Writer's note: Again, this is all opinion based stuff. So don't get your panties in a twist!

Despite each years gaming lineup being cloaked in a veil of excitement, it’s inevitable that a few games will fail to reach the mark and disappoint the masses. Last year, we seen the likes of Resident Evil 6 and Assassins Creed 3 fail to impress, and with 2013 being shrouded in a list of blockbuster titles as far as the eye can see, we can expect to see a handful of hyped games drop to the floor like lead balloons. Here are three games that I think will potentially flop this year:

Dead Space 3
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The original Dead Space game was a masterpiece that breathed new life into the survival-horror genre. The game oozed with fear. Throughout its reasonably short campaign, there wasn’t one moment anyone immersed in the game could say they weren’t clutching their controller for dear life! In 2011, the follow up to this, Dead Space 2, followed the same format, and whilst it wasn’t as scary as the original, it still initiated a commendable amount of fear, while possessing a considerable amount of innovation to name it as a worth sequel.

In Dead Space 3, we venture to a frozen planet and team up with Sergeant John Carver in hope to stop the Necromorph epidemic once and for all. That simple plot outline is enough to give me serious doubts about this game. What made the Dead Space series so enticing was its solidarity; in the game we rarely came across any survivors and when we did, they were absolutely insane. The fact that we were truly alone was the most haunting thought of all; if you heard something moving, you knew it wasn’t a buddy, and that it was something that was coming to kill you. Furthermore, you knew nobody would have your back and that it was just you and your weapons that stood between a horde of Necro’s and a tasty meal!

With the addition of a new character, I think we’ll lose the true core of the game: Solidarity. With that in mind, I can see Dead Space 3 fail to hit the marker (pun intended).



The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct
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Developed by Terminal Reality (Exactly. Who?), Survival Instinct follows the TV Show; where you’ll play as Daryl along with his brother, Merle, as they traverse through Georgia in order to get to Atlanta. Unlike TellTale’s highly successful series, this game will be a FPS that puts heavy emphasis on the brutality of the zombie apocalypse.

After watching the debut of this game on IGN’s Up at Noon, I was terribly unimpressed by it. Whilst visuals ultimately don’t make a game, the graphics featured were horrible to say the least. The environments, walkers and everything about the game just looked like something that Joe from school whipped up on Unreal Editor. Lackluster comes to mind. Furthermore, the plot seems too bare to hold any real gravity, I don’t care for driving along the road and picking up hitchhikers to then command them to go and get food for the group, nor do I care for catering to a group of random people who don’t feature in the TV show. If TR wanted this game to hold real promise, I feel that they should have followed the TV show more closely; it would have been better to put us in the shoes of Rick as he keeps the group alive; a group who’re more tangible and vulnerable. Instead we’ll be running around as Daryl, shooting a crossbow and probably keeping his redneck brother in place. Yawn.

Bioshock: Infinite
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At number one is the one game that can either be Game of the Year, or flop of the year. It brings a tear to my eye to include this title in the list, but it’s a gut feeling that Infinite will fail to live up to Bioshock standards. First and foremost, I’d like to go on record and say I loved the other two Bioshock titles, so much so that Bioshock 2 was my favorite game of all time, followed by the original Bioshock in second place. I hope you can understand my pain here!

To put it simply, I don’t like the idea of this game, not one bit. I’m sure many Bioshock enthusiasts will agree with me here in saying that we’re not ready to leave Rapture behind. The world of Rapture was enchanting; an underwater metropolis with an indescribable atmosphere that made us fall in love with the game with true emotional investment. Why-oh-why would you leave something like that behind for a floating city?

To make matters worse, we’ll also be leaving behind the Big Daddies, Little Sisters and Big Sisters. Instead of smashing skulls as a Big Daddy, we’ll be traversing the city as a simple man: Booker DeWitt – it just doesn’t have the same ring to it, does it? It feels like 2k are throwing us into the hot water with little time to adjust, it would have been ideal to have a transitional game that eased us away from Rapture towards Columbia.

With all that said, I sincerely hope I’m wrong about this game, and that it lives up to the hype that its predecessors set, I’d love nothing more than to pick this game up and enjoy it. However, between them stripping away many core features (namely Rapture), and the lead designers leaving through the project, I fear the worst. I don’t think Infinite will have the Bioshock feel to it; granted, it’ll look like a Bioshock game, but it won’t have the same gravitational pull that the other titles had. Let’s hope I’m wrong!