You wouldn't know it from the overwhelming popularity of some genres, but interactive entertainment is always trying to innovate, to find the next big hook. It's that drive that's given us such promising titles as No Man's Sky, Splatoon and Bloodborne to look forward to in the new generation. Unfortunately, that same ambition is all too often unruly and, ultimately, too much for a project. Games developers have a nasty habit of aspiring to become a jack of all trades, despite a mountain of evidence showing that mastering a single art is plenty to keep players engaged. Dishonored has its dynamic gameplay, LittleBigPlanet its adorable and creative platforming and Assassin's Creed has stabby-stabby down to a science. It doesn't have to make us breakfast to qualify as good, and going that extra mile may very well tire a game out to the point that it can't pick up the pace when it most needs to. Worse still, many games with too much on their plate have a truly novel idea at heart. Of course, trying too hard isn't the only way to wreck a good idea; outright bad design does just as little justice to a stellar pitch. That's where these 10 games come in. By way of needless fluff, poor design, or some deplorable combination of the two, these games took what could have been a game upon a hill and dragged it down. They aren't necessarily badthough many of them arebut they don't measure up to the shadow of what could have been.
A freelance games writer, you say? Typically battling his current RPG addiction and ceaseless perfectionism? A fan of horror but too big a sissy to play for more than a couple of hours? Spends far too much time on JRPGs and gets way too angry with card games?
Well that doesn't sound anything like me.
