10 Video Games That Were Too Damn Short

2. Gears Of War 4

Gears of War 4 is a funny entry on this list, because taken in isolation it probably won't appear too short. The campaign clocks in at a meaty nine hours, which is only a touch under the other entries in the franchise, but it's mostly the pacing that kills the sequel dead.

Microsoft had a pretty difficult task on its hands when it came to crafting Gears 4; not only had the original developers left to work on other projects, but the new team was picking up a series that had pretty definitively tied off its story.

Consequently, the entire sequel bends over backwards to give itself a reason to exist, establishing new characters, reintroducing old ones, and putting in the groundwork so that players could view the continuation as a vital part of the story as opposed to a cash-in.

In that sense, the game works, but it also results in the whole thing feeling very much like the first act of a larger story. The stakes are small scale, the characters only feel truly fleshed out towards the end, and the magic similarly only returns in the closing sequences. In a way, it feels like a nine-hour prologue to the proper Gears 4, which I guess is Gears 5.