For some follow-ups it might not even be that the sequel in question is bad but merely that it ended up being mediocre enough that people lost interest in the franchise. In all honesty, this ends up being the less likley of the two cases in which the game is either mediocre or straight-up shit on a stick. But enough dilly-daddling, lets get onto what is probably going to be the most depressing post I've done so far!
Number 10 - Company of Heroes 2 (2013)
Image source: www.dualshockers.com
Ok so this first choice is pretty much entirely a personal one. I mean all of the choices to some degree on this list are personall but I've tried to balance all that out with objective impacts made on the respective franchises, common buyers of and fans of said franchises and games. Company of Heroes 2 on the other hand is entirely subjective as it was the highly-anticipated sequel to my favourite game of all time, the 2006 World War II-set RTS Company of Heroes.
Regardless of your viewpoint on RTS games and Company of Heroes itself to which even I can atest that it had some poor online balancing and a few AI issues, Company of Heores is undoubtedly one of the most impactful and important RTS classics next to the likes of Command and Conquer Red Alert 2 (2000), the orginal Starcraft (1998) or Shogun II Total War (2011). Therefore, with the aspect of a slew of top-quality expansion packs following the original release, if you're going to properly follow a game with such pedigree that it revived the WW2 RTS genre from obscurity and stagnation you'd better damn well make sure that your follow up is an absolute golden winner. Of course this was easier said than done and I think that the placement of COMP 2 on this list, even at number 10 more than shows (at least in my opinion) that THQ and Relic royally screwed up the sequel to their 2006 classic.
In fact, even more than Relic who were primarily involved in publishing COMP2, you could probably lay the blame for the faliure of this game mostly down at the doorstep of THQ whose development of the game went from shady to downright disastrous. The shady part is probably that THQ's development of the game entailed some partiuclarly unsavoury microtransactions and grinding aspects more apropriate in something like World of Tanks (2010) rather than COMP2 and as such, the game already garnered controversy soon after it was announced in 2012. This is perhaps necessary on THQ's part though as the company signed for banckrupcy around the release of the game prompting them into some shady practices in this regard as well as selling of sub-division Relic to SEGA which at least ensured that we would later on get the prospect of Total War: Warhammer. However, the biggest and most disappointing aspect of COMP2 that ruins it as a follow up to the original is undoubtedly the story and blatant lackof historical research put into the game.
As a history and politics student this particularly offends me. For one, multiple armies are misrepresented because of poor research particularly in how for some reason, all members of the German infantry portrayed in the game are all wearing uniforms of the Slovenian National Front which fought on the Eastern Front in World War 2 on the side of the Whermacht. But perhaps the saddest controversy is how the Soviet officer class, millitary and social hierarchy are wrought with a complete lack of humanity and compassion for their troops as well asd a total lack of sympathy for the civilians of the Soviet union and the polish commandos they ended up fighting alongisde during their push through Eastern Europe. Admittedly, many Soviet leaders could easily be accused of all this but for the most part the officer class was noted with being forced into practical decisions very regularly by the pressures of war meaning that more often than not the Soviet army did its darndest to assist it's polish auxilliary gurellia allies, protect the civilians of the nation against the enroaching Germans and deny the Whermacht any advantage without sacrificing too much. Therefore, the bit where you're ordered to set fire to civilian houses when the Soviet soldiers were explicity ordered to clear them before committing to 'scorched earth' or how the game misrepesents the proportion and number of casualties by execution means that to pretty much all gamers with Eastern European or Russian roots like myself, the game is notably insensitive.
Aside from this the gameplay is relativley solid although the concept of impactful tech-trees and individual strategies is replaced by bum-rushing and mass firepower being the deciding factor in a given fight. There's also the tragic aspect of how the original game ended up having five campaigns, at least four online modes and four armies to choose from after all the expansion packs were released whereas the original release of this game was even more barren and dry than that of it's predecessor. The gameplay certainly isn't the worst thing about COMP2 but it certainly helps to make it a crappy follow-up to what was truly a brilliant RTS.
Number 9 - Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2: The Sith Lords (2004)
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Ok so I wasn't the biggest player of the original KOTOR (2003) as I was more so into playing Star Wars Battlefront (2002) and Star Wars Battlefront II (2005) at the time to really pay much attention to the plethora of RPG's coming out in the early-2000s. However, when I got round to playing the original a few years ago on recommendation of my freinds I realised that now more than ever I was intrigued by all the criticism that its 2004 follo-up which I'd only aever marginally noticecd was something I wanted to have a look into. In hindsight I wish I'd just stuck to playing the original.
Much like COMP2, KOTOR 2's many problems in large part stem from the lacklusture story this time roundof which seems to be more content to rehash similar narrative themes from the original game while adding nothing original into the mix. Admittedly, this can be difficult to do when creating the sequel in an established franchise as you'll probably want to stick a bit closer to the original source material as not to totally alienate the fans. But come on Lucasarts and Obsidian Entertainment! Even you guys must've surely realised that this was a narrative suicide note! Not even the added prospect of two different endings can save the story as they are both equally open ended in a manner that leaves more questions unanswered and more heads overheating in confusing with how vague both endings to the game are. Arguably this is one of the main contributing factors as to why there has been no proper continuation except for a small and partial one in the upcoming new Old Republic game which is probably going to come out in the next couple of years.
