Fallout 4. Fallout was finished. We did it. Nv was a doctoral thesis on everything 'fallout' was or had to say. Even the dlc path literally ended with either 'you can't take the gold with you' and walking away from this beautiful fucked up hauntological horror ruin made out of misguided obsessive love or just nuking shit again and starting from nothing.

fear 2 and 3 could never really live up to the original. 2 sort of watered things down, 3 was bizarre plot wise, like a buddy shooter with the primary antagonist?

I almost feel obliged to bring up halo 4 and the rest of the 343 fever dream of games. also tiberian twilight, what kind of shit was that?!

Max Payne 3 was really disappointing compared to 1&2.

Phantasy Star Online 2 never hit me like PSO, maybe it's the pace of the game

Overwatch 2

Assassin’s Creed III never clicked for me, and I remember buying the Collector’s Edition day 1 - after enjoying the hell out of AC1, 2, Brotherhood and Revelations.

I ended up enjoying both AC4 and Rogue afterwards, so 🤷🏻‍♂️

This is me pulling from my youth, but at the time it released I really disliked Jak 2 (sequel to Jak & Daxter). The first one was a wonderful open world action platformer, and while there was a bit of that in the sequel, a ton of it was this weird GTA-esque city map complete with a crime star system. I remember really hating those parts and they just went on and on.

Command and Conquer 4. The game that killed the franchise.

Picture things after C&C3. Two factions, GDI (America, basically) and Nod (evil religious dudes) were busy fighting a bunch. The Scrin (aliens) show up and start blowing things up. It is discovered that the aliens are making special structures of unknown purpose. GDI gets to work with blowing them up, but Nod helps the aliens save one of the structures. It is rendered impervious to harm when the game ends.

Then, there's the C&C3 expansion. The fancy alien device under GDI's control is stolen back by Nod, on the orders of their leader, Kane.

Quite a setup for C&C4, right? There was a first person shooter sequel (called Tiberium) on the pipeline, but it was cancelled. Wait some more time, and C&C4 is announced and released.

What did we get?

• The base building system used for every installment is abandoned in favor of a mobile base system. You can zoom around in your mobile base and make units from that. Static structures are gone. Awful.
• The story is incredibly short. Only a few hours.
• One character (James) is a huge pile of shit, and fucks shit up at the end regardless of whether you side with GDI or Nod.
• Nothing on the alien plotline.
• The video at the end looks like it was shot with an extra just outside EA's offices.

Ridiculous. I'm still upset about it to this day.

Borderlands

• 1: Decent
• 2: Best in the series
• Pre-Sequel: Playable Clap-Trap is the only redeeming factor.
• 3: Solid gameplay, shit narrative
• 4 Shit.

Saints row 3.

2 had just the right balance of funny and serious.

3 felt cobbled together as a series of lolsorandom ideas without an actual soul in them, cut out fleshed out characters you grew to love in 2 to make space for terribly acted cardboard cutouts voices by meme-famous people like Hulk Hogan and Sasha grey, neither of whom aged particularly well as a casting choice, and didn't really have anything seriously above 2 except for the raw gameplay.

This isn't from personal experience because its reputation is so bad I avoided it entirely, but apparently Mass Effect 3. The fan backlash was so strong they apparently had to retcon the ending, LOL!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_Effect_3_ending_controversy

(You know it's bad when it's infamous enough to warrant its own Wikipedia article.)

The three Spyro the Dragon games on the Playstation were all fantastic. The first Spyro game on the PS2 (notably not made by Insomniac) was terrible.

Might get shot for this, but Quake 2 never really did the thing for me compared to Quake 1. Weapons and enemies all just felt a bit sluggish, and level design was a bit confusing at times.

The last of us 2.

I liked the first game, the twist at the end was a bit iffy, but it was understandable from a character perspective (Joel was never a good guy, and him deciding to kill a bunch of fireflies to save his psuedo-daughter from an iffy medical procedure makes sense to his character).

The second game was fantastic mechanically, and a train wreck everywhere else.

