If there was anything I was thankful about this week, it’s that I do enough research to usually know whether a game is going to be crap or not. So while there are surely far worse games out there, these are games that simply disappointed me personally. </p>
Special mention to Titanfall, which I didn’t get to play since I don’t own an Xbone. A cool concept for the shooter genre I love that was botched at the finish line.
Destiny: A game that proves that it doesn’t matter how good you are at making shooter games if you decide to use elements of other genres and do no apparent research or insight to properly use RPG and MMO elements in a game.
At the very least, it’s a deeply flawed game that still has a deep gameplay hook. I’ve never played such a disappointing game for a truly concerning amount of time.
Bungie has something here. Maybe next time they’ll really blow it out of the park.
Basically Any Triple-A Game Ubisoft Released this Year
Well, OK. Far Cry 4 was good, as was South Park: The Stick of Truth. But the former was basically the same as the previous version, and the latter was simply published by Ubisoft after the previous publisher went under.
Watch Dogs, which was our first view into the world of next-gen, just turned out to be a thoroughly okay-to-mediocre open world game with a hacking gimmick. And God knows Ubisoft hasn’t released anything like that recently.
The Crew had the cool idea of mixing MMO-style missions with racing, along with driving across an abridged version of the United States. Cool concept, but some truly terrible racing, shallow implementation of missions, and a truly horrendous AI for opponents that would actually see enemy racers teleport in front of you.
A special point of terribleness goes to how money-grubbing Ubisoft seems to have become. Instead of content with the usual DLC alongside their full-priced games, many of their games this year were loaded with microtransactions. Execs are on record that they want consumers who pay $70 for a game to pay over $100.
I’m getting the sneaking suspicion that Ubisoft is overly meddling with their franchises. Be it print or digital, publishers directing the hands of their creators usually leads to trouble.
Assassin’s Creed Unity: Yeah it gets its own spot. I, like many, was feeling the franchise fatigue of Assassin’s Creed. While I really loved the pirate ships of Black Flag, it wasn’t enough to ease that fatigue. The free running and combat may have been interesting before, but they’ve gotten stale.
Ubisoft had a chance with this new generation of games to really show why Assassin’s Creed is still relevant.
The result was a rushed out game that, while returning to its simple assassination roots, ultimately feels like a failed attempt to recapture the glory of Assassin’s Creed II. They are utterly unaware of how much trouble this franchise could be in if things don’t improve.
Infamously glitchy graphics. The same old free running. The same old combat, boring and too easy.
The focus seems to be more on a strange overemphasis of historical accuracy in the buildings and details of the plot. Not, y’know, the gameplay.
I’m seriously done. Unless we get more pirates or a huge improvement to Assassin’s Creed gameplay, I’m not touching one of these games. Ubisoft seems more concerned with churning these out, one year after the other.
