Overhyped Games That Ended Up Being Terrible

Nothing's worse than spending $60 of your hard-earned cash on a new game, only to be disappointed with the product. We've all been burned by bad games at one point or another. Publishers and developers overhype their games, making bold promises, and placing false hope into the minds and hearts of consumers. Here are a few of the worst offenders.

The 15th anniversary of Sonic the Hedgehog came in 2006, and to mark this event, Sega released a game called...well, it was just called Sonic the Hedgehog. In it, the rapid rodent was tasked with saving a princess named Elise from Doctor Eggman. Unfortunately, the developers took a page out of Sonic's book and rushed it. The end product was a clunky game with poor controls, long load times, and a host of glitches. Sonic's all about speed, but there are some times when you'll want to take it slow.

One of the PlayStation 4's launch titles, Knack had the duty of setting up the console's future and success. Let's take a moment to thank Sony that it wasn't the only launch title for the PS4, because that would have been a disaster. Knack looked like it could've been fun. But nope. The gameplay was terrible: players would die from the smallest encounters and have to backtrack a ton. Not only was the gameplay frustrating, but the story was so weak that your rage at the crappy gameplay was canceled out by your utter boredom. The only thing this game had a Knack for was getting traded in at GameStop.

Developed by Crytek, the makers of the incredible Crysis series, Ryse: Son of Rome was set to be one of the Xbox One's coolest Kinect titles. Players took on the role of a Roman centurion as he embarks on a blood-soaked quest for revenge. But during development, Ryse underwent a bunch of changes that saw it go from a Kinect-heavy first-person title to a third-person hack-and-slash game. When it was finally released, Ryse was beautiful, but repetitive. Considering it was a launch title for the Xbox One, it should've been much more than just a button-mashing bore.

Stuck stewing in development hell for about 15 years, Duke Nukem Forever was finally released in 2011. Unfortunately, the long-awaited sequel to Duke Nukem 3D had gamers wanting to send it back where it came from. Simply put, it felt dated. It was so bad that all versions of the game scored in the 50s on sites like Metacritic and GameRankings. In the end, this sequel's dismal reviews nearly tainted the memory of the original. Not groovy.

No matter how much pre-release buzz it had—and no matter how much scary Creepypasta fan fiction surrounds the mysterious and terrifying Slender Man character—Slender: The Arrival was simply not that good of a game. Slender Man is one of the most celebrated horror game characters on the Internet, arguably setting the standard for horrifying online mythology before the anthropomorphic animal robot suits of the Five Nights at Freddy's series scared your socks off. Heck, over the past few years, one girl obsessed with Slender Man tried to burn her house down with her family inside it in order to appease the fictional character. Two 12-year-old girls stabbed a friend a staggering 19 times—all for Slender Man.

You'd think with all that insane controversy, any game starring the message board monster would have to be worthwhile. Instead, Slender: The Arrival tried to skate by on creepy atmosphere and an occasionally-spooky bad guy, who steps aside for other antagonists later. The gameplay is pretty repetitive: you just wander through abandoned areas to achieve simplistic objectives (collecting note pages, turning on generators, etc.), all while avoiding the creeps stalking you. Slender Man occasionally teleports around and can be seen staring at you through windows and doors from far away, and he'll keep trying to spook you until he closes in. The game throws jump-scares at you whenever he's nearby and if he corners you, but that's about it. In later levels, other baddies appear, and there's not much you can do to ward off any of them. The game's success sparked a slew of first-person horror titles that offer you no real means of fighting back—and helped inspire some pretty good releases, like Alien: Isolation. But Slender: The Arrival was way too overhyped to justify its underwhelming premise.

Oh Sonic, how we've tried to like you. It seems like Sega just keeps rolling out their big "Sonic is back and better than ever" spiel, and we keep falling for it. After the facepalm-worthy fiasco of the 2006 Sonic the Hedgehog, we thought the Blue Blur would never be able to bounce back to proper form. For this title, they completely redesigned Sonic, Tails, and the rest of the gang, giving them lankier limbs, some mummy-style useless tape wrapped around Sonic and Knuckles' bodies, and random fashion accessories (along with steroids for Knuckles). Ultimately, though, Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric boils down to what we were dreading the most: another horrible 3D Sonic game.

Even with a successful computer-animated TV series to help build up this revamped Sonic squad, Rise of Lyric falls face first at the hedgehog's legendary high speed. Speaking of which, many of game's segments are slowed down with an all-too-basic combat system, featuring some weird laser thing called an Enerbeam that gets shoehorned into the game far too many times. In an era where Mario has made the jump to the 3D realm with the greatest of ease and proved himself time and time again, we're afraid this is going to be the final nail in the coffin when it comes to any future big-budget Sonic game. Much of this can be attributed to Sega making the game the debut title of a newly-founded studio, Big Red Button. Just sell the rights to Nintendo already, Sega.

Star Wars Battlefront had all the ingredients of a great game, but it ultimately failed to deliver. It was developed by DICE, the studio known for the Battlefield FPS series, so we were expecting multiplayer gameplay that was at least as in-depth as Battlefield 4 or Hardline. Throw in the Star Wars Battlefront franchise, and we were bound for something both nerdy and groundbreaking, right? With EA looking over DICE's shoulders while trying to finish the game before the theatrical release of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Battlefront ended up being all flash and no substance. Mind you, Battlefront is easily one of the greatest-looking first-person shooters ever made, but it's also one of the shallowest, especially when it comes to the standards set by most conventional FPS games that focus on online multiplayer.

