Most of these aren't what I'd call "bad games" (actually, most of them are at least pretty good) but were disappointing in light of the expectations I had for them.
10. Super Mario Odyssey - This is more about expectations than the quality of the game, which is very high. I had a lot of fun with this game, but it's probably my least-favorite 3D Mario game. Which means it's still a 9/10-type game, but it just wasn't what I'm looking for from a 3D Mario game. It's a much lesser platformer than the Galaxy and 3D Land/World games, and it also fails to capture what was so special about Mario 64. It's a lot of fun, bite-sized challenges and there are far worse things in the world than that, but I was hoping for something a lot more ambitious.
9. Devil May Cry 5 - With DMC5, it's about personal preference and where I find myself respective to the game's target audience. I like character-action games, but I'm not exactly the best at them; if I get a "B" rank on a mission, I'm generally satisfied with that. It was the adventure game element of the early titles that really drew me to the series, and that's pretty much gone completely from DMC5. Instead, the campaign is essentially a series of linear levels that are entirely combat encounters, with same-y, ultra-bland environments. And with all of the frequent switching between characters, I never really got into a groove with any of them. It's clear that the point of DMC5 is to replay the missions over and over and get the highest possible rankings, and I totally get that it's what the core fanbase wants. I just wasn't interested in revisiting those missions at all. In the end, I actually liked DmC more.
However, unlike all the people who complain about FromSoftware games and how "they should cater their games FOR MEEEEEEEEEEE" with difficulty levels and whatnot, I'm fine with acknowledging that I'm not part of the DMC target audience (the fanbase appears to be very happy with this game), and that this series just isn't for me anymore. There are plenty of games out there for me to play instead, and I'll always have the original trilogy to go back to.
(Okay, just DMC1 and 3!)
8. The Outer Worlds - The creators of Fallout teaming with the developers of New Vegas to make, essentially, a "Fallout killer" that reestablishes the role-playing element that has been diminished more and more in recent Bethesda games? Sign me up! So in hindsight, it's really strange that I ended up enjoying Fallout 4 more than this. But there's just something missing here. There's a lot missing, actually. It's a fine enough video game, but after a very promising start, the bulk of the game is largely unremarkable. Aside from a few notable companions, the characters and the dialogue were very forgettable, and the quality of the worldbuilding left a lot to be desired. It's a good enough game that I'd like to see a sequel that fulfills a lot of that promise, as this just felt like a game with a blatantly reduced scope so that they could release it when they did.
7. The Evil Within - Similarly, I expected a whole lot more from the director of two of my all-time favorite games - REmake and Resident Evil 4 - than a pretty good game. After nearly a decade of work in action games, this was the "Father of Survival Horror" returning to the genre he popularized at what felt like low tide for horror games, and certainly the low point for Resident Evil. But at no point did this game ever really decide what it wanted to be. It's a largely unfocused, inconsistent jumble of ideas cobbled together, which resulted in some incredibly high highs and some very low lows, on a moment-to-moment basis. For purportedly being "the game to save survival horror", it didn't come anywhere close, and the fact that the brilliant Alien Isolation released the same month didn't help matters. Nevertheless, I enjoyed this game overall, but to call it a mess wouldn't be overstating things. I preferred the second game which, while also flawed, offered a much more consistent experience.
6. Yoshi's Crafted World - Yoshi's Woolly World is surprisingly one of the best 2D platformers on a Wii U console that had a number of great ones, highlighted by a charming art-style and delightful soundtrack. Good-Feel had gone from Wario to Kirby to Yoshi and had been 3-for-3 in my eyes, and remained one of the most underrated developers on the planet. Perhaps going back to the well with another Yoshi game was a mistake, then, because none of the charm and creativity of Woolly World made it into Crafted World. This is a soulless, forgettable product.
5. Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus - What happened here? This wouldn't have been a disappointment had The New Order not been one of the best surprises of the generation, but my expectations were raised coming into the sequel. The drop-off in quality from the first game to the second game was stunning, especially in terms of level design. The New Order stood out for having levels designed for stealth and non-linear exploration, and the sequel tries to do the same but with a series of corridors and combat arenas instead. The New Order was also enjoyable and unique as a stealth/FPS hybrid, as instead of feeling the urge to reload your checkpoint if you were caught, it was fun to let the game devolve into a firefight. However, combat isn't fun at all in Wolfenstein II, with bullet-sponge enemies and a playable character that is anything but that. There are a few very memorable and shocking story moments that salvage the overall experience somewhat, but this is still a huge disappointment. This was eerily similar to the steep decline from Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay to Assault on Dark Athena, developed by MachineGames' predecessor.
4. Deadly Premonition 2 - Many people have called Deadly Premonition "so bad it's good", but I've always pushed back on that. It's one of my favorite games of all time, but it's because the great things about Deadly Premonition were legitimately great. The bad aspects of Deadly Premonition (especially the combat) were legitimately bad and for the most part didn't help the game's cause. Unfortunately, Swery seems to have bought into the idea that people liked the original game because it was so bad it's good, and so he made a blatantly bad game that's "so bad it's bad". And beyond this just being poorly designed, the technical issues are unforgivable. I've never played a game with a worse framerate, which is hard to fathom considering how ugly the game's visuals are. Aspects of this game would have looked unimpressive on the PS2 (my goodness, look at the trees!), and the combination of that, the ridiculous amount of pop-in, all of the visual artifacts and the god-awful framerate, it's one of the worst-looking games of all time considering the release year and platform. Playing this game literally gave me headaches. While patches improved it somewhat, you still can't polish a turd. Regardless, DP2 is missing a lot of the charm that the first game had, and Le Carre has only a fraction of the character that Greenvale had.
