Nobody ever sets out to make a bad video game, but the realities of business and production mean that plenty of bad ones exist, and quite a few of them happened in 2015.
To be clear, this isn't a list of the year's worst games (if it was it would be full of predatory mobile games you may never have heard of), rather these are the biggest games with the biggest problems, or the ones that failed to live up to their own hype.
Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5
If you were a teenager at the millenium, I hope you like having your nostalgia kicked in the face because this game is trash. A brand-exploting cash grab, the ugly visuals and broken gameplay on display here reek of a publisher's snap decision to eke one more bag of dollars out of a franchise before it slipped through their fingers. This is particularly disappointing given the anti-establishment feel of the original games and skater culture in general.
Watch this YouTube clip of this car crash in action. It's much more entertaining than paying for and trying to legitimately play the thing.
Batman: Arkham Knight
Knight might not be perfect, but it's a solid conclusion to Rocksteady's Batman trilogy. Just about everything surrounding the game has been an absolute greasefire though, and the blame for that likely lies with publisher WB.
The $60 (!) "season pass" excited punters were sold before the game was even out promised a stream of vague additional content, which turned out to be shallow and lame. Players on PC were hit worst of all, as their version of the game was so broken upon release that WB removed it from sale. It returned five months later, still broken. Purchasers of the PC version can get a refund if they want one, but that's hardly the point.
Devil's Third
Masterminded by the legendary creator of Ninja Gaiden, Tomonobu Itagaki, Devil's Third is the kind of soulless, impotently violent game I have nightmares about people judging the entire medium by. An MA-rated game with a protagonist that feels like he was designed by an eight-year old (the game begins with him doing a drum solo in prison), it's a gibberish of archaic "cool" signifiers and not much else (you're a buff Russian bald dude covered in Japanese tatts! Fight the woman who just took her clothes off for no reason!)
Itigaki seems to genuinely believe this is what people want, with barely a touch of irony or self-reference to be found. It seriously feels like an imaginary video game that would have shown up on an episode of Frasier; a quick sight gag incorporating all the worst stereotypes of video games ripe for non-gamers to chuckle at and others to be bemused by. Worst of all, considering its pedigree, it plays like a cheap PlayStation 2 game.
Halo 5: Guardians
Full disclosure: I love this game. But there's no denying the marketing and promotion leading up to it led to many people thinking they were buying one thing and getting another. Halo is known for two things: multiplayer and epic space-faring stories. In Guardians, one cannibalised the other as the campaign mode shifted from focused narrative to four-player Destiny-style online fare.
The focus on multiplayer meant the story — misleadingly advertised as a showdown between series stalwart Master Chief and newcomer Agent Locke — took a back seat and became a total afterthought to the team-based shooting gameplay, which remains tight as ever.
Mario Tennis: Ultra Smash
Time was you could grab anything off the shelf with Mario's face on it and be confident you'd get your money's worth. In 2015 though, it seemed that for every amazingly polished experience to roll off Nintendo's assembly line there was also a disappointing one that just didn't have enough time in the oven.
Ultra Smash lets you play tennis as a bunch of Mario characters, but that's it. In an era where sports games are generally filled with options, it gets old incredibly quickly. The only attempt at a touch of Mario magic is a mushroom that bounces frequently across the court and makes your character huge if you touch it, but it actually makes the game much harder to play. An uncharacteristic miss.
The Order: 1886
Another one from the "not a bad game, but ..." files, The Order is an incredibly good-looking game that feels like a demonstration of the developer's ability to make good-looking games. The setting, characters and narrative ooze with potential, but then there's nothing there.
Released as a full-priced game in February and touted by Sony as one of the first massive showpieces for its PlayStation 4, many were understandably disappointed when the game turned out to be more or less a walking tour of a beautiful alternate-reality London with some constrained shooting sections.
Animal Crossing: Amiibo Festival
Nintendo's amiibo figures — small toys themed after iconic characters that can be scanned to affect various games — seem perfect for a digital board game, and this year we finally got one. But charming as the Animal Crossing world is (and cute as the series' amiibo are), that's literally all the game has going for it. You roll the dice, your character moves and you get a speech bubble with text (think Monopoly's community chest cards) that will add or subtract from your score. That's it.
Apart from the board game, sold-seperately amiibo cards can unlock a series of mini-games, which are also ho-hum. Each one is the kind of thing I would love to have on my smartphone for playing a couple of minutes at a time during a commute, but it's tough to get excited about them in a console video game. For such a celebrated series and seasoned developer, it's charming but dull.
Afro Samurai 2: Revenge of Kuma
To be absolutely honest, I never played Afro Samurai 2. How do I know it's bad? Because it's a very rare case of a game that was released, played, and then apologised for and pulled from sale by an embarrassed and ashamed publisher.
The game was designed to be the first chapter of a five-part follow up to 2009's well-respected Afro Samurai, but amid reports that just about every aspect of the game — technical, conceptual and otherwise — was terrible, publisher Versus Evil opted to take the project behind the barn and shoot it before it went any further.
Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number
The original Hotline Miami was an inspired, fast-paced and stylishly ultraviolent top-down shooter that topped many a 'best games' list in 2013. Does the sequel measure up? Well I have no idea, because it was barred from release in Australia.
A scene depicting apparent sexual violence put the game beyond the Australian Classification Board's R18+ classification, and while the developer argued that the depiction was justified by context (a director calls "cut" and the scene is revealed to be all a film shoot before any sexual violence occurs), the ACB famously can not allow for context in its application of the guidelines.
Hatred
A game that promised to be so offensive and nihilistic that it sparked an internet-wide war of words, Hatred ultimately proved to be totally boring and not worth anybody's breath. A sad indictment on web culture, this is a game nobody would even have noticed if it wasn't for the manufactured flame war.
Hatred sets out to shock with its 'kill everyone' premise, but video games are past that. A hundred games have done homicidal maniac better — from Grand Theft Auto to the aforementioned Hotline Miami — and what they have that Hatred lacks is any reason at all for the player to keep playing. The protagonists in those games love carnage, and the quality of the games' design means the player does too. In Hatred, the protagonist kills because he "just hates the world so f***ing much", but the player does it because it's literally the only thing the game does. With no insight or coherent message to offer, it's just a chore.
Do you have other disappointments from 2015 to offer? Or do you think one of the above games was actually great? Give your thoughts in the comments.
