Not all games can be great or even good, and while a slick marketing campaign can often prevent players from realising this until it's too late, there are also those many games whose non-quality we all see coming a mile off.

Sometimes a game just can't hide its own stink no matter how hard the publisher tries to put lipstick on a pig, and so players en masse know to give it a wide berth well ahead of launch.

And that's absolutely the case with these 20 recent games, each of which made it abundantly clear pre-release they wouldn't be delivering the goods.

Perhaps it was as simple as trailers and gameplay footage showcasing all of our worst fears, a lengthy dev cycle that raised a lot of eyebrows, or unsavoury creative decisions that basically doomed it from the jump.

Whatever the reason, it was clear that these 20 games were going to have some serious issues on launch, and in each case that's been proven categorically true.

The lesson here? When a game shows you what it really is pre-release, believe it...

Even though 2024's Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 felt like a serious return to form for the FPS franchise, eyebrows were swiftly raised when Activision announced that it would be immediately followed by Black Ops 7.

More to the point, Black Ops 6 developers Treyarch and Raven Software were tasked with also releasing Black Ops 7 the very next year, counter to the usual Call of Duty production model of cycling between different studios to ensure annual releases while maintaining quality.

It was a red flag from the jump, then, and on release week reviewers noted two other hugely concerning things - the campaign was always-online and therefore couldn't be paused, and the game contained AI slop art.

It was painfully obvious that Black Ops 7 was hurriedly sloughed out with the bare minimum effort, and so nobody should've been surprised that it scored some of the series' worst reviews to date while also posting the franchise's worst sales in almost 20 years.

The fallout was ultimately dire enough that Activision even vowed not to release back-to-back Black Ops or Modern Warfare installments ever again. 

Jack Pooley

Contributor

Stay at home dad who spends as much time teaching his kids the merits of Martin Scorsese as possible (against the missus' wishes). General video game, TV and film nut. Occasional sports fan. Full time loon.

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