We like having banger after banger after banger. Unfortunately, things don’t always work out this way, which is why we’ve had the difficult decision to pick our top six most disappointing games of 2024—stay tuned for supreme heartbreak.
It’s easy to talk about the best games of 2024, but many like to leave it there. No, we need to talk about these things and remind you it’s not all roses. 2024 has had stinkers too, and I’d rather forget about the outright worst games, and fixate on the releases people were excited about, but it left them down in the dumps.
Like a bed-ridden Santa Claus on Christmas Eve, here’s our carefully selected assortment of most disappointing games in 2024 that didn’t deliver.
Most Disappointing Games of 2024
Concord
I feel Concord’s significance will still echo a decade or two from now. When I first played the Concord beta, I genuinely thought to myself, “This is pretty solid, but nothing special.” I reiterated these comments to my peers, and I didn’t think Concord would last long, but I didn’t think I would be as right as I was.
Concord’s core gunplay mechanics are solid, but it didn’t do anything special that Overwatch, Valorant, or the now-released Marvel Rivals doesn’t already do. Its content was lacking—as most free-to-play, live-service titles seem to be on release—and the minimal interest in the beta was telling. People didn’t ask for Concord, nobody wishlisted it, and their reluctance to invest time and money is why I now refer to Concord in the past tense—it’s dead.
PlayStation shut Concord down within two weeks of its launch. Its reported $400 million budget makes the shooter a catastrophic failure and one of the worst ever, and developers are likely to learn a lot from Concord’s mistakes for years to come.
Skull and Bones
I put around 20 hours into Skull and Bones, and the moments of genuine enjoyment were fleeting at best. Skull and Bones was first announced in 2017 to much hype and excitement, with players ready for a full-blown, pillaging, and pirating adventure akin to Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag. Instead, Ubisoft ended up making a much more boring version of its own game.
You can’t fight other crews as the action is relegated to cutscenes, harvesting resources can be done from your ship via a simplistic mini-game, and everything about Skull and Bones is uninspired: The story, the gameplay, the lackluster visuals, and the progression. The ill-conceived fast travel system forces you to regularly travel enormous distances on your ship—where very little happens.
Skull and Bones had less than one million players at launch and shows no signs of improving. It started a familiar trend of disappointing AAA games—or AAAA in Skull and Bones’ case—with many games underperforming—such as XDefiant.
Star Wars Outlaws
Oh, look, another Ubisoft game. The festering stink of a Ubisoft open-world lingers all over Star Wars: Outlaws. It looks pretty on the outside, but inside, a hollow, familiar journey awaits. It makes The Force Awakens’ derivative clone of A New Hope look faultless—I do love The Force Awakens, by the way, but still.
Outlaws promises a new story in which we get to be bandits. It’s a novel idea and a welcome one, but throughout Outlaws’ development, trailers, and gameplay reveals, it was hard to shake the feeling we were getting a reskinned Far Cry and Assassin’s Creed entry. Again, by nature, it’s a “good” game, but not one likely to live long in the memory.
Worse still, its lukewarm launch caused Ubisoft’s stock to plummet, and sales underperformed big time. Ultimately, it pales in comparison to EA’s Star Wars Jedi series and shows you need more than an IP to become a true Jedi.
LEGO Horizon Adventures
The LEGO video game franchise has sold millions of copies rehashing a successful formula. Take a popular film series or game, LEGO-ify it, turn it into a collect-a-thon with amusing cutscenes and basic gameplay, and it sells like hotcakes. LEGO’s Horizon Tallneck model is excellent, and little did we know this would prompt a crossover (like Concord) no one was asking for.
On paper, LEGO Horizon Adventures should be a success. I don’t think Horizon gets the praise or adulation it deserves, Aloy is a great hero to follow, and its world is captivating. But when it got the LEGO-ify treatment, people didn’t gravitate toward it. Its OpenCritic rating stands at a decent 71/100—with its “Critics Recommend” score plummeting to a lowly 53%.
This might be a lesson to not stick “LEGO” in front of a franchise and expect gold studs to spew out.
Star Wars: Battlefront Classic Collection
I lost so many hours to Galactic Conquest and Hero Assault in Battlefront II, and when I heard it was getting newer and, hopefully, more polished ports, I was excited to revisit it in 2024—especially after 2017’s dismal reboot disaster. I was all ready to splash out the cash on the Classic Collection, only to study the vehement backlash to its release.
Currently, the Classic Collection has a “Mostly Negative” verdict under its 7,000 “All Reviews” on Steam. The Battlefront games launched with the smallest licks of paint to polish, broken servers, missing modes featured in the original, and sus AI. Curiously, despite the full-price tags, you can actually buy “STAR WARS Battlefront (Classic, 2004)” and “STAR WARS Battlefront II (Classic, 2005)” on Steam for far less than the disastrous collection.
The Star Wars: Battlefront Classic Collection has gone under the radar somewhat, but it can’t escape the grasp of our most disappointing games of 2024 list.
Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League
Admit it, you were getting worried I wasn’t going to include this. How I could not feature Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League—the live-service atrocity pulled from Early Access barely one hour into its launch. Suicide Squad was supposed to be the video game adaptation somewhat based on the movies, only, we have the fascinating plot about killing each member of the Justice League due to Brainiac’s evil influences controlling them and making them evil.
Instead, Kill the Justice League is full of copy-and-paste missions, painfully slow XP grinds, repetitive content, and heinous narrative decisions undermining and destroying Rocksteady’s beautifully molded Arkham universe. I also can’t forgive Suicide Squad for being the last-ever credited role of the legendary Kevin Conroy as Batman—truly lamentable in its own right.
Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League bombed, and is another entry on this list falling short of expectations. Furthermore, it lost Warner Bros. over $200 million—resulting in many Rocksteady layoffs—and Season 4 spells its end within a year.
How did we do? Are there any gaming disappointments in 2024 you consider to be even bigger than these? Let us know your most gut-wrenching disappointments of the year.
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