10 Video Games Ruined By Overhype

The Last of Us Part II was perhaps the single most anticipated video game of the last five years - a sequel to one of the most innovative and narratively ambitious video games ever made, and which consequently had a lot to live up to.

Now, it would be silly to call Naughty Dog's action-horror sequel anything but a rousing success from a sales perspective: it recently passed the 10 million units sold milestone and was largely praised by critics.

The player response, however, was considerably more polarising.

The problem, inevitably, is that so many fans had a very precise idea in their heads of what The Last of Us Part II should be: Another adventure centred around Joel and Ellie, while refining the gameplay systems and expanding the scope of what came before.

After years of waiting to play the sequel, this fixed concept became basically immovable for many players. And so, when the game released in 2020 and didn't give them what they wanted, the backlash was ferocious.

The bold decision to kill off Joel in the first few hours of the game and then have players spend almost half the game playing as his killer left many players irate.

The fanbase's most toxic tendencies quickly revealed themselves, with members of the dev team and performers online getting death threats, enough that discussing the game basically became a depressing, exhausting chore.

It's incredibly difficult for any sequel to fully live up to a beloved original, and though in the eyes of many The Last of Us Part II absolutely did, the game's messy legacy is a direct result of fans refusing to believe it could be anything but the exact product they decided they wanted years before.