Recently I've discovered that finishing newly-released games has become a chore. I'm just not into what the industry releases as a final product even though all the previews and buzz get me hyped up for release. Whatever the reason, the following games released in 2010 have turned out to be duds at best and utter failures at worst.
Mafia II
Everyone who remembers the thread about this game on the old Mob site is probably scratching their heads right now. This was the game to watch for in 2010 as far as I was concerned. Mafia: The City of Lost Heaven is a PC classic that set the bar high for a sandbox action game. It took everything that GTA III did right and not only did it better but also managed to marry that gameplay with a cinematically-paced epic mob story. The characters were real, and you explored a living world while building a crime empire that collapsed due to human drama.
Eight years later, Mafia II somehow managed to get everything wrong. Despite all the advancements in sandboxes since Mafia[/i, the game ignored most of it and stuck to a highly linear gameplay model. The world served as background scenery for the sequences in which you drove from cutscene to gunfight and back to cutscene. [i]Mafia II'scharacters, rather than being motivated by human emotions, did things because they fulfilled the requirements of clichés and/or provided the impetus for a change of scenery. Worst of all, the all-too-familiar cover-based gameplay was included, slowing the action down and making it far too easy.
I got about three hours in and shut it off for the first and last time.
Victoria II
This one I have less to say about. In a nutshell, I'd like to know who thought it would be a good idea to create a century-spanning grand-strategy game where more than half of your success depends on managing your economy, and then have the economy break within a decade of the starting date. They better patch this thing until it's perfect.
Mafia II
Everyone who remembers the thread about this game on the old Mob site is probably scratching their heads right now. This was the game to watch for in 2010 as far as I was concerned. Mafia: The City of Lost Heaven is a PC classic that set the bar high for a sandbox action game. It took everything that GTA III did right and not only did it better but also managed to marry that gameplay with a cinematically-paced epic mob story. The characters were real, and you explored a living world while building a crime empire that collapsed due to human drama.
Eight years later, Mafia II somehow managed to get everything wrong. Despite all the advancements in sandboxes since Mafia[/i, the game ignored most of it and stuck to a highly linear gameplay model. The world served as background scenery for the sequences in which you drove from cutscene to gunfight and back to cutscene. [i]Mafia II'scharacters, rather than being motivated by human emotions, did things because they fulfilled the requirements of clichés and/or provided the impetus for a change of scenery. Worst of all, the all-too-familiar cover-based gameplay was included, slowing the action down and making it far too easy.
I got about three hours in and shut it off for the first and last time.
Victoria II
This one I have less to say about. In a nutshell, I'd like to know who thought it would be a good idea to create a century-spanning grand-strategy game where more than half of your success depends on managing your economy, and then have the economy break within a decade of the starting date. They better patch this thing until it's perfect.