The Most Disappointing Games of the First Half of 2024

In the six months since the start of 2024, a lot of games have been released in that period and while, more are promised to be released in the autumn and winter, we can draw some conclusions even now.

And in short, they are not particularly positive!, Allow us to present to you the biggest video game flops of the first half of 2024! 

Silent Hill: The Short Message 

It’s a free game, so you may wonder, how can a free game disappoint? Especially considering that fans of the series have been waiting for it for twelve years (although thankfully not in Azkaban). Alas, it is indeed a real disappointment, and here's why. 

Yes, the game’s features have elements of the Silent Hill series, or at least an attempt to introduce them, for example, there’s a very grim world and an unkillable stalker following us, but  nonetheless, it is still a very surface-level game. We wander around the house, trying to find something, the atmosphere is certainly dark, but there is no suspense or drama. It doesn't compare to the smoothly immersive and intense horror games of previous years. 

The whole plot is built on clichés. A teenage girl Anita receives strange texts from her dead friend, so she goes to an abandoned construction site and searches for clues. It might have even been decent had the writers made at least some effort to scare the player. Nothing about the game — not the texts, not the clue searching, not the gameplay itself — looks realistic. To look specifically at the gameplay, the basic nature of the format is mind-numbingly boring, as you just walk around, look at the walls, ceiling, floor, randomly bump into a monster and… that's it. In this kind of game, the main emphasis is put on storytelling, but any narrative is non-existent. 

It's a real shame to see a subpar project like this from the creators of a truly cult classic of the horror genre. Get it together, Konami! 

War Hospital 

The game promised to be similar to the sensational This War of Mine and Frostpunk. We haven't seen such good economic simulators in a long time! The very setting of the game was quite promising: World War I, limited resources, you need to figure out how to develop a hospital and save as many lives as possible. It could have been a very enjoyable game. 

But unfortunately, the key phrase here is ‘could have’. 

All we got was a boring mobile phone level game full of bugs. The gameplay is extremely standard, with too much time  devoted to staff rotation and patient leave, but not to the most important component of such a genre, i.e., the economic simulation itself! 

Oddly enough, the challenging part of the game is only the first chapter, but after that everything starts to work itself out. There's no progression of difficulty along with the large influx of patients and what's going on in the war, no connection to the combat, no more obstacles to overcome. Nothing happens to keep the player interested until the very end. 

As a result, the project came out with loads of bugs, lacking history, tactical tasks and challenges. I'll have to play This War of Mine again to somehow brighten up my impressions of this game. 

Skull and Bones 

You often find that when everyone eagerly awaits a game, which is repeatedly delayed, it turns out to be a hit which breaks all records. After all, we assume that the delays are caused by the developers' desire to refine the game and make it “the best of the best”. But I guess not this time.

Initially, the game promised to be very interesting. We all remember Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag, with its ship simulator, which was probably the most memorable element of gameplay. All those battles, ship upgrades, crew recruitment, and more… We expected something like that here too, a real pirate adventure! And in the end we got this: you have a boat, and you control only the main character in tiny, non-interactive locations. That's it. 

There are no really well-thought-out and exciting battles, neither in the water nor on land. Nowhere! Shooting at passing ships is as boring as just clicking a mouse button on one place on the screen would be. And you have to buy this game for  full price! And, of course, there will be a battle pass in the game and tonnes of microtransactions. I mean, it's Ubisoft. 

Maybe the game will get a second chance if the developers get a grip and add more variety to the gameplay, but there's little hope of that. Which makes Assassin's Creed 4 still the best ship simulator. 

Devil May Cry: Peak of Combat 

One of the favourite series for all fans of the ‘hack and slash’ genre with unique combat mechanics and vibrant characters. All the characters, are gathered in this episode. It would seem that this is a real recipe for success! The new part of Peak Combat should have been at least as much fun as the previous DMC games, but, sadly, it hasn’t worked.

Instead of capturing players' attention with unique combat mechanics, the game copies Honkai Impact 3d's battle systems. The fights are boring and repitititive. The mechanics of gacha games blows away all the charm of the classic DMC series: not only is the character progression system confusing, but the game is peppered with notifications to purchase premium access. 

We agree with players on Metacritic who gave it a score of 41 out of 100. It might be worth a couple of hours if you miss Dante and Virgil or gloomy demonic locations with catchy soundtracks, but after a week you probably won't remember what you played at all. 

Have you noticed this trend too? Major companies don't seem to be trying to create full-fledged games with new game mechanics and well-thought-out plot anymore. Now they just take the formulas of past successes and try to sell them to the community again without even tweaking them. The new game trend on microtransactions, launched mostly by gacha games like Honkai, is also causing damage. At the same time, more and more attention is being paid to small indie studios, because it is they who bring something really new, thought-out and detailed to the market today. If such a giant as Ubisoft doesn't change its policy soon, it's quite possible that in a couple of years they will go bankrupt for good. Players are tired of being disappointed. And so are we! That said, hopefully we'll see something worth playing at least in the second half of 2024.