Five major video game disappointments from 2024

Before we get started, I get it. It's really easy for me, a non-developer, to sit here comfortably on my couch and dog the products made me teams of talented people. I respect the people who make all games a lot.

But in the case of this list, the fault lies not with the development team but usually the corporate shills who are just trying to make as much money as possible. Here's a couple of those. Enjoy.

05) Funko Fusion

Scott Pilgrim and the gang from the Funko Fusion video game

We are getting closer and closer to some licensing singularity. A property hell in which one company literally owns EVERYTHING. But while we're there we now have companies with too damn many licenses and they're learning that if they want to hold onto them they need to use them. It's how we got the second Space Jam which seemed to solely exist to remind us what properties are in the hellish claws of Warner Brothers.

One company absolutely known for license grabbing is Funko. Makers of the Funko Pop! figures, these guys have mastered snagging everything on the planet and turning it into a collectable. Love the Golden Girls? Love Umbrella Academy? Love...I dunno...Bob Ross? Get figures of the people involved, you know, as long as you want that figure to have a head big enough for the rest of their body to comfortably hide inside.

Funko Fusion was Funko flexing their licenses in video game format instead of via film. And to read the page of their game development studio 1010 Games "We have now successfully developed and submitted our first game, Funko Fusion, with no crunch and proved -hopefully to other studios too - that it is entirely possible." And this shows that even if you give a team all the time in the world, they can't make a soulless attempt at our wallets into a fun thing.

Which is a shame because, by all accounts, Funko Fusion should have been EXCEPTIONAL. But what we got is a game where you play various characters from various universes who all feel like you're playing the exact same characters. Scott Pilgrim characters have the same strength as people like Luthor from Umbrella Academy (who has super strength).

Not only that but the stages felt so poorly based off the properties in question it felt like they don't fully understand what they had. It felt like you're playing through the versions of these properties that existed in the worst possible timeline. Remember when Lucas Lee fought Scott Pilgrim by trying to hit him with a motorhome? Remember that part in Umbrella Academy where the gang was stopping Cha-Cha from going from bedroom to bedroom and hoping on the bed? Remember that part in Hot Fuzz where the gang had to follow around a goose in a detective hat that was solving mysteries? Me neither, but that's what you do in these worlds and it felt like someone just typed a few relevant terms into ChatGPT and made a game around it.

It's disappointing, boring, and features a slew of KFC ads. It just feels like you're playing a Target catalogue and I hated it.

04) Concord

Concord should not have happened, period.

Firstly, hero shooters are dying. The only reason Marvel Rivals managed to get in was because they're using already established characters in a familiar game format. But for Concord to come out of nowhere and offer a hero shooter with regular ass looking people in awful coats was a bad move.

Then the game came out with a $40 price tag. Listen, I get it, charge for a game. I love paying for a game and just owning the damn thing instead of having to mess with season passes and all that other nonsense. But in a world where Fortnite, Overwatch, Valorant, Apex, all those are free, coming out of nowhere with a studio that only formed to make this one game and then asking people to pay $40 for an unknown thing is BALLSY.

The numbers then rolled in and, guess what, bad idea equals poor profit, surprising no one. It didn't help that the game featured characters with realistic body proportions, which cause all the Charlie Kirk listening, glue eating, dipshits to lose their collective minds and rally against it for no reason.

But instead of switching the game to a free-to-play model like everyone was waiting for, they instead shut the game down, fired the entire development team, and closed out the building they set aside for Firewatch Team.

The journey of Firewatch Team and Concord is the perfect 2024 story of how every company is currently eating their own tail.

03) Zenless Zone Zero

Anime characters with colorful outfits in action poses against a yellow and blue background. Zenless Zone Zero. Dynamic mood.

Listen, this one might be confusing as Zenless Zone Zero is actually fairly successful (though no where near successful as Hoyoverse properties like Genshin Impact and Honkai Star Rail) and looks phenomenal. It's also my favorite Hoyoverse game as, one, the combat is fantastic, and two, it's the only Hoyoverse game where the women are allowed to wear practical footwear that you could actually adventure in as opposed to all the prom night heels the Genshin girls seem to think you can run around on dirt in.