However, if you think the story is the worst bit about this game then...you'd probably be right but even still. The gameplay isn't much better with a now much more streamlined process of levelling up and a much more limited move set. In a sense this means making greater use of your force powers against bosses but also takes much of the deep strategy of the orignal out of the game and strips the combat in the follow-up down to its basics. You could argue that some games like the Elder Scrolls games have limited move sets but here there is so much customisation and variation in levelling up that your variety of strategic combat is gift wrapped to you. I and other gamers have only ever really found any depth in the combat of KOTOR2 by exploiting the fuck out of it. On top of this, the game is comparitivley easy making it almost lifeless in how little of a challenge it offers you. Perhaps the wierdest con of this game though is how the graphics seemed to get worse from the original. Sometimes this could be understandable from a point of short budget but considering that KOTOR 2 had two large companies and a highly successful predecessing game behind it, I find that hard to beleive in this case.
What we have is a wierd follow up that not only had the capabilities to make a great addition to the Old Republic sub-franchise and didn't but stalled those lofty yet hopeful ambitions for years to come. Thanks to the organising and funding power of Disney and Lucasarts we can now have new hope for the upcoming Old Republic game but don't get your hopes up, you never know how it might turn out.
So taking that into account, its probably fair to say that I'm not the biggest fan of Halo but even looking at the series from a mostly objective standpoint, I can totally understand the backlash towards the sixth game in the franchise; 2012's flop Halo 4. Where do I even begin with this one? Like I said, I was never the biggest fan of the series growing up although I do love the original nowadays but the Halo series always had an interesting design and smooth style of gameplay that set it apart from most FPS of its day whereas Halo 4 just seems to ditch that out of the window into a flaming rubbish bin. Whereas the gameplay in previous entries was fluid enough that you actually felt like a genetically enhanced supersoldier sent into critical hotspots whereas the gameplay in Halo 4 seems like an even more neutered version of the last couple of Call of Duty games. Regardless of what you think of the gameplay of the Halo series either game to game or as a whole, you must admit that the gameplay in this entry just feels a little too similar to what its competition proposes. Not only that but the Halo 4 storyline feels like what the story of the series as a whole would be if you described it to someone who was a fan of some other similar series and greatly disliked Halo with forced dialouge, a tepid and forgettable story about an alien race supposedly more advanced than the covenant empire and a main villain called the diadact whose pretty much just there as an obstacle whereas previous vilains could at least be used as a thinly-veiled critique of religious extremism and fundamentalist ideology or the dangers of overt collectivism.
Really, the main reason why Halo 4 is a bad sequel to the previous games is, in my eyes at least, because of how underwhelming and too similar this entry is to its contemporary franchise rivals rather than being straight up bad. Halo 4 by no means is one of the worst FPS clones ever made as there is still fun to be had in the simplicity of the gameplay and a suprisingly heart-tweaking ending to the campaign story but irregardless of the polish that this game had, it was simply just too similar to its competition to define itself either as a standout Halo or even as a stand alone. Here's hoping Halo 5 will get back to what made the franchise great to begin with.
Number 7 - Dino Crisis 3 (2003)
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Ok, so chances are you've heard of all the other games on this list so far but haven't heard a peep of this third installment flop into the very underrated Dino Crisis series (1999-2003) which defined much of what made late-90s and early-2000s 3rd person shooters either nonexistent or very real underrated gems. The original two games in the Dino Crisis series were decent 3rd person shooters taking a great deal of notes from the first three Resident Evil games (1996, 1998 & 1999) with the second Dino Crisis released in 2000 using the pre-rendered backgrounds from the first two RE games with a fresh lick of paint to act as its background. All in all, these games were simple in gameplay but had an interesting take on the tank-like controls so popular in gaming at the time with a premise that seemed more like the writers of Jurrassic World were taking crack rather than a team of game writers were writing a story and script.
So its safe to say that the first two games were pretty silly in their concept but they did handle it with enough cheese and solid conviction that it was quite endearing and that the games were enough of a success that they ended up spawning the spin-off series Dino Stalker and that Dino Crisis 2 created in my eyes one of the most lesser-known female sex symbols in video games in the form of Regina who returned as one of the main characters from the orignal game. So the unsuccessful but cult-status pedigree was well and truly set by the time producers Hiroyuki Kobayashi and developers Capcom Production Team 3 and Sega AM3 must've surely known that while they were going to have to update the graphics and gameplay in the early period of the 6th generation of gaming, they were also going to have to at least stay mostly true to the whacky roots of the Dino Crisis franchise in order to not alienate the fans.
