The 2024 Player 2 Game Awards - Biggest Disappointment
It’s that time of year folks, time for the P2 crew to put together the definitive GOTY list. As always we can never agree on anything so it is just easier to let everyone have their own choice.
Second Award: Biggest Disappointment – It is important to note the difference in our minds between bad and disappointing. A disappointment is not necessarily a bad game.
Rob Caporetto - Lunar Lander Beyond
I’ve slowly been developing a mixed relationship with Atari’s handling of their legacy. For every project that nails it like Atari 50, there are games like Lunar Lander Beyond which totally misunderstands the concept of the original arcade game.
Granted, the source material doesn’t offer a lot to work with – Lunar Lander is a simple arcade game after all, and fleshing it out was going to take a lot of work. The problem is that the result is a game that trades the tension and precision of landing on a planetary surface, for a story laced with soulless cynicism and flying through rings.
Stephen del Prado - No Switch 2
I was really hoping 2024 would be the year we finally got a follow up to the original Switch which lumbers towards a decade old. Handheld PC competition is fierce, and a noticeable dip in releases aren’t helping to keep me interested in my first gen Switch which would benefit greatly from an OLED screen and a larger battery without a doubt. I’m crossing everything that the Switch successor manages to make it out the gate in 2025 before I’m up for yet another set of Joycons. If Nintendo could do me a solid and not only improve performance of first gen titles but also make the transfer process nice and simple, I’ll be there Day One!
Shaun Nicholls - Skull And Bones
Man, Ubisoft dropped the ball on this one. What once started as a spin-off of the highly successful and extremely well like Assassin’s Creed IV, which had you engaging in the life of a pirate sailing the Caribbean, turned into a live service game with bland resource gathering, a story that didn’t grab me at all and zero ship boarding based combat. Having seen what we were given, I would have quite happily accepted a remaster of AC IV’s sailing components without any of the AC storyline incorporated. Just sailing the world and being a pirate and doing pirate things. I mean it couldn’t make the story any worse than it already was could it, and at least I would be able to fight on the deck of a ship, ya know, like pirates did back in the day.
Matt Hewson - The Big Three
My god, it felt like a race to the bottom between Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo this year. From the massive layoffs to the piss-poor handling of studios to the Concord debacle to suing an indie studio by retroactively patenting a mechanic, it really was a year for the big boys to be absolute pricks to anyone and everyone in the industry. Honestly, it is so disheartening to see, especially as CEOs and the other C Suite clowns keep giving each other raises while the rest of the workforce cops the brunt. Pathetic from all of them and their shortsightedness is going to be the death of the industry.
Jess Zammit - Alone in the Dark
Oh, Alone in the Dark. You made it onto my list of most anticipated games of 2024, and now here you are, sadly as my biggest disappointment. Jodie Comer and David Harbour mostly showed up and did their best with the script they were given, but even they couldn’t save what was ultimately a let down of a horror game that wasn’t quite sure what it wanted to be. The puzzles never felt quite as satisfying as I wanted them to, the graphics were a hot mess, and it was never clear whether the horrors were supposed to be in the imagination of Decerto mansion’s residents, or very real things plaguing our world. I don’t know. I wanted to love it so much, but it just couldn’t quite get there. I’m sorry, Jodie Comer, you deserved better.
Jason Hawkins - Dragon's Dogma 2
Expectations are a hell of a thing, and review scores don’t always completely describe something. With that in mind, Dragon’s Dogma 2 is a wild in-between of one of my favourite games of the year, and also the biggest disappointment. Bad enemy variety, some very odd class choices and way, way too many collectables put this on my biggest disappointment of the year. Maybe if we get some Bitterblack Isle DLC, that’ll all change. One day. Maybe.
Paul James - Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League
To be disappointed in something, you at some point must have been anticipating something, and there was a nugget of something to Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League that I was looking forward to. It might have just been the Rocksteady factor and the magic they’ve created prior to this, some deluded thought that the game could still be okay despite all reporting and available footage – I’m not sure what it was, but I hoped nonetheless… and then the game came out. How deflating.
Tim Henderson - PSSR
Let’s get this out of the way first: The real disappointment of the year is that 2024 has somehow decimated 2023 as being a terrible year for layoffs. This is the perpetual disappointment and will remain so until the husk of AAA development is a twitching, chalky stain on the floor.
Moving on…
I bought a PS4 Pro at launch back in 2016, and as the days and months went by I became increasingly impressed with the upscaling that the then-novel checkerboard rendering could do. It was sometimes streaky in motion, but it really did help improve resolution rendering in a way that made the Pro games look reliably better than they did on a base PS4. At the time, I just assumed that this was a trial run and that the eventual PS5 would ship with some new kind of super-checkerboarding.
The PS5 came out and… didn’t have any kind of unique upscaling technology at all. AMD did an… okay job of filling the void, but image quality of PS5 games tells a pretty consistent story: these machines aren’t really outputting to the potential of now commonplace 4K televisions. It took the eventual PS5 Pro to bring with it a truly new PlayStation unscaling tech: PSSR.
Thank heavens that the lack of a disc drive has had me hold my trigger on buying a Pro this time. PSSR has been a mixed bag so far. It’s helped out games like FF7: Rebirth and Stellar Blade notably, alongside games like, but has been an absolute disaster in numerous other examples. Pro games are getting reported as looking noticeably worse than the base machine. The (surprisingly excellent) Silent Hill remake actually patched it out. While nobody expected DLSS-caliber upscaling, PSSR has had a rough start. I fully expect this to improve as 2025 goes by, but for now I’m very happy to sit on the sidelines and wait for that moment.