I understood the story they tried to tell, and they might have even told that story decently.

But it was absolutely not what I signed up for, I went from a coming of age (Ellie) / found family (Both) / redemption (Joel) story, and went right into a gritty "the price of revenge" story that was just so emotionally exhausting. Half the story was spent on a character I didnt care about, the timeline was confusing, and most of all, I didnt want to play a game about Ellie (and Joel's brother) descending into emotionally driven monsters who sacrifice everything for revenge.

Its hard to say the game was "bad," since mechanically it was good, and the story had depth. The confusing timeline wasnt great, but was survivable if the game was otherwise good. It was just such a tonal whiplash, and was such a slog to get through that it killed the whole series for me.

God of War III. Good gameplay, but what the hell was that story? Kratos kills everyone (including his own father) in an unneccessarily sadistic way, turns the whole world into chaos and ruin and then offs himself with his own sword.

That felt like reading a school shooter fanfiction.

Fun fact: He also pushes a helpless nude woman into a door mechanism that kills her. Just...why?

No wonder they made a prequel after that and then rebooted the series.

Controversial take: doom 1 is better than doom 2. Doom 2 has a bunch of awful levels.

I didn't really like doom2016 or eternal that much, either. Too much start-and-stop.

Guilty Gear Strive.

Plus R is my favorite fighting game. Xrd I hated because they fucked with my character (Zato/Eddie) but I could tell it's a fun game…

Strive just fucking sucks. The irony is I did vibe a little more with Zato in Strive than I did in Xrd, but WTF was everything else in this damn game… they just kinda ripped away anything that made characters unique in favor of standardized systemic depth and breadth.

Less unique moves, less unique combos, even animations feel too samey compared to Plus R or Xrd… I hate it. Everything just feels needlessly homogeneous.

Even the game's ideas suck. Like, WTF is Zabubu…

Every time I give it a shot all I'm thinking is: why the fuck am I not playing Plus R instead?

Metal Gear Solid 5.

How can you just ditch your main character's voice actor? As a Metal Gear completionist, how do I even play this traditionally linear game now that it's open world and packed with repetitive side missions? Why am I building a strut base and hiring staff that I magically airlift to a chopper out on the battlefield? Overall a disappointment, not because of bad graphics or bad controls or bad gameplay, just a hodgepodge of content that was too much of a departure from the format of the first 4 linear games. I never finished it and probably never will. I know Konami threw multiple wrenches in Kojima's gears during development but I feel the overall direction was still flawed from the onset. Open World was just so popular at that time and maybe they forced it on Kojima, who knows. I know he didn't want to make a 5th game anyway so I'm gonna just pretend it never happened and be happy with the first 4 and the PSP titles.

Probably a bit niche of a game series, but Dungeon Defenders. It's an Action RPG / Tower Defense hybrid that I loved as a kid. And all the sequels kinda sucked for one reason or another. I've played all of them a little bit too much, so I'm going to go into way too much detail here lol.

The first game was one of my all-time favorites on the xbox 360 as a kid (which is kinda funny because it has like 100x the content on PC). The game was riddled with cheaters and hacked items, but damn did I have fun anyway. My friends were practically begging me to play anything else when they came over to hang out.

Then they made Dungeon Defenders II and charged $20 for it in early access. I bought the game in a heartbeat because I loved the first one so much. But it just turned into an always-online, live-service game without any actual story, that forces you to buy multiple microtransactions for necessary QoL features in order to play the game in the way it's intended. Eventually the game went free-to-play and pushed that model even harder. Its a shame, because underneath all the bullshit it looks like a fun enough sequel.

Then Dungeon Defenders: Awakened came out. Half sequel, half remake of the original (time travel shenanigans), it had a lot of potential and it's one of only two games I've ever backed on Kickstarter. The game is basically a modernized Dungeon Defenders, with some new content and a boat load of QoL additions. They even release all future content for free instead of as DLC like the original, so its a one-time purchase (and very strange coming from the same studio that runs DD2). Unfortunately, it was too damn similar to the original and didn't do enough on its own. DD1 had a community dev team adding new maps and content for over 10 years, so why the hell would you buy the new game who's original content amounts to like 6 new maps? The game did eventually get more content, and is honestly not a bad purchase at this point imo, but it could never catch up to the original.

