Personally there are a few games which left me very dissappointed, after hyping myself up for years in certain cases.
Divinity Original Sin: turns out I prefer more streamlined, less packed games (love Pillars of Eternity) and that coop play in a CRPG stresses me out.
Wasteland 2: I actually managed to finish this one but secretly I admit I was hoping for a better Fallout which I didn’t really get. New Vegas did the cowboy theme much better.
INSIDE: while the design was cool, it was just a ton of boring, easy puzzles in comparison to LIMBO, its predecessor.
Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit (2010?). Cars felt right due to Criterion working on them to make them like in Burnout, but their Autolog service, plentiful cutscenes, menu, performance issues and a lot of boring lonely sprints on time killed it for me. I loved to drive in free mode, but avoided races like fire.
GTA IV, but it was on me, maybe. They totally shifted the tone of the game, changed so much I felt like I play a different series. While I came to like it more, the first time it just didn’t work for me.
TellTale’s The Walking Dead after S1. It’s either them losing their juice or me and my friends starting to understand the formula and how low stakes it actually is.
GTA IV is weird compared to the others GTA (it misses the big booms and the big vehicles that are present in the other titles of the series) but it’s a good game taken on his own.
It was made in the era of gritty reboots and dark games which made them use the colour grey way too much. The worst offender of this is probably Shadow the Hedgehog, which went so “realistic” that it became comedic.
True, but I think that Liberty City would be very weird without a grey tone on it. Having it very bright like Los Santos in GTA V would have made it almost comical, which would have made the story less mafia-like.
I haven’t liked a Need for Speed game since the original Most Wanted (and that was the first one since Porsche Unleashed.) I’ve played a few since and some were okay, but none of them have grabbed me the way the old NFS games did. I spent more time playing any of the first five NFS games individually than I have playing all of them in total since MW.