The list of games I played and didn't enjoy as much is the shortest one, so I think I'll be able to talk a little about each one.
Binary Domain (PC)
Source: Youtube Channel IGNentertainment
To be fair, I did enjoy the game from time to time throughout the playthrough; however, the amount of flaws made it more frustrating than enjoyable. The premise of the story isn't entirely new, but it was provocative and intriguing. The writing was humorous and made dialogues between the characters more interesting rather than just moving the plot along. The graphics were incredibly beautiful, especially a lot of the city scape settings. With so much going for it, what made it considered so bad? The biggest gimmick in the game was the ability to give voice commands to your allies. You can tell them to rush forward, give cover fire, praise them, or yell at them. Unfortunately, the voice command system was always going haywire and giving absurd directions or insulting your team mates when you want to praise them which affected the relationship level system between the main character and his allies. I ended up turning off the voice commands which limited me to 2-4 choices of responses using key presses whenever presented with a question. Then there's the relationship level system mentioned earlier. Commending an ally or performing extraordinary feats will raise your relationship level with allies while friendly fire and undesirable responses to questions will anger them and lower your relationship level. The higher the relationship level, the more likely an ally will listen to a command while lower levels will often get them to ignore you. The problem is that friendly fire happens quite often as allies tend to run in front of gunfire almost constantly despite being purposely in front of them. Sometimes they'll ask a question in mid-combat and immediately get angry as an enemy interrupts them. The relationship level also affects the ending the player gets, so it makes it that more difficult to raise their levels to the max. Movement can be clunky, and firefights mostly consist of covering and firing. Boss fights are quite large and exciting, but they're also buggy, tedious, and annoying at times. This game probably should be in the first list as it was pretty fun shooting tons of robots and blowing things up, but it's also a game I couldn't recommend a friend and not a game I'd want to revisit anytime soon. I guess I felt that this game could've been so much more but isn't.
Home (PC)
I did not enjoy this game. It's an Adventure game presented as a retro-style, 8-bit thriller as the player tries to figure out what had happen in the brief past as the main character retraces his steps back to this own home. The story was shallow, the pacing was incredibly slow, and every possible ending was intentionally ambiguous to try to reach for something deeper in meaning which didn't matter. I do have to commend the game's ability to create a somewhat eerie atmosphere, but that's about it. Thankfully, it was only $1 and nothing more.
Journey (PS3)
Journey is by no means a bad game. The concept is unique, the graphics and environment is beautiful, and the experience was interesting; however, I just didn't enjoy it as a game. Most of the game was just holding up and walking. I fell asleep a few times from the short 1.5 hours of completion of the game. The most riveting part of the game was probably the very end. I won't say anymore as the whole playthrough is an experience and I wouldn't want to spoil it for anyone. Also, it quite pricey to have a $15 tag on it for just 1.5 hours of gameplay. I would probably recommend anyone to play through it once at a friend's house who has the game just for the experience as $15 just isn't worth it. Journey is more like an Art piece than a game.
Nexuiz (PC)
It's not that I didn't enjoy the game, it's that I didn't get a chance to. Nexuiz is an arena-style shooter akin to First-Person Shooters like Quake and Unreal Tournament. It's fast-paced, has tons of character abilities, a nice line up of weapons, and beautifully crafted levels. But the problem is, no one plays it. I bought the game, was excited to try it out, went online and saw 2 people in one server and 1 guy in his own server. Despite numerous sales, promotions, and even the addition of Steamworks compatibility, the population of Nexuiz is extremely low to none. Thankfully, there's still a practice mode where I can mess around in the game against bots. It's a fun game, but ended up disappointing with no community behind it.
The Secret World (PC)
So what happened with this game? A few years ago, it was announced and caught the attention of the industry by storm. But once it came out, this MMORPG was shot up with a spark of interest and quickly melded with the rest of the MMOs out in the market. I had the opportunity to try the game out during a free weekend and was presented with nearly 2.5 hours of cut-scenes and dialogue while only 30 minutes of those 3 hours was spent killing a few enemies. It's a strange mechanic to have the player press every attack over and over with the number rows when moving around with WASD and dodging is such a big part of the combat system in the game. It made the controls feel cumbersome and messy. A lot of the combat felt "ho-hum, it was kinda interesting" where it didn't seem to deliver the excitement and fast-paced combat it promised in these past few years. It's evident that the publisher couldn't keep the subscription base model anymore and moved to a pay-once with micro-transaction model much like Guild Wars 2. The game might have gotten better as I played farther into it, so perhaps I'll give it another chance in the future if it's still around.
The War Z (PC)
I bought this game knowing it uses the same exact formula concocted by the modders for DayZ, that it was still in Beta form, and that it included micro-transactions. What I didn't know was how hard it was just to play with a friend, how incredibly slow the pacing of the game was, and how very little the player is rewarded. The War Z is an obvious rip-off of the popular ArmA 2 mod "DayZ" where players are dropped into a desolate world of scarce resources, mobs of zombies, and human players who are more likely to kill you for your supplies than help each other to survive. In the first hour of playing the game, my friend and I worked on trying to meet up only to find ourselves dropped on opposite sides of the map. He was killed 3 times in a row by another player with a gun while I died of zombies overwhelming me whenever I found an item. 90% of the time will be spent walking to a destination or running away from zombies. 7% of the time, you'll be finding items and walking through a village or city. And the rare 3% of the time, you'll be fighting zombies and/or shooting other players. It's pretty exciting finding a weapon, item, or just nourishments, but that feeling is quickly dashed when you're killed by an unsuspecting zombie that made no sound or by another player sniping you from far away. So far, the game seems to work well for trolling other players by staying stationary at a city and killing other players who pass by, hackers who go around killing players with aim-bots with sniper rifles and such. The game provides quite the experience, but I don't think I'll be able to make the $13.50 I paid worth it. This game has so much negative feedback right now that I doubt it'll last much longer. From the poor launch to the handling of design priority, the developers and publisher of the game has a very bad reputation amongst the community. This was probably the most disappointing game I played in 2012.
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