8 Video Games That Utterly Failed To Live Up To The Hype

The victims of their own hubris.

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Lionhead

The Hype Train is an almighty beast.

Each and every time we hear the little "toot toot" in the distance our wallet begins to sweat bullets at the beating it's about to take. It's so easy to board as well, as thousands of others get swept along with us in a merry frenzy and we spend months if not years, oogling trailers, and whooping at E3 announcements.

However, if we were to look out the window of Coach F Seat 38, we'd see that the track we're riding on is more than a bit wonky, and with each bump, we begin to lose a bit more confidence in the end result. Yet on we ride, hoping and maybe even praying at this point just for the game to be released at all.

Such is the danger of hype, that it's easy to buy into, which is exactly what publishers want us to do, namely to give them money far before the launch to secure a foothold and audience for the game in question.

Unfortunately for these games however things derailed soon after the drop, or in the case of some of them before the game was even finished, with the hype train plummeting down into the void along with our hopes and dreams.

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8. Haze

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Free Radical

The term "Halo Killer" was bandied around like a hot potato during the early to mid-2000s as everyone was trying to take a can opener to Microsoft's big green tin of spam Master Chief and steal away a piece of the market. Many tried, and many failed, and yet for many Haze stood out as the one who sprawled out on the pavement the hardest.

Maybe it was due to an incredibly saturated ad campaign, or maybe it was the fact that Sony owners were just that bit more desperate to grab on to an exclusive with all their might, or just perhaps it was because Haze had such a brilliant premise that it managed to !*$% up entirely.

The gimmick here was that battle soldiers were fed drugs directly into their nervous systems through their suits in an effort to disguise the horrible things they were actually doing, and had it delivered on this premise we might be sitting here talking about how deep such a message actually is on the concept of the gratification of violence in modern media. However take a look at the list title, then back here and you can tell that's not what went down.

What did go down was this games score once you ditched the battle suit after about three missions and began a boring slog of an FPS that never regained it's footing. By giving players what they actually wanted and then systematically stipping it away after an hour, we all were left wondering what the hell the devs thought was going to happen.

"Oh please sir, can I play with the stick instead of the mega death rifle?" Said no one ever.

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Jules Gill hasn't written a bio just yet, but if they had... it would appear here.