Those were bad, but to make the top of the list there had to be some colossal failures involved. Let’s go to the Top 3:
3. State of Decay 2
How did State of Decay 2 manage to muck up all of the goodwill the original game laid down for it? Simple: by being a glitchy, buggy mess. Everything in this game was subject to some sort of issue when it launched back in April, and there was nothing in the missions or gameplay that made enduring those glitches worthwhile. A few technical hiccups now and again can be forgiven, but not what State of Decay 2 was serving us.
The poor soul that reviewed this game for us, Paul Sullivan, says it best: “although there’s a very competent core loop and entertaining resource management sim somewhere within State of Decay 2, it’s really, really, broken. Unacceptably so. It frustrated me mightily to see a flash of a game I wanted to play, only to be immediately reminded that it’s not ready for release.”
2. Metal Gear Survive
When Metal Gear Survive was initially announced, the negative reactions were palpable but predictable. After all series creator Hideo Kojima had just left Konami, and now the company was taking his golden child and bastardizing it with the undead. We thought maybe that the reaction was overrated, that a game with the same concepts would be received better if the words “Metal Gear” weren’t in the title. Then we played it, and hoo boy that is not the case.
One of the votes for this faux Metal Gear came with the following quip: “They had a chance to twist the existing franchise into something fresh and cool, but instead had us poke zombies through fences while they mailed in every aspect of this mess.” Metal Gear Survive doesn’t feel like a true Metal Gear game, it feels like an attempt to cash-in on the name, and that’s super disappointing.
1. Fallout 76
What else was going to go here? Seriously, what other game in 2018 boasted such an expansive and personalized online experience, only for it to hit every single stumbling block on the way? Glitches, mission errors, an uninteresting world, Fallout 76 not only doesn’t live up to its own hype, it doesn’t live up to the pedigree of the Fallout franchise or even Bethesda itself.
This situation was only exacerbated by the collector’s canvas bag issue and Bethesda’s lack of understanding as to what a “canvas bag” is, but that was simply the rotten cherry on the shit sundae known as Fallout 76. We can only hope our “Todd Howard did this on purpose to get a new game engine built”; conspiracy theory ends up being true, otherwise, we may hold more Bethesda Game Studios release at arm’s length.