Top 10: Most Disappointing Sequels

What's nice about movies is that when a sequel comes out, you can just expect it to suck. It's only once in a blue moon that an Empire Strikes Back comes out and eclipses the original. In the video game world, however, I'd say it's about a 50/50 chance that the sequel will be better than the original. Often times, even if it's not as good, it's still close. Sometimes, though, you let yourself get too excited and just set yourself up for disappointment. The following is the list of the ten sequels I found most disappointing. It's important to note that these are not all bad games, but some of them definitely are.

10. Burnout Paradise
Burnout Revenge was the first racing game not featuring turtle shells I ever played that got me hooked. It had a blinding sense of speed, physics built for fun before realism, and spectacular car wrecks. The only drawbacks were the lacking online mode, limited car models, and 2-player only local multiplayer. All I wanted for the first true next-gen Burnout was a larger variety of cars (instead of just two basic models), giant multiplayer races, and next-gen crashes. I only got one of those things (and *damn* did the crashes look good). Unfortunately, the good people at Criterion decided that we a sandbox racing game. I'm not going to lie, the game is very impressive, and there are a lot of people who like it and play it to this day. Hell, they even managed to have an in-game DJ who actually succeeds in sounding cool. I'll also give Criterion major props offering arguably the best post-release support this generation. The problem, though, is that every race just goes from point A to point B. Point A is a random stoplight and point B is one of eight cardinally-directed finish lines. The races are too short, too hard to organize, and it takes way too much memorization to stay on course. Burnout always succeeded in balls-to-the-wall racing where you always felt a little out-of-control, but the courses did a good job a directing you. When you have to quickly react to turn signals and turn down the right road, it's pretty easy to accidentally find yourself going 90 degrees in the wrong direction. Plus, having to take right turns just interrupts the flow of the race. It certainly has its great moments, but they're too short-lived and too few-and-far between.

9. Gears of War 2
If you were to pick this game up for the first time today, you might wonder why it's on this list. However, those of you who picked this up week 1 know exactly what I'm talking about: glitches and head-scratching balancing issues. Why, for the love of everything holy, would you let everyone spawn with a stun grenade that ragdolls players for 2 agonizing seconds? Why would you let ragdoll physics impact the outcome of each confrontation and why would you stun someone that long? In the heat of battle, 2 seconds is an eternity. Aside from that issue--which they've fixed--there were the unlimited and nearly indestructible grenade plants, the unbalanced weapon cycling, the broken matchmaking, the nonsensical ranking system, and the schizophrenic shotgun with a mind of its own. I'd list more, but at this point it's beating a dead horse. I've harped on this before, but the lesson here is that you should always do a beta test for a highly anticipated game. Epic got caught with their pants down big time.

8. Resident Evil 5
This is another game that wasn't necessarily bad, just not as good as I'd hoped. Resident Evil 4 was the critically-acclaimed and 100% bitchin' revamp that the series desperately needed. The big thing that game accomplished was being smooth. It was an incredibly well-crafted experience from beginning to end, which stood in stark contrast to its clumsy predecessors. RE5 kept RE4's revamped control scheme, but added back a healthy dose of clumsiness. The cooperative play was a nice idea, but it just didn't work particularly well. It just felt so forced, and by consequence, RE5 was stripped of a large number of the nice touches that pushed RE4 into the all-time great category. The weapon, inventory, treasure, and upgrade systems were all greatly reduced and felt naked in comparison. Not only that, but inventory was strictly limited and had to be managed in real-time. There's a reason co-op shooters don't give players inventories. On the story side, the Uroboros were way less cool than las Plagas, and while RE4 had some of the best boss fights in recent memory, RE5's boss fights ranged from dull to uninspired. Had the co-op been an in-game spin-off like Assignment Ada, the game could have been a lot better. Forcing co-op throughout the entire game (and I say "forcing" because trying to play it with an AI partner was excruciating) ended up crippling the experience.

7. Perfect Dark Zero
The current generation of games got off to a really rough start. Where Super Mario 64 and Halo: Combat Evolved let us know that their respective generations were going to take us places we'd never thought possible, Perfect Dark Zero introduced us to the Xbox 360 with a whimper. Never has the premier launch title of a hotly anticipated console sucked so much. Not only that, but it was supposed to announce the return of Rare, who was of the former king of console FPSes. Honestly, I can't really list off a bunch of specific problems because I returned it the day I bought it. It was archaic, unpolished, clunky, and ugly. The graphics weren't even noticeably better than Halo 2's. Had it not been for the surprisingly solid Call of Duty 2, there wouldn't've been any reason to own an Xbox 360 for the first year of its existence. Oh, and seriously, what is with the redesign of Joanna Dark's character model?

6. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords
Knights of the Old Republic was one of my favorite games of all time and remains my favorite RPG. When Bioware decided to turn the sequel over to Obsidian, I was understandably nervous. Turns out my fears were completely justified. The game just felt like it had no soul. Like the developers just didn't have any passion for the Star Wars universe. The story felt empty, the characters were uninteresting, and your character got too powerful too quickly, so the game was too easy. It was impressive technically, but the experience just felt hollow.

5. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2
I've never seen a developer get so cocky as to blatantly remove functions that gamers wanted, and then scoffed at their complaints. PC gamers like dedicated servers? Well, screw you, you don't get them because their stupid. Xbox gamers like party chat? F that, we're taking that away, too. May your Modern Warfare sessions echo with the prepubescent screams of nine year-olds. On top of that, there's the whole knifing issue, the terrible maps, the incoherent single-player, and infinite grenade launcher rounds. This game was so close to being the best online shooter ever made, but IW got out of control.

4. Twisted Metal III
Twisted Metal 2 was awesome. Then, 989 Studios took over for the sequel, and it was just terrible in every way. That's about all there is to it.




3. Metroid Prime 2: Echoes
I don't I've ever been more excited for a game's release as I was for this game's (maybe Melee). Metroid Prime is my favorite game of all time, but its sequel was a huge let down. First off, let's just forget that I was actually excited for the multiplayer, which ended up being little more than a afterthought. The first Prime was incredibly atmospheric. Echoes was half purple. Half of the game was spent in a parallel, dark version of the planet where everything was an ugly purple. The enemies here looked like they were handcrafted by a 4 year-old, and for some reason it was necessary for the player to take damage in this world when outside of protective light bubbles. Traveling to the dark version of the planet was not something one did with anticipation, but with agitation. Add to that that three of Samus' four beams required ammo, something that had never been a part of Metroid and hasn't since. As a result, instead of getting to wield fire, ice, or electricity at will, the player basically stuck to the boring old power beam and saved the light and dark beams for boss fights. The game wasn't exactly terrible, but it's just so much worse than its predecessor.

2. Grand Theft Auto IV
This is the only game on this list that seems to be universally acclaimed by reviewers (Modern Warfare 2 had good initial reviews, but it quickly fell out of favor), and I'll never understand why. Is it because of the convoluted, meandering story line? The annoying incomprehensible accents? The impossible-to-drive vehicles? The clunky aiming and running controls? The God-awful cover mechanic? The blatant disregard for checkpoints? The constant pestering of in-game characters? The confusing world map? The creepy character models? The boring side missions and mini games? Niko's inability to buckle a seat belt? The absence of tanks? The fact that at no point during the entire 90 mission long campaign was game fun? I'm tellin' ya, I just don't get it. They took away everything that was fun about Vice City and expanded on everything that was annoying about it. Ever wish they went down a more Vice City-esque path? Go play Saints Row 2.

1. Prince of Persia: Warrior Within
And here we have the inspiration for this entire list. Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time was one of the most surprisingly good games of the last generation. Hell, it was great, and even won some Game of the Year awards. It started the whole parkour game thing, and the level design puts Assassin's Creed II to shame. Sure, the game was entirely linear, but it worked well that way. The Sands of Time also had an incredibly moving story about lost love, and the ending was pretty gut-wrenching (but still very good). The Prince was also a very well-crafted character who was very likable (which is very rare for an action game character). He had a softer side, but could kick ass when necessary. The problem is that while The Sands of Time was critically acclaimed, it sell as well as, say, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. So for the sequel, Ubisoft decided that the parkour platforming needed to take a back seat to the combat, and that the prince needed to be more of a badass. So, in the opening sequence to this sequel to an extremely tasteful game, the Prince is on some ship in the middle of a storm, doing battle with some "bitch" in a metal thong. See that America? The Prince swears now! He's so much cooler. So instead of trying to regain his lost love, he's running around killing random people and forcin' out swear words at every turn. I fuckin' love swearing as much as the next guy, but it was just so out of place here. There are games on this list that were worse sequels to better games, but no other game on this list completely bastardized everything the original stood for like Warrior Within.

--Chilly P