I'm seriously thinking that they concentrated way too much on the former though as the design of the story seemed less like its was concentrating on making a good shooter that had dinosaurs in it and more about creating an ever more ridiculous scenario in which you shoot up said dinos. SEGA, Capcom, guys, the premise of this series was dumb enough as it is, you didn't have to put the series on steroids by making the setting a rip off of Star Wars and give the dinos the capability to fight in space and some of them to use lightning as an attack while you fight them with laser weapons and jetpacks. Now I'm not saying this couldn't ever be a good premise but with SEGA and Capcom, being the corporate psychos that they are, they certainly weren't the right people to head the making of Dino Crisis 3. What we get is a buggy and juttery 3rd person shooter with crappy controls, a tepid story a premise that can't be taken seriously in the context of which it was made and the disposal of what made the series such an underratted gem to begin with. Therefore, more than KOTOR 2, the shredding up of the gameplay and the watering down of the plot is ultimatley what makes DC 3 such a terrible sequel to the brilliance of the original two games. I guess this makes Dino Crisis 3 less of an insulting game to its fans as it isn't as much of a depature to what made the series great as COMP 2 is but still, thats really not much of a consellation.
Number 6 - Thief 4 (2014)
Image source: pixeljudge.com
Again, much like the Halo series, I wasn't really a huge fan of the decently successful and popular Theif series (1998-present) which like Halo was first-person but in this instance was a stealth-focused series with a small emphasis on the occult and magic not to mention a main series protagonist with a penchant for mercenary behaviour and stealing from the rich for practical and relatable reasons. I firmly beleive, after having played this series now and again that Garrett has to be one of the most cynically and smirkily relatable main characters in all of gaming while being both a practical wise man and indomitably stealthy badass. The writing for me aside from the stealth mechanics have been whats been making me come back to this series now and again as both are really top notch. You can have a look at Garrett's dialouge in the first game or the terrifying Shalebridge Cradle level that at this point has transcended the series itself to be broadly recognised by many as one of the scariest levels in any game ever made.
So needless to say, the original two games and even the third Thief III: Deadly Shadows (2004) were always made great by light but engrossing story, well-written characters, in-depth stealth mechanics and scenarios that forced the player to think outside of the box while making them feel as tense and vulnerable as possible considering that, as the title of the series suggests, your main method towards your aim is theiving, stealth and subterfuge. Therefore, its perhaps no suprise then that internet personalities like The Escapits' Benjamin 'Yahtzee' Croshaw or Youtuber Razorfist (aka The Rageaholic) called the confusingly named fourth entry into this series the worst game of 2014, that they pointed to much of its failings being the simplifying of Garrett's character, the lesser emphasis on stealth and greater on combat and probably worst of all, the seeming lack of charm and wit that made any of the transgressions and failings of the first three games seem minor. I'm not one to harp on about how modern stealth games seem to focussed on hand-holding and bizarrely forced-in combat segments as seen with games like Assassins Creed 3 (2012) considering that its been done to death at this point but the downfall of modern stealth games really does seem to be down to shit like this. In order to make modern stealth games more accessible and easy to get into, developers and creators of said games have been making a modern fps stealth game a poisoned chalice and Theif 4 is definetly the worst and most recent example of that. Perhaps if Capcom and Sega pull their heads out of their arses then this might not've happened and hopefully it might never happen again. However, with the calibre of stealth games we've been treated to over the last 5 years, I think that may be very unlikley.
Number 5 - Supreme Commander 2 (2010)
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Ok so at this point you guys must know with my list of favourite RTS game units and placement of COMP 2 on this list that I rather like RTS games. Perhaps its no suprise then that Supreme Commander as well as another RTS aside from COMP 2 are being placed on this list. Really though, if you played the first supreme commander you would definetly be able to see its influence in more recent large-scale sci-fi RTS entries like Planetary Annihilation (2014). Even though SC's success and influence isn't perhaps as widespread as that of Halo or COMP, its still seen as a benchmark of futuristic design in video games as a whole as well as future-set RTS gameplay.
Really though I feel like making a sequel to the original game of this series was a bit unecessary to start with. With all the other games on the list that were sequels to a highly influential game, you could perhaps understand the hype surrounding their release as the original games of all the series mentioned before in this list were at least successful enough that they waranted plentiful seuels. Now while SC wasn't too different, I feel that it wasn't successful enough or at least was good enough particularly with the release of the Forged Alliance expansion pack (2007) that it didn't really waran't or need a sequel to properly continue the series. There are other examples of this like how I beleived Dawn of War 2 (2009) and all its expansion packs to create a good enough experience that I wasn't too pissed off when the rumoured Dawn of War 3 was cancelled. Likewise, I always thought that the original SC was good enough and thus was a tad nonplussed when I heard of the upcoming release of its proper sequel in late 2009. In fact, I never even played Supreme Commander 2 until a couple of years ago, 3 or so years after its release. In fact I wish I'd never played it.
Really though I feel like making a sequel to the original game of this series was a bit unecessary to start with. With all the other games on the list that were sequels to a highly influential game, you could perhaps understand the hype surrounding their release as the original games of all the series mentioned before in this list were at least successful enough that they waranted plentiful seuels. Now while SC wasn't too different, I feel that it wasn't successful enough or at least was good enough particularly with the release of the Forged Alliance expansion pack (2007) that it didn't really waran't or need a sequel to properly continue the series. There are other examples of this like how I beleived Dawn of War 2 (2009) and all its expansion packs to create a good enough experience that I wasn't too pissed off when the rumoured Dawn of War 3 was cancelled. Likewise, I always thought that the original SC was good enough and thus was a tad nonplussed when I heard of the upcoming release of its proper sequel in late 2009. In fact, I never even played Supreme Commander 2 until a couple of years ago, 3 or so years after its release. In fact I wish I'd never played it.
