5. Halo 5: Guardians
Mechanically, Halo 5 is one of the soundest releases of the year and probably a favourite for many Xbox One owners. The multiplayer is excellent, if you can ignore the gratuitous fleecing that is the microtransactions in a full-price AAA game. Where Halo 5 really suffers, however, is in the campaign. 343 have managed to turn one of the strongest aspects of the series into its weakest and ultimately most unnecessary.
The marketing budget for Halo 5 must have been almost as large as the production costs for the game itself and focused heavily on a confrontation between a Master Chief gone rogue and Spartan Locke, a relative rookie. Series fans were eager to be able to experience the showdown for themselves, all they got instead was an underwhelming cutscene between the pair that looked more like a futuristic skirmish at a nursery playground. Add to that the fact that the classic split-screen co-op the series was famous for was no longer possible and Microsoft had many disgruntled fans on their hands, decrying it as one of the year’s most disappointing games. And they are right.
4. Mad Max
Having sunk many hours into Mad Max earlier in the year for our review, I can honestly say that I remember very little about it at all. WB Games and Avalanche Studios managed to take one of the most distinctive franchises around and turn it into something vanilla and easily forgotten. Released at the same time as The Phantom Pain (a game I initially gave 10/10 prior to story completion, a pretty dumb move on my part because fuck that ending), comparisons between the two open-world games were inevitable, but there’s no question which was better.
The control system felt like it had been composed by a lucky dip as it went against all the norms gamers are used to. Combat was also very lightweight, feeling like a watered down Arkham game with half the fluidity that the series is famous for. Worst of all, Max as a character was deeply unlikable, coming across as every copy and paste white guy action hero ever portrayed. Don’t even get me started on the plot as it doesn’t exist, merely serving as an excuse to point you in a direction and pick up that thing to put in another thing. A wasted opportunity after the success of Fury Road.
3. The Order 1886
One of the best examples of why graphics aren’t always important in games, The Order: 1886 is undoubtedly one of the year’s prettiest games, astounding many with its facial animations and alternative Victorian landscapes. Look past the graphics, though, and you’re left with one of the most shallow games of the year that was anything but the PlayStation 4 shifter people expected it to be.
The action is about as revolutionary as a ham sandwich, offering nothing but a shooting gallery of enemies for you to shoot from cover for a few hours. I say a few hours because that’s unfortunately the length of the “story”, which finishes just as it’s getting interesting to set up the inevitable and cynical sequel. If you paid full price for The Order on its release, you might have been left feeling robbed of your money. If you want to pick it up now, the price has dropped an embarrassing amount to its actual value. With the inclusion of any kind of replayability, a multiplayer or more interaction with objects that isn’t just turning them over in your hand, The Order might not have been such an afterthought of 2015.
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