But here's the thing, ZZZ is supposed to be all about combat but that combat comes in the middle of what feels like several hundred tons of filler trash. Sure, I can go get 5-10 minutes of awesome combat, but first I need to take pictures of cats, eat at a restaurant, get coffee, turn in a scratchy ticket to a dog, fiddle with the placement of equip items that look like Bakugan, and mess with TV puzzles. Sometimes it can feel like an hour of filler nonsense happens just to fluff up the fact that there's not really that much combat in the game and that sucks. I'd rather the stages just be longer.

Not only that, but the majority of the things you have to fiddle with remind you how easily you can knock this out with microtransactions and yes, they are just as confusing as all the other Hoyoverse games. You need to buy one type of thing which is used to purchase a different type of thing, but only the thing of the right color because if you buy 100 of these one kind you can only get certain things so you have to pay attention and it is ALL stupid and clearly designed to trick and confuse people into spending more than they need.

It ends up being a commercial of itself while, at the same time, rarely letting me actually have the chance to play the game I already signed in for.

02) Endless Ocean Luminous

Character from Endless Ocean Luminous exploring an empty hole.

Endless Oceans Luminous comes from the Endless Oceans series, a series that, as I've mentioned in the past, I absolutely love. They were beautiful chill games about the importance of exploring and understanding the creatures below in the sea.

The first game gave me the best sense of scale I've ever felt in a video game before too. In the first Endless Oceans game there's a part where you swim into open water so vast the floor disappears below you and it's just you and a blue void. That's when a sperm whale shows up and swims past, fully to scale with your character.

You grab the side of it and are caught up along with it as it explores the water. It's beautiful and is the first time I've ever truly grasped (literally in this case) the size of one of these creatures. Not so much in Endless Oceans Luminous.

I stared at a massive sea creature, waiting for it to come at me so I could cling to it and play but me waiting on the sea creature was like Tidus waiting to catch the Yuna hug at the end of FFX. The fish passed directly through me as if I wasn't there.

The whole game is lifeless though. Miles of barren flat landscape. Low resolution fish. Broken light effects. And a nasty control scheme all seal this game's fate.

And this baffles me because this game does not need to exist. While Endless Oceans has its fans, even the highest grossing game originally sold around half a million-ish? It's not like some guaranteed money maker. Especially if you're just going to make it and then skimp on it and shoot out a terrible looking game of nothingness. What was the point here?

01) Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League

Deadshot, Harley Quinn, King Shark, and Captain Boomerang standing on a roof in the game Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League

This poor game. Suicide Squad could have been amazing. And I mean STUNNING. The people behind the Arkham games, easily the best selling DC games ever made, getting together in the same universe to put together something in which the Justice League has to kill the Justice League. And listen, they KILL the Justice League. I was skeptical of this, thinking there was gonna be some special McGuffin that keeps the Justice League alive but they get merc'd really bad in this.

I know it sparked some controversy too because a lot of people were saying Harley killing Batman on a park bench was Kevin Conroy's last time voicing Batman. It wasn't though, worry not. In fact, Kevin Conroy's final line was in Justice League Crisis on Infinite Earths Part Three and is INCREDIBLY perfect. Watch it here, get chills, and then come on back:

But all Conroys aside, the game itself looked like it was coming from a place of love. The Suicide Squad was written accurately, characters like King Shark and Captain Boomerang got the kind of love cool D-listers like that rarely receive, and the game did a fantastic job of showing how absolutely terrifying the Justice League could be should they decide to turn.

Hell, that game's version of Flash haunts me to this day, evil speedsters are terrifying.

But then the big wigs got involved. Suddenly the game required secondary accounts, it required you to always be online, it had season passes with unlockable cosmetics instead of getting to unlock them, and it was filled to the brim with a ton of padding to justify it being a "games as a service" type thing.

And when they started adding character like (yawn) Joker, they did so without even giving them a real story, they were just kinda there. You'd think Deathstroke or Joker being around would really change the dynamic with this gang but, nope, apparently it's business as usual.

It's such a pity because this game genuinely had the potential to be something great and, instead, Harley's one chance to lead a video game fell flat on its ass because of the near to monetize every damn aspect of a game.