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The reason for why I didn't want to play it beforehand was kind of convoluded as you've seen (although that might just be my writing) however I was still kind of curious to find out the validity of the mixed reviews. After playing this travesty I realised that it was bad and my trepadition was justified as Supreme Commander 2 is a well-presented game that otherwise suffers from a repetitive story and gameplay copied from the original but severley neutered. The reason for the gameplay being like this I feel is that as the game had a console release it subsequently had to be simplified in some areas and while I sometimes don't have an issue with that sort of thing the gameplay in this game is limited in how you can only build and spend rescources after you've collected them. While this might seem like a good idea on paper, it severly limits the qeue planning that many patient RTS players can do and limits them to playing at the game's pace rather than their own or making improvements from their mistakes. This is shown even more in how bases are built. In the original, slowly built your army as well as your base with your commander unit with the measly bits of rescources you'd collect at the start of each match with this only being deviated on in the campaign now and again where you might be dropped into an active warzone. In Supreme Commander 2 you start off with a base and a pre-set opponent and the unlocking of experimental and higher tier buildings and weapons being limited by the introduction of research points only further forces the player to play according to how the game wants you to.
Arguably the worst part about this shit-stain on the world of struggling RTS franchises however is that it has arguably one of the most underapreciated and yet also worst stories I've ever seen in video games (at least RTS). Each section of the campaign for the United Earth Federation, Aeon Illuminate and Cybran Nation are supposedly focusing on three different commanders with their own personal problems facing the turbulence in the face of the collapse of the galactic coalition (which rather insultingly spits on the satisfying and happy ending of the first game). However, the story repeats itself at the end of each section with each of the three commanders realising a hypocrytical warping of authority and order in each of their command structures which after three repetitions of the same basic story structure gets really boring. The Cybran story ending being the worst is no debate for me, anyone who played the first game will remember the leader of the cybrans, the enigmatic Dr Brackman who was forced through circumstance to realise the error of his ways in Forged Alliance and side with his enemies to defeat the greater evil at hand and make himself a better person. Want to know how to fuck that all up? Give him a generic as fuck tyrant plot point with the main character of the cybran campaign being a clone of him and have him disregard all the positive character development he had in the first game. Seriously, fuck this game up its stodgy, plot hole-ridden arsehole.
Number 4: Devil May Cry 2 (2003)
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Ok so People consider DMC: Devil May Cry (2013), the fith installment into this occult and hyper octaine and stylised hack 'n' slash series to be the worst entry but I respectfully disagree with a metaphorical giant sword stuck in my chest and point to the series' second entry way back in the days of the PS2 in 2003. Now some might say that the sheer amount of post-release hype and commercial success following the release of the original game could have been a major factor in leading to DMC2 being a massive letdown moreso than biting into a chocolate bar only to realise that it's a fruit paste bar. However, even taking this into account, DMC 2 is still a dull and boring game on its own merit that disregards a fully objective review of it by both being insultingly grey and easy and spitting on the legacy of the original game so much. I mean you probably could've gotten that from the brooding and emotionally simmering picture above but I guess that's kind of obvious at this point.
Admittedly, while the gameplay in DMC 2 is easier than FF 13 (which in of itself is a sentence not commonly uttered), the main weakness of this second entry into the DMC series is the slaughtering of series hero Dante and the story in general in this lacklusture sequel. At least in the original game, Dante was a cool and confident demon hunter lauging in the face of danger and having swords stuck in his chest, holding a motorbike in middair with bullets and eating pizza while cracking legendary one-liners. Now while DMC: Devil May Cry might be reviled for making Dante seem like someone whose trying way too hard to be witty, he at least showed some modicum of emotion in that game whereas in DMC 2 he's reduced to spouting some of the most philosophically grey and boring dialouge I've ever heard in any 3rd person adventure game while brooding over minute things that don't matter and scouring the earth for the lost pieces of his seemingly nonexistent personality. Really that should be the end of it but as if the story and characterisation wasn't bad enough, the gameplay does a complete 180 on the difficulty that defined the first and third games and goes for one of the most streamlined and droll combat systems I have ever seen in any third-person shooter or hack 'n' slash. Thankfully this ended up only being a small roadblock to the success of the series because, as I mentioned earlier, DMC 3 came out in 2005 and gave the series a much needed kick up the bum to be followed by a further injection of humour with the much underrated DMC 4 in 2008. But while this was a little roadbump for the series, I unfortunatley can't really say the same for the next game on this list.
Number 3: Resident Evil 6 (2012)
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I'll admit that I was never a huge fan of the RE series up until recently when I played the shit out of Resident Evil 3: Nemesis (1999) and Resident Evil 4 (2005) so I can't really call myself well-versed on this series as I can with the Supreme Commander, Star Wars or Company of Heroes series. However, even the most disinterested-in-Resident Evil gamer could easily attest to how badly the game follows the lineage of all the games in the series before it, how badly it opperates as a survival horror game and even how badly it opperates as a 3rd person shooter. Whereas DMC 2 had faultiness in both its gameplay and story, its story was still much weaker and there are perhaps some out there who prefer the theraputic quality of just mowing through waves of demons easily rather than tactfully taking them out one by one. And in truth, I get the same feeling when I compare RE 6 to the previous entires in this stellar horror series particularly the shining star that is Resident Evil 4.
