(bright tones) - [Falcon] 2023 has been
a monster year for gaming, but it's also given us some real monsters, some doozies if you will, and today, we're gonna talk about how
mistakes have been made. Hi, folks, it's Falcon
and today on Gameranx, 10 games that sucked in 2023. We're gonna start off with
number 10, an obvious one, one that you will not be
surprised by, one bet, it's "Skull Island: Rise of Kong," published by the appropriately
titled Game Mill. I'm sure you realize this won't
be the only Game Mill game we cover today, I probably
didn't even need to say that, but same goes for just
everything wrong with this game. You see it for about a second and you realize that, oh,
this one's got problems. So besides being full of bugs and stuff, which that's pretty normal
for games now, sadly, it's also not full of
basically anything else. This is one boring ass game. You play as interchangeable
members of the Kong family from time to time, which
the way I worded that made it sound way more
interesting than it is. It's got really, really bad graphics. It's one of those games where
you can say like, oh, hey, remember the Dreamcast and
how it looks better than this? It proves that just pushing
a decent amount of polygons 'cause I know that these Kong
models have got more polygons than anything from the '90s, but it shows that that doesn't matter. It doesn't matter at all. There's gotta be some flare,
some style, some art design. You know, speaking of the arc design, remember how we can't really tell if Kong is supposed to be big or small because there's big
trees and little trees? There's various things that indicate that he is a normal gorilla in scale, and there's various things that indicate he is a
large gorilla in scale. It is not consistent with its art design, which it's probably,
you know, reused assets, which isn't automatically bad, but there's just nothing here. There's some platforming
elements, they're bad. There's some combat, it's, I guess, okay for about five or six seconds. Once you've cleared
through that first enemy and gone onto the second though,
you know the extent of its, you know, capabilities. Also, the game is very short. It's two, three hours,
and that'll be $40 please. One weird thing I thought
was I saw a lot of reviews that criticize the replay
value on this game. And yeah, there is a lack of replay value, but it's because it's a game that sucks. Why would you replay a game that sucks? I don't care what kinds of things they throw into the post
game to keep you coming back. I don't care if there
is or isn't a post game when the game is bad, you
know, and it is, it's very bad. The one saving grace is
that a lot of the Kong faces are beyond hilarious. I'm surprised they have not
been bigger memes, honestly. And number nine is "The Day Before," which, I mean, we've talked
about "The Day Before." I would highly recommend
you go to our videos about "The Day Before"
for a a full breakdown of the problems here, but even when things seem to
be going right for this game, I always had that Spidey
sense in the back of my head, saying, ah, you know, we do our big game roundups every month. Go back to that for the month and you'll see that I'm kind
of, well, it's coming out. Kind of surprised by that, but also, I don't know about this one. And that turned out to be very kind, a very generous, preemptive
kind of expression of nervousness regarding this game. Like where do you start?
The technical problems? There's a ton of technical problems. Well, let's say there's
no technical problems. "The Day Before" is
still "The Day Before." The gameplay Mechanic's not good. It's an extraction shooter
and not a good one. The shooting is not fun. The
extraction, also not fun. Got a bad user interface. The shooting doesn't
feel particularly good in terms of feedback, and every once in a while,
you could find Gigantor. I know I said assume that
there are no glitches. It's still "The Day Before," but I'm just gonna say this
is probably the best part of "The Day Before," this one, this is an all-time greatest glitch ever. This is the game's identity
as far as I'm concerned. It is in no way shocking that the company took the money and ran on
this one, like it's bad. And number eight is "The
Walking Dead: Destinies" Hey, it's Game Mill. I told you we'd cover more
than one Game Mill game. It's almost like they were
just churning them things out indiscriminately, like some
kind of mill for games, eh? In terms of complexity, I do have to say there's a lot more going on in
"The Walking Dead: Destinies" than there is in "Kong
Skull Island" thing. That doesn't mean it's good though. This is a very repetitive game. They throw in a bunch of these wonky, goofy little decision systems at you to make it seem like there's
a story, and to be fair, you can use it to do
some interesting things, but it also kind of doesn't have particularly real consequences. Like if you don't kill a
character that's, you know, killed in the mainline story, just usually end up filling
up some other character's role later rather than being, you know, somehow a new story branch where
different things happen. Combat's bad, maybe a
little better than "Kong," but not by virtue of it feeling better. In terms of the melee, I
think "Skull Island" feels a little bit better than this. However, this has firearms
and the firearms are, oh, they are respite for a