Battlefront's Metascore average isn't bad based on a few dozen critics' reviews, but thousands of players voiced their displeasure with the game, resulting in significantly lower user scores on Metacritic. This makes sense because there's a lot to like and love at first glance, but very little meat once you actually spend some time with it. Millions of gamers fell for those gorgeous graphics and Star Wars nostalgia, especially in the midst of anticipation for Episode VII. But when you look past the shiny coating and all the familiar beeps and blasts, you'll realize that Battlefront offered much less content than most current multiplayer FPS titles, especially when you factor in that Battlefront avoided the prequel trilogy for its content and didn't feature any kind of story mode at all.

Excluding the tutorials, almost all of Battlefront focuses on online multiplayer. Games like Rainbow Six Siege and Titanfall took similar approaches, but at least they added a ton of content and features to entice your return. Battlefront has a collection of tried-and-true multiplayer modes (along with Walker Assault and Heroes vs. Villains being the two standout features) each with a different Star Wars-y tweak on things, but everything just boils down to the same kind of mid-range firefight, which can get old fast. After playing Battlefront for 30 minutes, you've pretty much experienced all the game has to offer, making this a rent-only blockbuster.

In 2014, all eyes were on Bungie in anticipation of their first post-Halo console game. Given that Bungie revolutionized the first-person shooter genre with Halo, we were hoping for something absolutely groundbreaking with Destiny. Shocked to hear that Activision had invested a staggering $500 million, gamers expected MMORPG-like elements as online players participated in missions and quests in shared worlds. While it went on to have one of the greatest video game franchise launches ever for a new IP, however, Destiny didn't necessarily deliver when it came to the hype. Critics greeted it with initially positive reviews, but fan letdown set in once the bullets stopped flying, with an underwhelming amount of end game content that wouldn't flush out until subsequent paid expansions were released.

While Master Chief's story was awesome and filled with twists and turns, Destiny's was pretty bland. Its script was filled with unexplained jargon you had to look up on the Destiny website or through its tie-in app, as it didn't have an in-game codex explaining its abstract terminology. It didn't help that the voice you heard the most throughout the game was a bored-sounding Peter Dinklage of Game of Thrones fame as your companion, Ghost (which was ultimately replaced). Destiny's repetitive gameplay just boils down to exploring the same five or so stages (each a different planet) over and over again to finish different (but essentially similar) missions. Even the weaponry was a letdown: hundreds of different guns are offered, but nearly every gun of each type (rifles, revolvers, shotguns, etc.) looks and sounds the same. We were hoping for a Borderlands-esque level of variety (and personality), and Destiny did not quite deliver.

Enter the Matrix is just another grain of sand in the desert of bad movie-based games but, whew, were we hoping for something better. This title was a tie-in for the release of the second film in the series, The Matrix Reloaded, and received similarly mixed reactions from fans and critics. The game was rushed to launch the same week that the film hit theaters, and it shows. Any game set in The Matrix has some pretty simple expectations: play as Neo, Morpheus, and Trinity while fighting with stylized moves and slowed-down action sequences. Instead, you end up playing as Niobe or her fairly silent wingman, Ghost. These two characters had very little significance in The Matrix: Reloaded, and Ghost was pretty much just a background character for Niobe's minor scenes.

The third-person shooting/fighting had a lot of promise, especially when you factor in your bullet time abilities to dodge and shoot in slow motion, but that unfortunately gets old really fast. We still have nightmares over those Logos ship sequences. Sure, it was interesting that Enter the Matrix helped tell the side stories of what happened around the events of Reloaded, but that's about all anyone can say for it. It's sad to say, but Max Payne 2, which came out the same year, was a vastly superior Matrix-inspired game.

Mighty No. 9 seemed like it could be the spiritual successor to Mega Man we were all waiting for, or at the very least one that would meet our (very high) expectations from creator Keiji Inafune. Unfortunately, it dashed hopes and dreams with a lackluster end product that combined poor game mechanics, boring boss encounters, and simplistic graphics into one massive letdown. Plagued by multiple delays after its successful Kickstarter campaign in 2013, its development fell into a downward spiral that would eventually find players losing faith that the game would ever be released at all.

Comcept's mishandling of the Kickstarter campaign was partly to blame, and the fact that it was already being tapped for a live-action and animated series before it even reached players was frustrating beyond belief. It led players to believe (rightfully, it seems) that Inafune and Comcept were being spread too thin, greed winning out over quality. The company's overall failure to deliver also meant that it didn't even meet its Kickstarter goal. When it was revealed that Comcept actually already had a publisher funding its creation, that only cemented fans' ire further. It didn't help that the Mighty No. 9 gameplay was on par with an independently-funded title rather than a massively hyped release with a large budget.

Battlefield Hardline was an interesting departure from the series, trying something very different from its predecessors. Instead of focusing on some sort of war or conflict, it was hyped as a gritty fight between cops and robbers and it simply couldn't deliver. It ended up being a serviceable riff on the trope, but fell short of the typically high mark established by previous Battlefield games. In fact, "serviceable" tended to be the theme for the entire game, as it was rife with police procedural narrative elements, collectibles and other bizarre design choices that just didn't resonate with critics or consumers. As a result it withered away into obscurity, leaving Battlefield to explore other venues.