The reason for this being that in previous games you were either tactfully picking through corridors and claustrophobic environs (RE 1, 2 & 3) or blazing through coordinated groups of powerful enemies while trying to ration your ammo and other rescources (RE 4 & 5). RE 6 on the other hand falls into the same camp of gameplay as DMC 2 in that it just feels like a generic 3rd-person shooter without anything from the previous games that made them unique. Rather, instead of being a 3rd-person shooter with horror elements, RE 6 devolves into the most generic of 3rd-person shooters with a much greater emphasis on setpieces so ridiculous that it starts to feel less like an RE game or even a well rounded 3rd-person shooter and just dissolves into a buggy, non-threatening or challenging clone of far superior TPS games like Spec Ops: The Line (2012).
Right, so that's the gameplay, what about the story? Hmm...ok...so to anyone of you out there who only started cooking for yourself when you went to university, think about the first few meals that you made. They were probably jumbled messes of different ingredients right? That's basically what the story in RE 6 feels like but in this case it doesn't even taste satisfyingly well enough to whet your appetite. Whereas the previous RE games had defined arcs with definitive conclusions, RE has multiple campaigns following the finest characters in the series with only Leon's campaign coming anywhere near to being good. Even in the case of Leon's campaign though, the set-pieces and story points are absolutley mental to the degree where you can't be immersed in the story or combat with one recurring boss who turns into a T-rex then a giant mosquito. Fucking seriously? Did Lovecraft come back from the grave to help write Leon's RE 6 campaign or were the writers fucking high on a heroin/crack/MD cocktail?
When I put digital pen to paper and typed down my first review almost 4 years ago as of this post I was writing about probably the most conflicting but also apparent sense of buyers remorse that I'd ever felt in my life up to that point and even to this day, spending £39.99 in the Steam store for the PC version of Duke Nukem forever feels like an even worse investment than the time I wasted even just £1.50 on Red Faction 2 in a second-hand games shop or the time I got a Fray & Bentos pie from the off-liscence for £1.79. The reality is that when I bought Duke Nukem Forever soon after it came out in 2011 I was so looking forward to it that I initially overlooked many of the faults with the game itself. However, fast forward a third into my 12-hour playthrough of this absolute trave3sty and I started to realise that not only is this the worst sequel I've ever played but it might just be one of the worst games I've ever played period. And I'm not joking there.
I can easily say without hesitation that I find almost nothing satisfying about what is arguably the worst game of 2011, a game in which my most entertaining moment was the intespersment of some mini-car driving sections and a couple of moments where you kill giant aliens by punching them in the nuts really hard then tearing out thier single eyeballs and punting them out like you're on the New Zealand rugby team. Really though, that's all I remember being truly enjoyable from this absolute rotten diahhrea puddle of a game.
Alright so it would probably make sense at this point to give some examples as to why this game is as bad as it is both in my opinion adn arguably in an objective sense.
For me personally I always found the variety of loadouts and amount of weapons and explosives you could carry in previous Duke Nukem games to be the greatest selling point aside from the humour. In previous entries into the series including the 2D ones, you could dispose of your enemies in exciting and variedly violent manners which in of itself had its own morbid charm and variety. On top of this it game many situations in the older games various routes of attack and approach and gave the previous titles in the series each an edge of tactical simplicity. The humor in turn was another aspect of the previous Duke Nukem games that drew me to the series overall as Duke's cartoonishly raunchy, edgy and pop-cultural humour made light of hectic and badass action segments. This type of humour was also very relevant in the early 1990s and early 2000s so it just helped even more to cement the Duke as an icon of that original archetypical macho image of fantasty that many a gamer had back in the day (including myself so to speak). Duke Nukem Forever did away with a two-gun limit and barely any of the vitalised humour that made the series so great. The two gun limit hurt me personally in particular because while this concept has been done well in other series like the Killzone series (2004-present), the Battlefield series (2002-present) and the Call of Duty series (2003-present), this concept was never really explored in the Duke Nukem games to the degree that when it was introduced in this entry it was virtually an entirely alien concept to fans of the series. Even given the sense of disbeleif, COD, Killzone and Battlefield are all reasonably realistic games in comparison to the Duke Nukem series so the idea of only carrying two or three weapons at a time in addition to two or three grenades makes very reasonable sense but given the cartoonsigh nature of Duke Nukem this just doesn't fit into the style and ethos of the series.