few moments until you realize that they don't get better,
then they're just kind of dull. The AI's bad, the graphics are bad, the performance, weirdly
enough, despite the simplicity of the graphics is also bad. Oh, you know what else
is bad? Them cut scenes. And I'm not just talking about how there's no animation. I'm talking about how bad
they are. They are bad. Sometimes laughably bad. The lack of animation
certainly contributes to that, but they're not acted
well, they're very awkward, and then you throw in that animation so there's no actual
action for the most part. I mean, a couple of scenes
are weirdly animated, but most aren't. Oh yeah, and smoke is
the same thing as grass when it comes to stealth. I know that, you know, it's
easy to criticize games for making tall grass essentially
an invincibility thing, but smoke is much weirder as that. And they got it here as that. And number seven is "Redfall." All right, so now we're starting to get into our legitimate
disappointments. "Redfall" is a game that Arcane Studios clearly didn't want to
make, and I called it. There's a few deep dives out there now about the creation of this game. And it ended up with a lot of people just leaving the studio straight up. It has irrevocably changed the makeup of Arcane Studios Austin. They're no longer the
developers behind, you see, what this thing is, is
some suit said, hey, you gotta make a live service game. All right, that's what you gotta do. You're Arcane Studios,
you made "Dishonored," you made "Pray," you made "Death Loop." You guys are frigging amazing. If you make a live service game, it'll be infinite money for us forever. And they were like, all right, let's come up with ideas for this. And they're like, okay, vampires in town. That's kind of cool.
That sounds kind of cool. And then they realized really quickly that it was not possible for
them to make the kind of game that they wanted to make and
have it be a live service game. So basically morale was really
bad and a lot of people left. The result is this empty
mapped, weird combat, bad AI muck game. Like from time to time,
there's something cool in it, like the vampires I like, they
got pretty decent designs. I guess that's kind of it. I really don't remember a
lot of other good stuff. This game, it's sad that it's sucks 'cause honestly, it could
have been really cool if it had just been
designed as an Arcane game, but you know. At number six is "Wanted: Dead," a game that has a little bit
more mixed of a reception than some of the games we have
discussed up to this point. Kind of a throwback action
game. Goofy as hell. This is one of those games
that I find it hard to hate. It sucks, like hard, but
I kind of love it too. It is firmly set in that
so bad, it's good area. Everything about this is great. In terms of game play, eh, there's some all right
stuff in the combat. It's pretty repetitive though, and there's elements of
it checkpoint placement and other weirdness that, well, they firmly stop it from being good. The story is fricking bizarre. I mean, if there is a game
that could've been directed by Tommy Wiseau, the "Room" guy, oh boy, it's "Wanted: Dead." There's a weird charm to
it, but it's very weird. And that charm does not come from the fact that it's very well made at all, even a little, I don't know. In no way do I feel
even a little bit weird about including this on a
list of games that sucked. However, I also like it with
a lot of obvious caveats. And number five is "Crime
Boss: Rockay City," a game that sold itself
on a star-studded cast. And yeah, that's about
what it has going for it. I'm not gonna lie and say it doesn't have at least somewhat of a unique charm to it. Maybe the kinda weirdness you expect from a cheap B movie, not
quite so bad, it's good. It kind of knows what it is and it embodies that in terms
of its aesthetic choices. However, the game sucks. The AI for regular enemies,
for police, it's bad. And when I say bad, I
don't just mean it's weak. It is weak, but it often
flat out does things that remind you, hey, there
are games from 20 years ago that did AI good. It's one of those, it's
got that feeling to it. I mean, it basically
tries to be this unique, rogue-like crime game,
but it falls very short. When you have a game that just sucks, it doesn't really matter how fun and charming the celebrities are, and there are times when
they're uniquely very much that. I mean, you know, it's
"Crime Boss: Rockay City" the whole time, that's for sure, but everything else about it just sucks. Like it looks like it should be a "Grand Theft Auto" style game, right? And the marketing kind of
leaned into that a little bit. It was like, oh, "Cyberpunk"
wasn't that first person future, neon, "Grand Theft
Auto" you expected it to be, so "Crime Boss: Rockay City," except it's not even anything like that. It's a mission based rogue-like-ish game. And number four is "Lord
of the Rings: Gollum." I mean, it's certainly wasn't
the only high profile game of the year that was so bad
it caused the studio to close, but it's certainly the one that is set in the most beloved IP that no one wants to see ruined. This is a game about Gollum
and it's not an action game, so you'd think, well, probably a good idea to explore the character of Gollum. You would think that, yes,
that would be a thought. You're using your brain there. Yeah, it's not that. You got a real bad, buggy crap
