10 Video Games Even Worse Than Everyone Expected
Lord of the Rings: Gollum surpassed even the lowest expectations.
Try though video game publishers might to disguise an incoming turkey in their marketing, we as players can usually sniff out a game that's been through the developmental wringer.
Yet sometimes a game ends up plummeting far beneath even our already-low expectations, delivering an experience that's best described as an abject disaster worth neither your time nor money.
And that's absolutely the case with these 10 games, each of which came to market amid little hope from players, only to end up being received even worse than everybody feared.
It's certainly a testament to just how damn difficult it is to produce a quality game, and also the near-impossibility of turning around a sinking ship - especially once players en masse have caught wind of what's going on.
None of these 10 video games left players optimistic for the end product, yet what ultimately released was somehow more disastrous than we all braced ourselves for, in some cases even ranking comfortably among the very worst games of all time.
So here's to games that weren't content to be merely mediocre or bad - they went the whole terrible, barely playable hog...
10. Fast & Furious Crossroads
While a Fast and Furious game theoretically had a ton of potential, the track record of video games based on movies being what it is, most were simply expecting Fast & Furious Crossroads to be a bog-standard Need for Speed clone with some franchise branding slapped on it.
Even with Vin Diesel, Michelle Rodriguez, and Tyrese Gibson lending their voices and likenesses to the title, Crossroads looks more like a fake game you'd see in a movie than something that was actually released worldwide.
Given the film series' penchant for hilariously gravity-defying action, it's baffling just how unimaginative and forgettable the "cinematic" gameplay is throughout.
But worse than that, it's saddled with atrocious handling, an awful camera, and woefully dated graphics which feel a whole generation behind.
This all evidently turned players off enough that the multiplayer suite became an arid, unpopulated wasteland within days of the game's release.
The ultimate vote of no confidence came from publisher Bandai Namco themselves though, who delisted Crossroads barely 18 months after release, presumably because they didn't want to renew their licensing agreement with Universal for a certified dud of a game nobody was buying.