Funny enough, the original DD1 started getting new DLC again a few years ago, so all three of these games are being developed simultaneously by different teams despite being sequels to the last.

Dragon Age 2. Origins was so good. Then... Bleh.

Possibly a bit obscure, but I absolutely loved the racing game "pod". "pod 2" released on the Dreamcast and I bought it without hesitation. It sucked.

Life is Strange Double Exposure. Why did Max's powers change wtf?!

Gauntlet (2014) if you count it as a sequel to Legends and Dark Legacy, is a big disappointment. I think simple games can be fine but this is just too simple. Legends just barely had enough depth to be good, and then they go and make something simpler. I had so much fun with local co-op Gauntlet Legends on Dreamcast.

Deus Ex Human Revolution might be the best game that I hate lol (I guess sort of not an answer to OP, since Invisible War is maybe worse)

It's just not close to as good as the original and it still gets so much praise and so many more fans. They dropped so much of the strategy and depth of Deus Ex. It doesn't hold up nearly as well on repeat playthroughs.

Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter. After 4 great fantasy RPGs they dropped that post-apocalyptic groundhog day turd, and the series essentially died.

Fallout76. Thankfully never paid for it. Huge fallout fan. Lack of NPCs was a big part for me. Than there was hackers deleting your progress.

Ohhh, this will probably be a controversial take, but I am going to frame if to "most disappointing" instead of least favourite.

Batman Arkham City.

Firstly, it is still a great game. I am not stupid enough to say it's bad. And it is better than Origins and Knight.

But, Asylum is such a beautiful and intricate game with some of the best level design. It is an almost perfect Metroidvania. And then they jumped to the open world for the rest of the games.

That jump, doesn't particularly add anything, and while Gotham looks great, it is mostly empty and skipped over as you glide and hook to the next indoor section. Outside of some challenges and riddler trophies, it actually is just terrible padding of low level mobs for the most part.

The reason I chose City over knight is precedent, that first jump to open world for me really reduced how much I was invested in the world/areas of the game.

I still love it, and the improvement to combat and gadgets are great, but Asylum will always be king of the Batman games(City is a close but disappointing 2nd)

Parasite Eve 3, or should I say 3rd Birthday.

The first 2 games were sequels to a sci fi horror novel. The title doesn't actually have "parasite Eve" in it because the rumour is they lost the rights to the book and any references to ideas from the book. So they couldn't mention the titular Eve or mitochondria.

Instead they made a story about time travel and mysterious unrelated monsters.

No idea why they bothered making it.

Halo 4. Never was big on Halo and hadn't really played past Halo 1 until recently getting the MCC, and then I binged on all of them. The main series story was ok, despite feeling slightly more incoherent with each game. Even the spin-offs were ok games. Pushed through and finished Halo 3 and thought it was a fairly satisfying ending to the plot, only to find that they're reviving the chief. Again. With Cortana. Again. And guess what, she's going rogue. Again. I just couldn't do it, stopped then and there.

Oh and Far Cry 6. That one can fuck right off.

Banjo-Tooie. You have every ability from the first game off rip. Sounds good on paper, makes more sense than losing everything for some reason. But, it also makes the move set feel bloated, makes the devs reuse old gimmicks to keep the old abilities relevant, and makes the new abilities feel less interesting and very situational. Overall, it makes the game hard to play because the rewards for doing so just aren't that interesting.

Since all the big ones have been covered - Total Annihilation Kingdoms. (yes I'm old.) It wasn't made by the same team and took TA and dumbed it down, when it could have been made more complex. Thankfully Supreme Commander and Planetary Annihilation took the reigns. (although those never stuck with me as much as the original TA did.)