With 2010 still fresh in our minds, and the impending doom of civilization brewing for 2012 (if only we'd listened to John Cusack!), I thought it'd be nice to go back and remember the games we loved about 2010...

Wait, did I say loved? I mean that we were thoroughly and utterly disappointed in!

2010 was full of huge hits and great games like Mass Effect 2, Red Dead Redemption, and Mario Galaxy 2. But there were other games, games that were supposed to be HUGE, games that we were all supposed to love, that ended up crashing to the ground. Let's honor these games that, even with shades of greatness, fell short of our lofty expectations.

Here's my most disappointing games of 2010:


FINAL FANTASY XIII - "The game gets good after 25+ hours"... you're kidding, right? Nope. The vast majority of the game was just walking forward, fighting, and cutscenes. No fun mini-games. No towns to relax in. No airships. No optional dungeons. Even that would be bearable if there was more than one likable character in the game. There's not. Couple that with the most unintuitive weapon-upgrade system devised by man, complete moon-logic boss battles, and a story that was so badly paced and edited that it makes Evangelion look coherent, and you wind up with the most disappointing FF game ever made... until FFXIV came along a few months later, that is.


METROID: OTHER M - You really have to try hard to ruin a two-decade run as the greatest female character in games with some of the best, highest-rated games of all time. Sakamoto and Team Ninja did just that by casting the once fearless, stoic, badass Samus as a whimpering emotional wreck with daddy issues and the dullest voice-overs ever recorded. The rest of the story was just as hammy and melodramatic, but most criminal was the removal of so many things that made Metroid games Metroid; the game was linear to a fault, upgrades were handed out at random instead of sought out and earned, the traditional sense of isolation was lost since you had space marines running around all over the place, puzzles were de-emphasized in favor of hyperactive dodging and shooting, and even the music and sound effects from prior games were disappointingly absent in many areas. And the gameplay itself was only decent-to-good, but for a series like Metroid, "decent" absolutely doesn't cut it.


CRACKDOWN 2 - A sequel should have a number like "2" in the title. Crackdown 2 doesn't deserve it. It's Crackdown 1.5, or even Crackdown 1.2. Even that may be too generous. It's the exact same game with the exact same world with even some of the exact same orb locations and missions, only with somehow less-fun additions and four-player co-op. Two years of waiting and paying full-price for a skin-job game, and even more tragically is that if Realtime Studios had made the game like they had the first instead of busting on APB, it probably would have been great game, sold buckets, and they'd still be in business.


LOST PLANET 2 - The first game was a fresh, original game, a standout IP in a sea of derivative sequels. It's own sequel promised to be bigger, louder, and better than it in every way. Well, it was bigger and louder, but somewhere along the way they forgot the better part. The result was an overblown game full of bugs, terrible AI, an unfair and almost unplayable single-player campaign for solo players, a bland story, and a loss of most of the charm and originality that made its predecessor such a success. Such a shame.

I haven't actually played a lot of other games that I'm sure crushed the hopes and dreams of gamers (like FFXIV), but out of the great experiences I had this year with some amazing games, these were the ones I walked away with disappointed, angry at, and even depressed by their unfulfilled potential.

So, sound off. Who else had some disappointing game experiences of 2010?