An ethos which in turn is even more so undone by the humour and charm present in this game as the stark raving mad humour of the previous games now seemed outdated with nothing done to improve upon or even slightly update it. I'm not even making an argument that humour in video games in this day and age should be more PC and sensetive because usually that can end up backfiring unless you're Nintendo but even considering that, the constant referencing for the sake of referncing and comparisons to otehr games without subtextual context makes any joke in this game fall either flat or fall to a chorus of 'ahems' and coughs. Even more depressing is when the humour takes a turn for the truly distasteful and dark with the breeding chamber level Duke Nukem Forever. I've spoken about this particular level before as have many other video game critics but for the sake of argument and context; the breeding chamber level in Duke Nukem Forever is a level set inside an alien structure where the Duke ventures and finds dozens upon dozens of human women being imprisoned against their will and being implanted into forced impregnation machines effectivley raping them and impregnating them with minature alien monsters that then burst out and attack you a-la Alien (1979) chest-bursters. However, unlike in that legendary sci-fi horror film the chest bursting isn't used as an ingenious and well-timed visual reference for visceral horror and as a visual anagram for rape but literally is an image of rape being shown without any real subtext to make it appropriate or even mean somthing in any way. Whats even worse is that Duke Nukem Forever plays this moment out for laughs and compared to the light-hearted humour of the previous levels in the game leading up to this point and afterwards, it just amounts to arguably one of the most jarring and inept moments of juxtaposition in any game I've ever played. Aside from this, the rest of the humour is generally pretty lifeless and shows that without adapting to the flaws of modern culture which is what the Duke did in the 1990s he may never be able to get back on his feet.
These subjective criticisms of course are only half of the issue as the game's lackl of online content, ectra features, glitchy graphics, occasional hard crashes, repetative gameplay in the FPS segments, poorly-handled first-person platforming, bare-bones puzzles and decade-long loading times makes this game at times a genuine pain to play. The loading times for me have to be the worst objective con to the game as each levele takes at least a minute and a half to load which might not objectivley seem like much but given the higher level of technology available to FPS games in 2011 as compared to the mid-1990s this is just plain unacceptable. Hell, even when I used to play Doom 2 (1994) the load times were rarely if ever as bad as they are in Duke Nukem Forever. The glitchy graphics as well really got to me and while this issue didn't effect me as much during the first few hours of my playthrough I got irritated by the frequency of which teh graphics bugged out and how often textures dulled out. Honestly though, probably the biggest objective criticism that could be levelled against Duke Nukem Forever is how repetetive the gameplay is and how ironically cynical this seems in comparison to the in-game jibes at other FPS series. With little variation between the FPS sections, difficult to navigate FPS platforming, simplified puzzles and only a couple of driving sections, the game seems more repetitive than it has any right to given how many in-game jokes are made. You know your humour has to be bad when the biggest joke is how little you notice the sheer irony of the criticisms you level at other games.
All in all, while there are redeeming notes in the other games on this list I can only think of one real redeeming factor in Duke Nukem Forever are the few and sparse driving sections and even then tehy don't really add all that much to the overall expereince. So while the enjoyment of vidoe games is an almost entirely subjective issue just take it from your uncle Ted; my opinion on Duke Nukem Forever is the same today as it was four years ago...it is easily one of the worst games of all time...period.
The reason for this being that in previous games you were either tactfully picking through corridors and claustrophobic environs (RE 1, 2 & 3) or blazing through coordinated groups of powerful enemies while trying to ration your ammo and other rescources (RE 4 & 5). RE 6 on the other hand falls into the same camp of gameplay as DMC 2 in that it just feels like a generic 3rd-person shooter without anything from the previous games that made them unique. Rather, instead of being a 3rd-person shooter with horror elements, RE 6 devolves into the most generic of 3rd-person shooters with a much greater emphasis on setpieces so ridiculous that it starts to feel less like an RE game or even a well rounded 3rd-person shooter and just dissolves into a buggy, non-threatening or challenging clone of far superior TPS games like Spec Ops: The Line (2012).
Right, so that's the gameplay, what about the story? Hmm...ok...so to anyone of you out there who only started cooking for yourself when you went to university, think about the first few meals that you made. They were probably jumbled messes of different ingredients right? That's basically what the story in RE 6 feels like but in this case it doesn't even taste satisfyingly well enough to whet your appetite. Whereas the previous RE games had defined arcs with definitive conclusions, RE has multiple campaigns following the finest characters in the series with only Leon's campaign coming anywhere near to being good. Even in the case of Leon's campaign though, the set-pieces and story points are absolutley mental to the degree where you can't be immersed in the story or combat with one recurring boss who turns into a T-rex then a giant mosquito. Fucking seriously? Did Lovecraft come back from the grave to help write Leon's RE 6 campaign or were the writers fucking high on a heroin/crack/MD cocktail?
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Thing is, while the flop that was Resident Evil 6 gave the series an immense kick to the teeth with a flaming diving boot, there is still a glimmer of hope for the Resident Evil series. As we saw, Resident Evil Revelations (2012) released the same year as RE 6 wasn't actually too bad and since then, smaller entries into the series have injected life into the series in small doeses in order to keep it on its feet. So while the DMC seiries didn't suffer as big a blow from DMC 2 as the RE series did from RE 6, at least, at the very fucking least, the RE series as a whole still has a modicum of a chance to get back to former glory. The next series on this list? Not so much I'm afraid.
