligated as a gaming blogger to say that I fucking called it for half of this list. One of the first blogs I ever wrote for this site was a preview for the first half of 2019, and I predicted that 3 of the 6 titles on this list would be busts. I also made a ton of horrible predictions and extremely crude jokes so please don’t read that post. I was young. I was stupid. Forgive me.
Here are the nominees for this year’s “Biggest Bust” Award:
Anthem (Bioware/Electronic Arts)
I’ve talked about this numerous times, but the biggest problem with shared-world multiplayer games like Destiny, The Divison, and Sea of Thieves is lack of content upon launch. It blows my fucking brain every time a new title in this genre is released with the same issue. You would think that games like this that are designed for people to play them every day would have loads of content on release day, AND you would think that in the 5+ years that this genre has existed that one of these franchises would have figured that problem out.
But Anthem isn’t just plagued by a lack of day 1 content, the game as a whole just feels unfinished. The world, the story, the pacing; everything is just so bland and shallow. You spend 75% of the game completing repetitive missions where you jump from point-to-point killing generic bullet-sponge enemies that reward you with boring loot. By the time you reach the endgame 30 hours later, you really wonder why you’ve been grinding the game at all. It’s almost like BioWare needed another two years to make actually good missions, and EA said: “nope, we need you to release it in 6 months.” Anthem could have been a return to form for BioWare, but instead, it was another step back for a studio that is running out of chances.
Crackdown 3 (Sumo Digital/Xbox Game Studios)
Crackdown 3 is a perfect example of a game that never should have been released. I’m not talking about the fact that the franchise only exists because the first entry came with Halo 3 beta codes, or how the sequel received extremely mediocre reviews. No, I’m talking about the development hell this entry went through for the last 5 years. The whole draw to this game was supposed to be the cloud computing feature that allowed players to destroy the whole map. Well, it doesn’t help when Epic Games buys the company responsible for this feature and most of the team leaves the project mid-development. At this point, I probably would have said: “hey, let’s cut our losses and move on.” But nope, Phil squirted this piece of shit out anyway.
The biggest problem with Crackdown 3 is a complete lack of innovation. It’s literally like they just remastered the original Crackdown, didn’t bother to change or innovate anything to make it better and threw in Terry Crews. I think everyone would still be saying the same things if the game had dropped on its original release date in 2016. Is it fun to play? Yea, kinda. But there’s no depth to keep you playing the game for longer than the first hour. And the multiplayer is as barebones and bland as it gets. If you’re a fan of the Crackdown series, you probably like this game. But otherwise, you were ready to move in after the first 30 minutes.
Days Gone (Bend Studio/Sony Interactive Entertainment)
So I was pretty wrong about this one. I’ll admit it; I didn’t do my research. I just assumed based on Sony’s track record this generation that any exclusive they release would be great. I had no idea that the company behind Bubsy 3D was hired to make this game.
Is Days Gone a bad game? No, not really. It’s actually a pretty average open-world post-apocalyptic title. But that’s the problem. When you release an exclusive first-party title, the expectation is set higher whether you like it or not. Hell, I’ve been roasting Microsoft for this entire generation for releasing mediocre unoriginal bullshit. It’s only fair that I roast Sony for the same thing, regardless of how few times they mess up. While Days Gone has great graphics and an awesome open world to explore, the narrative and characters fall completely flat, which is never good in a narrative-driven game. The game also had a TON of technical issues like where you’d try to drive over a rock that looked like a ramp only for it to fully render at the last second into a killable rock. Finally, the gunplay was very bad. Like very, very bad. Again, put it out there with other triple-A titles and I wouldn’t have even noticed it. But because it has Sony’s name on the box and it didn’t live up to the expectations, it doesn’t get a pass.
Rage 2 (Avalanche Studios/Bethesda Softworks)
Let’s look at an excerpt of that post I wrote way back in January:
“Every single game that…Avalanche Studios (Just Cause series) has made has the same problem: weak story narrative. Guess what the problem with Rage was? Weak story narrative. Hell Avalanche Studios just made the Mad Max game in 2015, and it was criticized for WEAK STORY NARRATIVE. All they’re going to do is re-skin their 2015 flop with bright colors and call it Rage 2! Don’t buy this game!” – The Unfiltered Nerd
Hey guys, guess what the #1 critique of Rage 2 was? WEAK STORY NARRATIVE. That and basically everything but the gameplay. The characters were boring, the writing across the board was some of the worst I’ve ever seen, and the open world was empty and boring. What’s crazier to me is that anyone expected this to go any differently, considering the track record of everyone involved. Bethesda learned nothing, Avalanche Studios learned nothing, and to absolutely no one’s surprise, this game sucked.
Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Breakpoint (Ubisoft)
HOW DARE YOU TARNISH JON BERNTHAL BY PUTTING HIM IN THIS PIECE OF SHIT.
Darth_PurP and I played the beta for this game a week before it’s release date, and we actually had a pretty good time. I enjoyed the competitive multiplayer mode and I “tolerated” the PvE mode even though it isn’t really my type of game. But one thing that we both concluded following the beta is that Breakpoint was going to have a very rough launch. The servers were completely fucking broken and there were a bunch of technical issues. Also, as someone who’s played a bunch of these type games, I didn’t see anything that stood out. And yea, that’s how the game was received a week later. Gamespot probably said it best when they called Breakpoint “a messy hodgepodge of disparate ideas, pulling various aspects from other Ubisoft games and shoehorning them in, half-baked and out of place…”
But to me, that’s not the only failure of this game. How about the fact that due to its horrible reception and sales Ubisoft had to push back all of their titles that were supposed to be released in Spring 2020? I’ve never heard of something like that in my entire life. I mean what were you expecting Ubisoft? That it would match the incredible sales of Ghost Recon Wildlands? When you basically made the exact same game but on a new island and loaded with technical and server issues? Call this an overreaction if you want, but I think Ubisoft is going to be in some huge trouble as a company if they don’t learn from the catastrophe that is Ghost Recon Breakpoint.
WWE 2K20 (Visual Concepts/2K Sports)
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I’m not gonna sit here and say that WWE 2K20 was even on my radar this year as a potentially good game, nor was it one I was interested in buying as a pro-wrestling fan. But dear fucking god, what is wrong with the people at Visual Studios? Not only are the graphics a significant step back from previous titles, but the game was also completely fucking broken at launch.
Have you seen the glitches? I’ve never in my entire life seen a AAA game launch this horribly. That includes Fallout 76 and Mass Effect Andromeda, which is saying something considering they’re two of the worst games this generation. How can you release a game in this state? How can a game that gets an annual release even BE in this state? WWE 2K20 deservedly holds one of the lowest scores of the year for a video game on Metacritic, and you have to imagine that 2K will be cutting all ties with Visual Studios after this atrocity.
And the winner of this year’s “Biggest Bust” Award is…
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Anthem (Bioware/Electronic Arts)
While each of the games above deserves this award, nothing had a bigger impact on a studio than the failure of Anthem. After the disaster that was Mass Effect Andromeda, BioWare was walking on thin ice. This was a chance for them to spring back to the glory days when they led the RPG world with Mass Effect and they completely blew it. I don’t know how much of this was EA pushing them to release a game before it was ready to be released or the fact that the team behind the Mass Effect trilogy isn’t there anymore, but Anthem has proven that BioWare no longer deserves acclaim as a studio. They are just another name in the giant pool of mediocre triple-A studios looking to make a buck on a mediocre game.
Previous Awards:
