Diablo III
I went into it fairly dark, but during the beta I was left to pause as to how they'd handle the skill system because it seemed like reducing the stats to automatically allocate and having skills that you can shuffle around at will killed all the character personalization of previous games. When I played the retail release, I found out that it actually was the case and everything seemed cynically designed as a loot grab. While the combat itself was an improvement over its predecessor, I found quest design, writing, and generally everything else to be watered down and lackluster. I got to level 60 before completing Hell and never even touched Inferno just due to how apparent they wanted to make the carrot on a stick.
Street Fighter X Tekken
Unlike a lot of people I actually liked the artstyle of the game coming into it, though they did kinda overgloss the characters but the backgrounds felt more reminiscent of the 2I/A2 games which I liked a lot. Ultimately the game played like a mess with its inclusion of gems and watching timeout after timeout, but the biggest slap in the face and turnoff was the DLC implementation. It greatly hurt my image of the company as a whole.
Max Payne 3
The game played great, definitely a worthy successor to the Max Payne name; unfortunately everything surrounding it wasn't. I think the backlash from the start towards bald Max was warranted, it's very rare that such a negative early impression comes around to being good in the end, and that wasn't the case here. I loved the atmosphere of the previous games set in a New York at night, covered in terrible weather, and some admittedly goofy characters. Instead I get a game that's a bit too much film and not enough game, which is a shame because I didn't like most of the characters and environments.
Halo 4
As a person who hates Halo Reach with a passion it was sad to see 4 carrying over elements of it like bloom, armour abilities, and upgrading sprint to a standard control feature. On top of that, bizarre choices like global ordnance replacing weapon spawns, the CTF changes, instant respawns, the Call of Duty-like loadouts that you need to gain levels to unlock items for, the perks, the maps being more catered towards sloppy BTB encounters, and a lot more have led me to sell the game after a couple of weeks. On the single player side of things the Promethean enemies are pretty much anti-fun every time they make an appearance in an encounter, and Spartan Ops as a mode is entirely fluff with its no consequence design; a poor replacement for Firefight.
Will probably get ME3 but all the hate for the game is making me second guess buying it.