Number 2: Command and Conquer 4: Tiberium Twilight (2010)
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In the name of Kane? More like in the name of taking a well-established RTS series dating back to the late-1990s and kicking it to the curb before blowing out its brains with a sawn-off shotgun loaded with grenades. Whereas Company of Heroes 2 might've been like finding your other half touching someone else's bum and whereas Supreme Commander 2 was like finding your other half in bed with someone else, Command and Conquer 4 is like walking into your bedroom to find that your other half has shit all over the walls, shagged all of your family members, the mikman, postman and your best freind then spat in your face and told you that it was your fault despite the fact that you're the one going out and making a living. Sorry, that was a bit of a psychotic analogy but I feel it fits the situation quite well for this series and its downfall. I suppose there was a bit of inevitability with such a long-running series as C&C that it would eventually have a shitty game and while I didn't so much think that Command and Conquer Generals (2003) was as bad as many others said, I did agree that eventually, the series would have to refresh itself before it truly stumbled. The thing is though is that the series updated itself with faster gameplay and more intuitive power ups and command abilities with Command and Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars (2007) and Command and Conquer Red Alert 3 (2008) I and many others beleived that the series had reached its zenith and would either go out with a shining swansong or at least end with a couple of modestly run-of-the-mill RTS entries and maybe a sequel to C&C Renegade (2002).
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What we got instead was a game that was easily both one of the worst sequels and RTS' that I've ever played. The story and the gameplay are equally as bad as one another in this game unike in the other entires into this list where it was a bit more proportional. The story for one in C&C 4 is an absolute abomonation of the cheesy dialouge and settings of the previous entries into the series which admittedly were very cheesy and hard to take seriously but here's the thing, the stories, characters, cutscenes and dialogue always embraced that in previous entries realising that C&C as a series could never be taken seriously in terms of its story. This in turn made for some investing moments as the story never made itself out to be something it wasn't like with the moment in the Allied campaign in Red Alert 3 when you have to prevent multiple civilian centres from being bombed or when the alien scrin forces arrive on earth in C&C 3. In Tiberium Twilight however, the story takes itself so seriously that all of the charm and mirthfulness that made all of the previous games' stories and characters so engaging and investing was gone. No longer was there any badly-acted but endearing wit to be replaced by plodding and overly-emotional spoutings about love, duty and a really convoluded and stupid civil war in the brotherhood of NOD. Neither the NOD or GDI campaigns this time round had anthing special in terms of their story and like I said, a silly but endearing story was always something seen as unique to the C&C series as a whole. If you take that out for somethign that was breifly tried and then immediatley abandoned in C&C Renegade, what do you do once that backfires in your face?
And that ending...FUCK...BOTH...OF,,,THE...ENDINGS...IN...THIS...SHITTY...GAME.
Seriously, if I could give a contemporary representation of the endings to C&C 4 I'd probably point to that time I was walking through an alleyway in China and saw a 3-foot tall pile of potato, banana and coconut skins and shells and it all smelled like what happens when veteran wrestlers don't shower for a fortnight. Either way, the endings to C&C 4 sour what could've been a really good end to a legendary video game series. C&C 4 did actually have potentional particularly in the more branchin story and lower scale gameplay but it really just wasn't there. At least however, at the very least, it wasn't as much of a disastrous dissapointment as my number one choice.
But before that lets look through some dishonorable mentions!
But before that lets look through some dishonorable mentions!
Dishonorable mentions
Lost Planet 3 (2013)
A bit of a wierd one in that Lost Planet 3 is still a competently made game but the lack of proper exploration as seen in the previous games just kind of kills the experience.
The 4th Pokemon Generation (Diamond/Pearl/Platinum) (2006 & 2007)
Ok so this one really hurts for me considering that I'm a huge pokemon fan and that growing up, Pokemon Emerald and Blue were some of my favourite games as they even still are to this day. Platinum and the other titles of the 4th generation of the pokemon series however, while having some of the best boss fights and legendary pokemon of the entire series just don't have that same sense of unique wonder that the rest of the series does.
Spyro: Enter the Dragonfly (2002)
Image source: en.wikipedia.org
Considering that this was another big series of my childhood it was very sour of a taste to swallow when the first 6th generation Spyro the dragon game turned out to be a mediocre and badly-voice-acted bowl of slop.
Right well I think that's enough pissing about, so what is number one? There is only one entry that it could be if you've been with me from the start and if you can't figure it out it should be pretty obvious.
Number 1 - Duke Nukem Forever (2011)
Image source: store.steampowered.com
When I put digital pen to paper and typed down my first review almost 4 years ago as of this post I was writing about probably the most conflicting but also apparent sense of buyers remorse that I'd ever felt in my life up to that point and even to this day, spending £39.99 in the Steam store for the PC version of Duke Nukem forever feels like an even worse investment than the time I wasted even just £1.50 on Red Faction 2 in a second-hand games shop or the time I got a Fray & Bentos pie from the off-liscence for £1.79. The reality is that when I bought Duke Nukem Forever soon after it came out in 2011 I was so looking forward to it that I initially overlooked many of the faults with the game itself. However, fast forward a third into my 12-hour playthrough of this absolute trave3sty and I started to realise that not only is this the worst sequel I've ever played but it might just be one of the worst games I've ever played period. And I'm not joking there.
