The five most disappointing games of 2022

This story is function of Gamepur's Best of 2022 round-up.

2021 has not been without its challenges, but the gaming industry has risen to the occasion and produced some of the most love new games in ages. This list, however, is not about those titles. This listing is virtually the games that raised the expectations of fans to dizzying heights, only to nuance their hopes on the jagged rocks of reality. Whether it was downwardly to bugs, a convoluted story, or just a primal misunderstanding of their audience, hither are the almost disappointing games to hit the market in 2022.

v. New World

Released on September 28, 2022
Developed by Amazon Games Orange Canton
Published past Amazon Games

New Earth was going to be a flagship title for Amazon Game Studios. Back in the exciting days of 2022, the studio appear that evolution had begun on iii fully-fledged games: Breakaway, Crucible, and New Globe. Over the post-obit years, AGS announced the counterfoil of Breakaway and Crucible, moving the dev teams from both games onto New World and setting expectations for the high-concept MMORPG sky-high.

When the game finally launched as a airtight beta in July 2022, things started going wrong almost immediately. Perhaps the nigh egregious issue right off the bat was that it was bricking a lot of users' high-end graphics cards. Even after its official release, New World was plagued with aureate duplication exploits, fishing bots, and much more, and scored middling review scores from diverse outlets.

The game has managed to shed nearly xc% of its player base in the months since its release, and those who are left have been expressing their dissatisfaction with some of the latest changes to the game. With a lackluster story, repetitive gameplay, and however an aggravating corporeality of bugs to wade through, it would seem New World was not quite the gamechanger that Amazon hoped information technology would be.

4. Twelve Minutes

Released on August 19, 2022
Developed by Luís António
Published by Annapurna Interactive

With the Hollywood star power of James McAvoy, Daisy Ridley, and Willem Dafoe behind it, Twelve Minutes seemed like it was going to exist a slam dunk. A time loop-based mystery-driven twist on the betoken-and-click genre, the game premiered at PAX Due east in 2022 but really seized the attention of the public after a showing at E3 2022. Due to the pandemic, the game was delayed similar so many others, somewhen striking virtual shelves in August 2022 rather than the originally-intended 2022.

When the game did release, in that location was a lot to like: the performances of McAvoy, Ridley, and Dafoe were highlighted by many reviewers as a particular high point, managing to perfect delivery and expression fifty-fifty with a tiptop-downward perspective that obscured characters' faces. However, many players found the ending, in particular, to exist messy at best, and nonsensical at worst. Others found the narrative use of incest and violence — much of which is directed towards the main grapheme's wife — to be tasteless or offensive.

People found some bug with the mechanics as well, with some console users lamenting the lag of mapping betoken-and-click input onto a controller, specially when faced with some convoluted puzzles with solutions tied very closely to specific points in the ten-infinitesimal loop. All in all, Twelve Minutes was rather a mixed pocketbook, and vanished from public discussion nearly equally apace as it had appeared.

3. Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack

Released on October 25, 2022
Developed and published by Nintendo

Nintendo has had something of a tortured relationship with game preservation over the years. Many take lambasted the company for fiercely gatekeeping admission to its extensive dorsum catalog and coming down difficult on emulation sites and fan-driven efforts at preservation. Things looked to be turning effectually when it announced the incoming expansion for its Nintendo Switch Online service, though. Sure, information technology cost an extra $xxx a year, but it provided admission to a selection of classic Nintendo 64 and Sega Dreamcast games alongside the regular subscription's collection of NES and SNES titles. What could go incorrect?

Cracks started to show pretty quickly. Fans lamented the paltry choice of games available at launch, and a widely-shared Resetera thread cataloged the various emulation bug with the service, including frame charge per unit problems, audio glitches, and input lag. The games also featured an unintuitive control scheme which, in a bluntly inexplicable failure of accessibility, could not be remapped. Nintendo subsequently expressed that it would be working to fix the problems that had been flagged up, merely many fans were still left dissatisfied. With new games being gradually added to the service, the company could withal turn things effectually, but it was certainly an inglorious start to a hotly-anticipated release.

ii. Balan Wonderworld

Released on March 26, 2022
Developed by Arzest and Balan Company
Published by Square Enix

In many ways, Balan Wonderworld had the deck stacked against it from the start. Trying hard to reignite the flame of nostalgia for the PS2-era platformer, the game seemed an odd fit for 2022 with its luridly-colored aesthetic and litany of collectibles. Nonetheless, with the popularity of modern 3D platformers like A Hat in Time and the Crash Bandicoot remasters, there was certainly a potential market for a game like Balan Wonderworld, particularly with Sonic fable Yuji Naka backside it.

On its release, though, it soon became articulate — despite the efforts of a handful of suspiciously-positive user reviews — that Balan Wonderworld was anything but wondrous. The gameplay was tedious, the level design unremarkable, and the controls nigh-on unusable. To brand matters worse, the game originally shipped with a seizure trigger, though that at least was swiftly patched out. The other issues with the game were non so easy to set.

Balan Wonderworld'due south reception was so bad that Naka went on to resign from Square Enix in Apr 2022. However, Naka later revealed that he would be going independent, transitioning into smartphone games, so it would seem that not even a disaster similar Balan could entirely degrade the creator of Sonic the Hedgehog.

ane. Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy – The Definitive Edition

Released on November 11, 2022
Developed by Grove Street Games
Published by Rockstar Games

With rumors swirling about the potential development state of G Theft Car 6, Rockstar decided to throw fans something of a bone this yr. To marking the 20th anniversary of the seminal Grand Theft Auto 3, the company announced that it would be releasing a remastered collection of three of the series' most popular titles. The news was huge, with fans of Grand Theft Autos 3, Vice Urban center, and San Andreas practically salivating to experience some of their favorite games in crisp 4K, with improved textures and graphical fidelity.

Unfortunately, things took a plough upon the game'southward release in Nov. Far from an exciting and modernized return to form, Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy – Definitive Edition was widely considered a buggy mess at launch. Players were greeted with soulless landscapes stripped of their original amuse even as the sharper edges were smoothed out, populated with glassy-eyed husks of characters that managed to exude less personality even than the original PS2 models.

The port was so poorly executed that it even initially included the code for the infamous Hot Java exploit. The various cut corners had a marked effect on the game'southward reception, releasing to mixed and negative reviews and garnering an impressively dire Metacritic user rating of 0.5/10. Definitive indeed.