Five 2014 games that may underwhelm

Every single game publisher will advertise it’s products as “great”, “amazing” or “innovative”, but more often than not, that’s not the case. There’s an immense amount of video games that don’t live up to the hype, and I’m going to try to signal out five unreleased games that are very likely to underwhelm in 2014.

Wolfenstein: The New Order

The Wolfenstein series has been around forever. id Software basically invented First Person Shooters with the release of Wolfenstein 3D, but history tells us that a new game in the series should be approached with care. The new game looks really good, being based on the id Tech 5 engine, but what do we actually know about this game? It’s set in an alternate history, the Nazis won the war, they now have giant mechs and B.J. Blazkowicz will kill them all. It would be enough for a Wolfenstein game made by… id Software, the defunct Gray Matter, or even a studio like Raven, but not for the yet unproven MachineGames. The little gameplay we saw up until now was O.K., but nothing worthy of the “father of FPS games”. It’s weird that there is no multiplayer, even though Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory was a great success in the early 2000s, and Bethesda keeps the game under tight wraps before launch, releasing the minimum amount of trailers to generate buzz. Even though you get the new Doom Beta, i urge you to not pre-order this game yet.

Sniper Elite III

Sniper Elite is one of those budget series, that comes once in a while and will be bought by a handful of people who played one of the older games. Yet Rebellion shoots for the stars with Sniper Elite III, by releasing it on five platforms at once. It will come out on PC, the old consoles and the new ones, but will it sell? It’s hard to say right now, but the gameplay shown in trailers looks like more of the same. The good news is that Sniper Elite III doesn’t have much hype around it, but I’m very curious to see how well it does sales-wise, especially on the PS4 and Xbox One.

The Evil Within

When the inventor of Resident Evil, Shinji Mikami, announces a new game that looks just like his most successful title, there may be a slight problem. Resident Evil 4 was a great game that I still play from time to time, but you can’t make lightning strike twice, Mr. Mikami. It’s so obvious that The Evil Within is just-another-resident-evil-game with different characters and plot, and I don’t think that this game can escape this lable. I have not seen the game in person just yet, but people who’ve seen it were not impressed, and frankly, the trailers don’t do a good job of impressing me either. Bethesda might try to hype this game up, but I’m staying at a safe distance, after Resident Evil 6 and other failed survival horror games in the past, The Evil Within has to first prove it’s worth before getting me excited.

Middle-Earth Shadow of Mordor

This one’s a little tricky. Monolith announced Middle-Earth Shadow of Mordor a few months ago, but plans to release it this fall, alongside games like Batman: Arkham Knight and Assassin’s Creed Unity. I compare it to this games because from a gameplay standpoint it’s similar to both. So… which should I buy? The Lord of the Rings tie-in, which looks good on paper (and in trailers), but am not sure that it can deliver on the whole Nemesis system, or the next-gen games i know and love from two of the most successful franchises of the last generation? Warner Bros. was very silent after the reveal of Shadow of Mordor and that worries me. They said that the Nemesis System, the most interesting thing about the game, won’t make it into the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions, and I’m afraid that they will take it out of the current-gen versions as well, in order to offer feature parity.

The Order: 1886

I’ve been struggling to make myself excited for The Order: 1886, but I just can’t shake the feeling the first gameplay trailer gave me. While it looks stunning, with CGI-quality graphics and animation, the gameplay sections shown are… generic. And that’s why I’m not really eager to play this game. I think that Ready at Dawn have bitten a little more than they could chew, jumping from PSP games straight to Triple A PlayStation 4 titles. I like third person shooters as much as the next guy, but I don’t think that this “Steampunk Gears of War” is what Sony needs in order to push forward it’s new console. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big PS4 supporter, but I don’t see The Order becoming the next God of War or Uncharted.

So these are my five picks for games that may underwhelm us in 2014, but I really hope that I’m proven wrong. I like how all of them look from afar and would really be happy if all of them succeed both critically and financially. All I’m saying is: don’t be surprised if some of them fail one way or another.