fest where nothing happens. You don't explore the character Gollum. You're supposed to explore a bunch of really bland
environments, lot of bugs, a lot of technical problems. Don't really know what
justified the length of the development cycle on this one. It very much feels like a game that was developed in about eight months, and I'm talking like, look,
feel, objectives, AI, game loop. There's nothing that seems
fleshed out or well done. There's a couple of all
right visual moments. Hooray. And number three is "Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3" campaign. Not the multiplayer, the
multiplayer actually pretty great, like the multiplayer, it's fine. And there's aspects of the "Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3" campaign that are nice. The production values
are freaking incredible. And in terms of the
visuals, the animation, the actor performances,
just everything about it looks, feels, and presents very well. But I mean, there's two prongs to what's wrong with this campaign. First off, it's very linear, and I am not somebody who
normally criticizes linear as a problem. When a studio decides to go linear, it usually means they're
going to use the resources to make the best possible
linear progression of events they can. And that's not what happened here, at least outside of production values. It's kind of just dull, uninspired, doesn't have a lot of depth, very simple narrative, weirdly
simple narrative, honestly. And then the second prong
is the gameplay mechanics are pretty muddled. A lot of the time, you're kind of feeling like you're supposed to choose
between stealth and combat and you're not really sure
what you're supposed to do. And not in an open-ended way. Like I said, this game is very linear. If either was a good choice, this probably wouldn't be
the same kind of a problem, but it's not like that. You are supposed to do one of them, and it's almost never clear which one. I mean, it's just in terms of gameplay, it's not cohesive at all. And in terms of narrative,
it is not that interesting. Beautiful, absolutely beautiful game. It's just very, very clear that that's where the effort went. And number two is "Forspoken," a game that has a mechanic that's awesome. They have this really cool
way of traversing a map. It's just fluid and cool in a way. I don't know if I've ever
seen anything exactly like it. I've seen things in the area of it, but that's kinda where the positives end. I almost don't even understand
why that's in the game. It doesn't really figure into anything. It doesn't figure into the story. The traversal just doesn't
matter to the character or the stakes that are established, which are supposedly significant,
but don't feel that way. I mean, so I kinda wanna make this point. The lore of the world in "Forspoken" is actually kind of cool, but if you've ever seen a movie with overly expository dialogue where they're just like
constantly telling the viewer what's going on, that's
what this game feels like, so it kind of squanders
all that decent lore. Really, squandered is
probably the right word for "Forspoken." They squandered a twist,
squandered a parkour mechanic, just a lot of squandering going on. Also, the name, "Forspoken"
on the surface level sounds like a decent descriptor, 'cause the word means to
cast a spell over or enchant. And you can actually apply that to the story in more than one way. Firstly, this woman from
New York gets sucked into a dimension with magic. Secondly, she is bewitched
by immoderate praise, another definition of forspeak, and that leads to the twist ultimately. But it's squandered is the
right word, squandered. That, and holy hell, I am a millennial, but wow, am I tired of people
talking like millennials. Or at least how millennials
supposedly talk. All this quippy ass
dialogue, enough of it, stop. We don't really talk
like that. What is that? - I just moved shit with my freaking mind. - [Falcon] And finally at
number one, it's "Payday 3." This one is a lot more
painful to talk about than any of the other ones, in my opinion. The rest of them are, well,
some of them are disappointing, but most of them are very
obviously what they are. "Payday 3," on the other hand, is a big improvement
in gunplay and stealth. In terms of gameplay, it's the most enjoyable "Payday" game yet. It's great, the combat is a lot more fun. The stealth is a lot more
fluid. It feels more flexible. I mean, there's a lot
of good to talk about, but the problem is, at
least back when it launched, I don't really know exactly
how it's going right now, but when it was launched, there's
some pretty bad AI issues. The mission objectives
are pretty uninspired and there's not a whole
lot of different heists. On top of that, there's a fair
amount of technical jitters and weirdness, but they came in addition to massive server issues. A lot of games launch with
some bad server stuff, but it lasted long
beyond the launch window. This is a game that, everything
about it should be good and as a basis for a game, it is good, but the fact that it's not
everything it should be makes it suck. I am not ruling out the idea that this could one day not suck, and that is probably the only
title on this list like that. In fact, it's even likely that one day, "Payday 3" will be good,
it just ain't today. And that's all for today. Leave a comment, let
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