Some game franchises are past the point of being put to sleep for a bit and have gone into the shoot-it-in-the-head-and-put-it-out-of-it’s-misery-already territory. There are tired games and then there are games that are zombie animatronics at this point. There are games that are tired, and then there’s this stuff. Anyway, before this sadistic intro gets any more tedious, here’s the list:
Assassin’s Creed
Assassin’s Creed is like lays: some good stuff sold along with a lot of hot air.
Ubisoft announced that there won’t be an Assassin’s Creed game in 2016, and for good reason: last couple of games were abysmal failures in terms of both raw sales and critical reception. They really needed a break. Going annual really affected the quality of the games as they stagnated, becoming mundane.
Imagine that, a franchise that’s built around stabbing people in the neck and running the hell away got boring. A franchise in which you sneak around town, investigating leads and planning a stealth attack to stab the living daylights out of some poor shmuck is boring. Most of this is to do with the gameplay not really changing since Assassin’s Creed 2’s refinements to the core run-stab-run mechanics.
The sidemissions are just checklists of the same stuff, and the game actually physically slowing down over successive iterations doesn’t help either. Whatever went so horribly wrong that the best selling game in the franchise is the one where the whole stabbing business takes a back seat to being a pirate? Well, whatever it was, the solution was surely not making it more like Batman.
Need For Speed
HALP! THE ONE YEAR HIATUS DID NOTHING! THE GAME IS STILL BORING AS ALL HELL!
In all honesty, this is a franchise which needs a really, really long break. But more than a break it needs a great big think. It needs to not be dumbed down. it needs to be faster.It needs to not shovel poorly disguised always online DRM down our throats.
It needs solid netcode for multiplayer, and it needs LAN. It needs an option to use your own audio tracks (so that I can pop in some Linkin Park or Marilyn Manson and really relive my embarrassing teens). Oh and Autolog really needs to go. It got old around NFS:MW 2012. Now it’s just an eyesore and a hassle.
RIP Sonic, He Went Too Fast
Looks cool, right? It’s not. Just trust me, it’s not.
The traffic cops always remind us that it’s better to reach there late than never. Someone should have told Sonic the Hedgehog that before he went full 3D. Now look at the poor chap, the best game he has in the past 10 years or so is like a greatest hits collection, and even then the 2D levels were said to be “best part of the game”.
With abysmal failures like Sonic BOOM and the infamous Sonic The Hedgehog (2006), Sonic has relegated from Mario’s rival to something no one wants to associate with. Worse, he has become a meme, a joke. This saddens me because I so clearly remember popping down to my neighbour’s to play Sonic co-op on his Genesis as a ten year old twerp. But really though,new Sonic needs to smothered in bed while it’s sleeping.
Simulator Games
FARMING SIMULATOR 2015! NOW WITH 110% MORE FARMS AND 70% MORE PIG BUGGERY!
It started with Cookie Cutter trying to mindf**k us and Surgeon Simulator taking the piss out of all those Menial Job Simulator (Farming Simulator, Ship Simulator Extreme and Construction Machines Simulator come to mind as particularly egregious examples). We wish that’s where it ended, as shitty people were hell bent on testing exactly where the buck stops, with tripe like Baking a Cake Simulator and the infamous Air Control.
These games made people question the concept of Steam’s Early Access and Greenlight programmes because, of course, these people were abusing the systems to get barely working crap on the storefront with minimum investment. Fortunately, the worst of the septic-flood is past, as the Simulator con artists moved to…
Survival Games
UnitZ is an asset pack on the Unity store. It’s supposed to be a base for you to build your game on. Some shysters just straight up sell it on Steam.
Survival games as a genre was birthed from the fertile, bountiful, flannel-clad loins of DayZ. Unfortunately, most of these illegitimate children just openly ape (mostly in a cheap way) the parent in hopes of stealing onto the gravy train in the dead of the night. I mean look at how many of these pollute the steam storefront. From a mod that boosted ArmA II’s sales through the roof to asset flipping shysters trying to dupe people out of their money, the survival genre has it all.
Smartphone Shovelware
Yeah, these suck too. Made in Chinese software sweatshops staffed by hyperactive monkeys who are paid in bananas and peanuts, these games are choking up the damn mobile appstores. They are nearly always copy-paste clones of successful games or in the saddest cases, each other, sometimes outright plagralising assets from other games, and always blatantly unimaginative tripe. They are sometimes hilarious for the wrong reasons, and are always bad.
The best case scenarios in these is a heartrendingly blatant cash grab (Deus Ex: The Fall, I’m looking very pointedly at you) and worst case scenarios are downright eldritch, with a smiling, cheerful visage and corporate cynicism. Particularly bad examples: 1, 2, 3, 4 (Disclaimer: I put in almost as much effort in researching these as the developers did in making them. Which is to say not much at all)
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