10 Video Games That Made Critics And Fans Hate Each Other
2. Shenmue III
Duke Nukem Forever takes a lot of flack for being an average, borderline terrible game, but more importantly: taking fourteen years to come to fruition.
But did it cost people six million of their own combined dollars? No, nor did it take eighteen years to come out.
Shenmue III did, though, and it's being thrown to the wolves so hard it actually makes DNF look like the better game. Sitting in the middle ground on Metacritic, it's really not hard to see why.
You could argue that Yu Suzuki has stayed true his vision of the series from its earliest iteration in 1999, and fans do. As far as retaining that same clunky, core gameplay and style, it really plays how you'd think a sequel to Shenmue would play.
However, the fact that it does play like a Shenmue game from twenty years ago has led many a critic to call this a lazy cash-grab of a sequel... and you can see their point, too.
Staunch defenders will call it a love letter to the true fans, whilst cynics will call it long past its time. It's not hard to see both cases.