2012 saw lots of fantastic games arriving on Android, and as such in terms of gaming Android enjoyed a healthy growth. Some of them were original ones, while others were ports from other platforms or classic hits. Anyway, I’ve decided to compile my five most disappointing games that came out in 2012. Just a slight note – disappointing here doesn’t necessarily mean that the game isn’t good, but merely that it turned out to be something lesser than what I expected.
Renaissance Blood THD
Without doubt one of the games I was personally looking forward most to in 2012. In the lead up to the game’s release, the developers never outright mentioned that this was an on-rails shooter. Instead, they referred to it as an FPS game. The graphics was also heavily touted, not the least because it was meant to extract the best out of the Tegra 3 chipset.
Alas, the game launched as an arcade on-rails shooter, had a rather weak storyline, uninspired gameplay, lacked polish for a Tegra 3 exclusive game, had bad voice acting and most of all had terrible and muddy graphics. What didn’t help at all was nonsensical glorification of the game on their Google Play page.
Avengers Initiative
The Avengers movie was pretty good. Hearing that Marvel Studios will be bringing the game to Android in the form of episodic adventures featuring four different heroes beginning with the Hulk was welcome news for both fans and non-fans of the movie who crave for a good mobile game.
But when the game launched finally, everything seemed wrong. Downright lackluster gameplay (who wants an Infinity Blade clone featuring the Hulk?), weak story, utterly repetitive nature of the game, lack of free movement, terrible performance on Android devices in general, a ridiculously huge file size for what it offered and disgraceful implementation of in-app purchases in a premium-ly priced game makes playing Avengers Initiative a thoroughly forgettable experience.
Dead Trigger
I was delighted the moment I got to know Madfinger Games were going to soon be launching a zombie-themed game in June 2012. After all, it was being made by one of my favorite mobile game developers who’d never disappointed before. I was expecting a gripping post-apocalyptic narrative interspersed with cut-scenes and voice acting, topped by a great zombie-shooting experience. Basically, I was expecting something along the lines of Shadowgun.
However, when the game finally got released, it was to my dismay that there were neither cut-scenes nor voice-acting to be found here. And no proper story-based campaign either. What this turned out to be was a casual first-person zombie shooter. Aside from signature Madfinger graphics and great controls, the game had a forgettable and almost non-existent story, shallow and repetitive gameplay and prominent presence of in-app purchases.
Horn
Together with Dead Trigger, this was the highlight game during the launch of the Google Nexus 7. Seeing the demos, I got very excited because it brought with it an extensive storyline, great visuals, open world action and an adventure worth participating in.
Fast forward a few months, I was actually still impressed when I played the first few hours of the game. The story was imaginative, and the voice-acting and orchestral soundtrack was just about the best on mobile. However, it soon became apparent the game was extremely repetitive, and by the time you made it to the second world the pace of the game slows down to a crawl and soon enough I was totally bored with it. The fact that the game has performance issues despite being an exclusive Tegra title and implements a tiresome tap-to-move control scheme doesn’t help at all.
Wild Blood
Contrary with what many may think, I actually feel Gameloft makes some fundamentally decent games at the high-end of the scale. Three of their main franchises – Asphalt, N.O.V.A. and Modern Combat – all offer quality mobile gaming. When word was out they were developing a hack-n-slash game with a full story, I was thrilled and hoped that since it was being made with Unreal Engine 3, this won’t suffer from performance issues.
Ultimately, when the game came out, I was frustrated. I expected more from Gameloft. The graphics were above-average at best, the storyline laughable, the voice-acting atrocious, the action comprising of mindless button mashing, and a camera that made me cringe every time I played the game. To top it all off, this is also the most IAP-intrusive “premium” Gameloft game. Performance wasn’t stellar either. Eventually, with what I perceived as an artificially inflated difficulty level, I quit and never finished the game.
Over to you
I’m sure you had your fair share of disappointments from 2012 as well. What were they? How did they end up disappointing you? What could have been made better? Feel free to share your thoughts by dropping a comment below.
