Personally there are a few games which left me very dissappointed, after hyping myself up for years in certain cases.
Divinity Original Sin: turns out I prefer more streamlined, less packed games (love Pillars of Eternity) and that coop play in a CRPG stresses me out.
Wasteland 2: I actually managed to finish this one but secretly I admit I was hoping for a better Fallout which I didn’t really get. New Vegas did the cowboy theme much better.
INSIDE: while the design was cool, it was just a ton of boring, easy puzzles in comparison to LIMBO, its predecessor.
Mirror´s Edge. 9/10 on Steam. I bought it during the last sales. The gameplay is playing again and again and again the difficult jumps until you make it. It’s boring.
I recently replayed that game after 10+ years. I think I could count the number of difficult jumps that required more than two attempts on one hand. The game is like $1-2 on a sale and you can beat it in 3 or 4 hours. I thought it was fun, but I could see how it would be disappointing if your expectations were higher than minimal.
Mirror’s Edge: Catalyst was much better IMO. Actual story. Decent characters. Free roam. Side quests.
ME has some cool first few levels, and then it barely evolves from that.
Yeah initially it felt really cool, but got old really fast. It just felt like doing the same thing over and over again.
What made me quit Mirror’s Edge was the combat. I was in it for the parkour; I didn’t really like the combat and kept being forced to fight people. Because of that, I didn’t get far enough in the game to get sick of the mechanics.
Part of the charm of the game was to make its combat unwieldy to push people into parkour-ing past/out of each encounter. The whole game was made so that you could finish it without ever picking up a gun.
It sounds like you didn’t get far enough to learn this.
There was one fight against a boss that was a huge pain in the ass because he tackles you just as you exit a door to the roof and if you don’t use the right maneuver, blam! you have to restart and listen to his monologue. Again and again and again. Dear gods, it was so bad it’s actually the only thing I remember from the game.
Which is a damn shame because it really was revolutionary, the architecture is fantastic, and the parkour is flawless. Even the “you don’t have to fight” thing was genuine! I literally did not fight a single guy… until that damn roof, where I suddenly had to learn the parry maneuver the hard way. Shame.
I agree, ME wasn’t for me either.