If you’ve read our Game of the Year contenders article, then you’re well up to speed on what has, for the most part, been a fantastic year in video gaming. In fact, 2016 is perhaps on course to become one of the great years in gaming history as a host of already superb titles are complemented by the impressive list of games still yet to come.
Unfortunately, the year hasn’t been perfect, and amongst 2016’s biggest highs we’ve also endured some crushing disappointments. We’re talking not necessarily about the games that were just bad, but rather, the games that fell short of expectation after promising to deliver so much more than they ultimately did.
These are the games that have strung us along through their tortured development, promised to innovate where they ended up feeling same-y and generic, and failed to meet the standards of quality that their expensive marketing campaigns wooed us into expecting.
We wouldn’t necessarily suggest that the games we’ve compiled in this list aren’t worth at least trying, but they certainly fell well short of their potential. It’s the frustration of wasting something that could have been really special that is so very upsetting, and there are already several prime offenders of this in 2016.
With that being said, let’s examine some of the year’s biggest disappointments so far and explain why these culprits failed to live up to the hype that had piqued our interest.