Thankfully, in rather sharp contrast to last year, 2015's gaming output has been jam-packed with phenomenal experience after phenomenal experience. Sure it took a while getting going, and it was over to Bloodborne and The Witcher 3 to keep things moving for the first half of the year, but once the rubber met the road, it was 2013 all over again. On the flip-side though, there are the games that completely missed the mark. Many failed in finding a home with consumers, and one - the hands-down worst game of the year by a considerable margin - abused an entire generation's love for its older instalments, simply to cash in on a half-baked new release. It's a harsh reality of developing games in today's ultra-glossy HD world, that the bar of quality is considerably higher for all involved, and when one person can code something as delightfully innovative as Undertale, or two guys can pull off Hotline Miami 2, you have to ask yourself just how the rest of these teams face-planted the dirt so hard.
12. Rainbow Six Siege
From that initial announcement through to launch day, it was one depressing announcement after another - and then we got hands-on with the retail code and realised Ubisoft had truly ballsed up yet another iconic franchise. How, you ask? By all but removing the single-player campaign, including a series of small areas in its place and riddling the whole thing with microtransactions. That's how. The truly awful thing is that people (mostly younger gamers, unaware of the time when we actually got full games at launch) will still cough up the dough to unlock better equipment, weapons and items. The majority of the unlocks can be gotten through earning 'Renown', but that fallback of "Well they're optional, so you don't have to" is the most asinine thing going. Having any progression in your game supplemented by something you can pay for and therefore fast-track, immediately cheapens any worth in terms of personal achievement. Overall, Siege lacks a level of graphical polish you'd expect from a titan of the industry like Ubisoft, and with gunplay as rote and phoned-in as the business model around it, this latest instalment is as forgettable as it is money-hungry.
