Every year, we play a few disappointing games, and here’s a list of some of the biggest gaming letdowns of 2023.
It most certainly has been a year, and there has been gaming masterpiece after gaming masterpiece. Sadly, for every Baldur’s Gate 3, there is also a broken Gollum. Here’s a list of some of the most disappointing releases of 2023, from lukewarm mechanics to bug-filled glitch fests. They will be listed in no particular order.
Avatar: The Last Airbender – Quest for Balance
Avatar: The Last Airbender is a phenomenal piece of animation that was made with love and passion. The show’s creators made a cartoon that, to this day, is loved by millions, and what better to honor this golden piece of animation than with a terrible licensed game? It cannot be overstated just how soulless this game feels; characters don’t act like themselves, story beats don’t align with the shows, miniscule enemy variety, and those horrible animations.
You would think a game based on a piece of animation would try to include the artform, but no, characters run like they have soiled their pants, and “cutscenes” are nothing but a wall of text narrated to you in passing. This game feels like it was made to insult the series rather than honor it.
Skull Island: Rise of Kong
Would you believe us if we told you this game was made in a year!! That might come as a surprise, as it looks like it was cobbled together in a few months. Game Mill has successfully made a game so under-baked and half-finished that it somehow fails on every conceivable front.
The game runs terrible, looks terrible, plays terrible, and heck, even the audio sounds terrible. Tie-in games like Skull Island: Rise of Kong were terrible in the 90s and 2000s, but Skull Island has really set a new standard on how garbage these games are.
The Lord of the Rings: Gollum
Are you familiar with the Butterfly effect? It seems after the release of this broken mess, it would cause a giant snowball effect, which would lead to even more terrible releases as the year went on, but even then, Gollum shines bright on its glitchy throne of trash. Gollum went through a severe cycle of development hell.
And what came from it was an unplayable mess, filled with terrible platforming, dated graphics, stiff character animations, and probably the creepiest version of Gollum to grace our eyes. The Lord of the Rings: Gollum is a game that shouldn’t have existed and should’ve’ been burned in the flames of Mordor. On top of that, the game’s publisher, Nacon, released an AI generated apology without the knowledge of the developers.
The Walking Dead: Destinies
This year was a grand feast for gamers who hate themselves because, in the year 2023, we didn’t get ONE terrible Game Mill game; we got TWO terrible Game Mill games! If Skull Island: Rise of Kong wasn’t bad enough, Game Mill decided to ruin another franchise by throwing out The Walking Dead: Destinies! It’s a game so pointless it shouldn’t have been released.
We are given the chance to change the trajectory of The Walking Dead’s’ story in a dramatic way that actually has no consequence. If the terrible writing and voice acting weren’t enough to throw you off, then the absolutely terrible AI will. Zombies just run toward you with no care or acknowledgment of any of their surroundings, making these encounters less scary and far more annoying.
Stray Souls
2023 was certainly a time for both terrible Silent Hill games and terrible Silent Hill clones like Straysouls. Stray Souls is a prime example of why you don’t build a game’s entire identity on being kind of like Silent Hill. Straysouls is an AA asset flip, literally – you can go onto the Unreal Engine Marketplace and find most of the assets used in the game.
If that wasn’t bad enough, the game’s writing certainly is. The dialogue sounds like it was written by a person who has never interacted with another breathing human. Characters either react to situations or are just far too casual. If that wasn’t bad enough, the developer behind the game is also just a terrible person with a long and well-documented history of racism and transphobia.
Smurfs Kart
The go-kart racing game genre is a pretty easy genre to get into, especially since Mario Kart and the kart-racing boom of the 2000s pretty much established the genre. You would think that in the year 2023, studios would be able to do something new and revolutionary with the genre, in particular, a studio with years of experience making racing games, but no.
Smurf Kart is as generic as they come; the game is incredibly simple and bare-bones to the point that there is almost nothing to it; it is just a kart game with the Smurfs in it, that’s it. Understandably, the game is targeted towards a younger audience, but even then, it is so simple that even a child would be offended by its simplicity.
SILENT HILL: Ascension
We didn’t think it was possible to release a Silent Hill worse than Silent Hill: Homecoming, but somehow, Konami really knocked it out of the park. Silent Hill Ascension is less a game and more a 2-hour long B-movie broken up occasionally with toddlers’ puzzles and pointless microtransactions that do nothing for the game.
Even though there are puzzles, how persistent the micro transactions are cannot be overstated. At this point in time, it’s incredibly clear that Konami’s’ return to gaming was too good to be true, and they would have done less damage to Silent Hill by not making another game than creating this… thing. They seriously canceled P.T. just to release Silent Hill Ascension.
Starfield
As the years have gone by, it’s become more and more abundantly clear that Bethesda peaked at Skyrim and has never been able to top it. It seems that with each new release from the studio, Bethesda loses more of its charm, and there is no better example of this than Starfield.
Starfield was a truly ambitious project, which was meant to give players an entire solar system to explore and try to recapture that wonder of exploration that made Skyrim so popular. Instead, what we got was an empty and boring half-baked experience, filled with recycled assets and numerous bugs and glitches, that shows that Bethesda’s’ best days are behind them, and not even new Microsoft many can fix that.
Immortals of Aveum
When people asked for something new from EA, they meant an entirely new venture into a new genre, not just reskinned Battlefield with magic. To say that Immortals of Aveum was a disappointment is like saying that fire is hot. EA seems to be averse to trying anything new and will, every once in a while, throw out a “new” title, knowing that they will just kill it off in a few months.
As stated earlier, Immortals of Aveum is just an incredibly generic shooter but with magic tacked on, generic characters, generic gameplay, and a generic story. Immortals of Aveum put less effort into it than EA put into trying not to seem as greedy as possible.
The Day Before
The Day Before is less of a game and more of a heavily marketed train wreck. The game was promised to be a huge open-world zombie multiplayer survival game, and instead, it slithered out as a buggy and unplayable mess.
It’s seriously surprising that Fantastic, the developers of the game, didn’t cancel the project instead of shipping probably the most disastrous release of the entirety of 2023, which is saying a lot, considering it was competing with the likes of both Gollum and Skull Island: Rise of Kong. Hopefully, all who purchased this “game” will be pretty refunded.