I can easily say without hesitation that I find almost nothing satisfying about what is arguably the worst game of 2011, a game in which my most entertaining moment was the intespersment of some mini-car driving sections and a couple of moments where you kill giant aliens by punching them in the nuts really hard then tearing out thier single eyeballs and punting them out like you're on the New Zealand rugby team. Really though, that's all I remember being truly enjoyable from this absolute rotten diahhrea puddle of a game.
Alright so it would probably make sense at this point to give some examples as to why this game is as bad as it is both in my opinion adn arguably in an objective sense.
For me personally I always found the variety of loadouts and amount of weapons and explosives you could carry in previous Duke Nukem games to be the greatest selling point aside from the humour. In previous entries into the series including the 2D ones, you could dispose of your enemies in exciting and variedly violent manners which in of itself had its own morbid charm and variety. On top of this it game many situations in the older games various routes of attack and approach and gave the previous titles in the series each an edge of tactical simplicity. The humor in turn was another aspect of the previous Duke Nukem games that drew me to the series overall as Duke's cartoonishly raunchy, edgy and pop-cultural humour made light of hectic and badass action segments. This type of humour was also very relevant in the early 1990s and early 2000s so it just helped even more to cement the Duke as an icon of that original archetypical macho image of fantasty that many a gamer had back in the day (including myself so to speak). Duke Nukem Forever did away with a two-gun limit and barely any of the vitalised humour that made the series so great. The two gun limit hurt me personally in particular because while this concept has been done well in other series like the Killzone series (2004-present), the Battlefield series (2002-present) and the Call of Duty series (2003-present), this concept was never really explored in the Duke Nukem games to the degree that when it was introduced in this entry it was virtually an entirely alien concept to fans of the series. Even given the sense of disbeleif, COD, Killzone and Battlefield are all reasonably realistic games in comparison to the Duke Nukem series so the idea of only carrying two or three weapons at a time in addition to two or three grenades makes very reasonable sense but given the cartoonsigh nature of Duke Nukem this just doesn't fit into the style and ethos of the series.
An ethos which in turn is even more so undone by the humour and charm present in this game as the stark raving mad humour of the previous games now seemed outdated with nothing done to improve upon or even slightly update it. I'm not even making an argument that humour in video games in this day and age should be more PC and sensetive because usually that can end up backfiring unless you're Nintendo but even considering that, the constant referencing for the sake of referncing and comparisons to otehr games without subtextual context makes any joke in this game fall either flat or fall to a chorus of 'ahems' and coughs. Even more depressing is when the humour takes a turn for the truly distasteful and dark with the breeding chamber level Duke Nukem Forever. I've spoken about this particular level before as have many other video game critics but for the sake of argument and context; the breeding chamber level in Duke Nukem Forever is a level set inside an alien structure where the Duke ventures and finds dozens upon dozens of human women being imprisoned against their will and being implanted into forced impregnation machines effectivley raping them and impregnating them with minature alien monsters that then burst out and attack you a-la Alien (1979) chest-bursters. However, unlike in that legendary sci-fi horror film the chest bursting isn't used as an ingenious and well-timed visual reference for visceral horror and as a visual anagram for rape but literally is an image of rape being shown without any real subtext to make it appropriate or even mean somthing in any way. Whats even worse is that Duke Nukem Forever plays this moment out for laughs and compared to the light-hearted humour of the previous levels in the game leading up to this point and afterwards, it just amounts to arguably one of the most jarring and inept moments of juxtaposition in any game I've ever played. Aside from this, the rest of the humour is generally pretty lifeless and shows that without adapting to the flaws of modern culture which is what the Duke did in the 1990s he may never be able to get back on his feet.
These subjective criticisms of course are only half of the issue as the game's lackl of online content, ectra features, glitchy graphics, occasional hard crashes, repetative gameplay in the FPS segments, poorly-handled first-person platforming, bare-bones puzzles and decade-long loading times makes this game at times a genuine pain to play. The loading times for me have to be the worst objective con to the game as each levele takes at least a minute and a half to load which might not objectivley seem like much but given the higher level of technology available to FPS games in 2011 as compared to the mid-1990s this is just plain unacceptable. Hell, even when I used to play Doom 2 (1994) the load times were rarely if ever as bad as they are in Duke Nukem Forever. The glitchy graphics as well really got to me and while this issue didn't effect me as much during the first few hours of my playthrough I got irritated by the frequency of which teh graphics bugged out and how often textures dulled out. Honestly though, probably the biggest objective criticism that could be levelled against Duke Nukem Forever is how repetetive the gameplay is and how ironically cynical this seems in comparison to the in-game jibes at other FPS series. With little variation between the FPS sections, difficult to navigate FPS platforming, simplified puzzles and only a couple of driving sections, the game seems more repetitive than it has any right to given how many in-game jokes are made. You know your humour has to be bad when the biggest joke is how little you notice the sheer irony of the criticisms you level at other games.
All in all, while there are redeeming notes in the other games on this list I can only think of one real redeeming factor in Duke Nukem Forever are the few and sparse driving sections and even then tehy don't really add all that much to the overall expereince. So while the enjoyment of vidoe games is an almost entirely subjective issue just take it from your uncle Ted; my opinion on Duke Nukem Forever is the same today as it was four years ago...it is easily one of the worst games of all time...period.
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