6. Brink
What We Expected: A butt-kicking sci-fi shooter in which we get to portray an acrobatic revolutionary who burns his enemies alive with molotov cocktails, but fills them with lead just to make sure.
What We Got: A messily produced if relatively ambitious shooter that nevertheless couldn't meet the lofty objectives it set for itself. Brink is a game that tries to give a multiplayer-esque experience to even single players, as the game plays out through a series of objective-based skirmishes. The problem is that there's not really any sense of strategy to what's going on: I found myself running around pretty cluelessly most of the time, and whether my teammates were CPUs or actual players, it didn't make much of a difference in terms of tactics. The overly frantic nature of the gameplay means that it's mostly a blind scramble to complete objectives, and though the game has fairly decent graphics, it's all for naught when the gameplay feels so sketchy and piecemeal. A real shame, as it had plenty of promise.