A sequel to Deadly Premonition is a game I never thought would happen; it was a true "game of my dreams". But now I wish it never got made. This game sucks and has really soured me on Swery as a game designer.
3. Batman: Arkham Knight - When the stop-gap game Arkham Origins released, all we kept hearing over and over was that Rocksteady was the Batman "A-team" and this was the big next-gen experience that they'd been working on. Well, that stop-gap game was better than this. I absolutely hate this game with every fiber of my being. Their Joker obsession went well beyond the point of parody. Scarecrow was completely wasted as a main villain. The hype and subsequent reveal of the titular "Arkham Knight" was stupid. The whole story sucked, really, with a lot of cheap moments that initially pack an emotional punch, only for the game to yell "gotcha sucker!" afterward. The side quests are the worst in the series. The Batmobile sucked. There are like 7 thousand Riddler trophies clogging the map, and you have to find them all to see the game's final ending, which also sucked. The tried-and-true core gameplay (combat, traversal, stealth) is still solid as ever, but that's all I can really say about this game. Everything that was new for Arkham Knight, either gameplay or content-wise, was bad. Rocksteady still hasn't put out a new game since, and I'm not expecting good things from it. This studio feels like it peaked with Arkham Asylum or City (depending on which style of world design you prefer; I lean towards the Metroidvania-inspired design of Asylum).
2. Resident Evil 3 (remake) - Capcom had been on a roll. The RE series hit rock-bottom in 2012 with RE6, but they followed that up with a solid effort in Revelations 2, a major return to form with RE7, and the brilliant Resident Evil 2 remake. The RE3 remake had a number of things working in its favor: remakes of both Resident Evil 1 and 2 were excellent, Capcom was riding high again, and RE3 is a game that really stood to benefit greatly from a remake. While RE1, RE2 and RE4 are all considered classics, RE3 is sort of the "forgotten" numbered entry among the early RE games. In terms of its development at the time, it was sort of an afterthought. A remake was a great opportunity to elevate the game's reputation to be at the same level of the series' most highly-regarded games. 20 years later, two obvious areas where a remake could do great things were the city setting, and Nemesis as a stalker enemy. It was not hard to envision a larger scaled, more open Raccoon City, and to expect great things from Nemesis after seeing some amazing stalker enemies in recent years (Alien, Mr. X). On-paper, an RE3 remake should be the ultimate Resident Evil game.
Instead, much like the original game, the remake was also clearly an afterthought. This felt more like an RE3 story expansion to the RE2 remake, rather than an actual remake of RE3. They didn't improve the design of Raccoon City streets at all, they kinda just moved some things around. It's not really better or worse. Nemesis was a huge disappointment. I never would have believed that Mr. X in the RE2 remake would be much more of an effective threat than Nemesis in an RE3 remake. The challenging puzzles that the original game featured? Gone. Unique areas such as the Clock Tower, Park, and Factory? Gone, replaced by more generic sewers and labs. Live selection? Gone. Certain notable enemies and boss fights? Gone. One character's iconic death? Gone. The graphics and presentation (including Jill and Carlos' redesigns) are better in the remake, as is the Hospital level; everything else is worse than in the original.
Stripped of all context of this being a remake and the follow-up to the RE2 remake, this is a fine game on its own. It looks and plays fine, and is competently made. But given its status as a remake, considering the quality of prior RE remakes and the quality of the most recent RE games, this was an enormous disappointment.
1. Red Dead Redemption 2 - I loved Red Dead Redemption, and it remains my favorite Rockstar game. RDR2 was my most-wanted game (by far) going into 2018. It ended up as one of my all-time Top 5 biggest disappointments, and is probably the last Rockstar game I'll play. GTAV was a mild disappointment for me back in 2013, because of how outdated it felt to play, and how rigid the mission design was. "If only their games would feel like other modern games do." "If only they would allow me some degree of freedom in how I complete a mission." However, Rockstar lives in a bubble where if it isn't something they themselves came up with, it simply doesn't exist. Five years later, and RDR2 doubles down on all of this, feeling even more outdated mechanically given the passage of time, and offering zero player freedom while in a mission. Why make open-world games when these are the missions you want to design? Why design missions like this when you've constructed such a beautiful, detailed open-world? It is oil & water. There are some great moments outside of missions, where you're allowed to be your own Arthur Morgan, but once a mission starts you are the Houser Brothers' Arthur Morgan and the game never hesitates to punish you for stepping out of line.
For most of the game, I didn't have a positive experience playing this. During Chapters 3 and 4 (the real meat of the game) I can honestly say I was enjoying my time with the game, but everything before and after was a slog. I stuck with the game in the hope that the story would pay off, but it doesn't. I genuinely don't think the story is very good, either. It's incredibly repetitive and takes much longer to reach its destination than it needed to, and even the game's climactic moment was ruined by dragging things out even further. And as someone who played as a villainous outlaw Arthur, the major late-game story development didn't land for me at all. None of it felt earned.
There are too many impressive elements of Red Dead Redemption 2 for me to call it a bad game. The visuals and presentation are top-of-the-line, and some of the NPC interactions (especially at camp) led to some really magical moments that you can't find anywhere else. But generally speaking, I didn't like this game. Every new Rockstar release has always felt like a huge event that I've wanted to be a part of. But if future Rockstar games continue in the direction of GTAV and RDR2 - as I expect them to - then I'm out. It was a good run, but I'm just not going to bother with something that I know I'm going to find frustrating.