It’s that time of year, folks, the time where the P2 crew sit around the proverbial campfire and argues over the highs and lows of the year. That’s right, it is award season. Join us as we take a look at what excited, surprised and disappointed us in 2025. Now it’s time for the bummer award, the biggest disappointment.
The 2025 P2 Game Awards - Biggest Disappointment
Shaun Nicholls - FBC: Firebreak
When I first heard about this, I was intrigued. Where traditionally, games set within the interconnected Remedy universe were single-player experiences rich with world-building and lore, FBC: Firebreak has almost none of that. Instead, delivering an extraction shooter that, if not for the visually distinguishable Hiss enemies and the Federal Bureau of Control, could have been transplanted into any other extraction shooter without it being noticeable. With FBC: Firebreak, Remedy had a chance to branch out to the players of the co-operative first-person shooter genre and draw them into the world of Control. Instead, what could have been a decent opportunity fizzled out faster than a spot fire in a typhoon.
Matt Hewson - Rugby League 26
How can anyone be disappointed with a BigAnt game? After all, it is almost impossible to have any expectations from one of their games (apart from the fact that it is almost certainly broken in a thousand ways). Well, I expected Rugby League 26 to be bad, but it somehow still managed to disappoint me. Not only was it broken, ugly, and fundamentally missing so much of what makes Rugby League my favourite sport, but it also made some absolute cardinal sins in regards to the players. Things like getting positions wrong or even worse, getting players’ nationalities incorrect (all things that could have been fixed if someone had, you know, looked at the team photo…) I mean, having a proud Pacific Nations women’s player represented as a blonde whitey is offensive on more than one level. Of course, the Big Cheese at BigAnt went on to blame everyone else except his own ineptitude for these errors, but hey… what’s new.
Paul James - Monster Hunter Wilds
There’s a lot to love about Monster Hunter Wilds, but I’m so sad to say that it is also the game that I was most disappointed in this year. The monsters are great, the action is awesome, but the open-world design just about broke me. PC players have it even worse with performance issues still plaguing the game. I fully intend to return to the game for further DLC and expansions, so don’t get me wrong, this is not by any means a bad game, but this was my most anticipated game of the year. Its ceiling for greatness was higher than any game released this year, and Capcom fell short this time around.
Rob Caporetto - Microsoft
This one is pretty obvious when looking back at 2025, but Microsoft is truly the worst (or close to it) thing in gaming right now, and this isn’t hyperbole based on what they’ve done in service of their obsession with “Generative AI” this year.
Firstly? Look at how many talented people they’ve laid off, with the Xbox division bearing the brunt of that in their latest round, despite it being profitable and bringing in plenty of cash. Seeing the leadership survive this unscathed bothers me at such a fundamental level, as while the rank & file have been made to suffer, they’ve not been impacted in any way, and isn’t the role of a leader to protect those under them? Well, it’s certainly not a priority for Phil Spencer and his cronies. Then there’s the increasingly monopolistic shadow they’re casting over the industry off the back of their countless acquisitions over the last decade. Those might have been made to fuel Game Pass (which itself has caused plenty of damage), but instead, it’s gutted their platform, slowly driving away interes,t which can’t help but feel like we’re watching it all slowly decay.
Finally, there’s the absolute mess they’ve made of Windows 11 and its “features” jammed in all over the place, with the OS falling to Copilot-generated entropy faster than anyone might have thought. We can’t ignore the shocking amounts of e-waste it’ll generate with the number of perfectly functioning PCs that are more than capable of running it, but are prevented by nonsensical requirements. But considering the callousness of their executives, none of this is really a surprise to me. I mean, remember how one of them recommended that the staffers they made redundant should just use AI to help them during those layoffs.
I have to believe karma will catch up to them sooner rather than later, as there has to be something to look forward to in order to balance out the horrendous disappointment to gaming which is Microsoft.
Tim Henderson - The Switch 2's Display
I’m really going with my own petty gripes here. In a world where AI developments are eating astronomical amounts of power and causing prices on consumer electronics to spiral out of control (just as graphics card pricing dropped down from absurd to to merely unreasonable, RAM went and got completely out-of-hand) and XBox has earned itself a place of the BDS boycott list while also laying off a tonne of people, it’s hard to be too upset over a little screen, but I still think that Nintendo could have done better here.
The mistakes made with said display are, notably, very not Nintendo-like in nature, which is interesting. This is a company that typically focuses on good value returns in important areas, so it’s odd that the Switch 2 felt a need to tick every box imaginable for its built-in display. Sure, it’s full HD, supports 120fps and VRR, features HDR and is nicely bigger than what came before. But the tradeoffs? Terrible pixel response time (which is pretty noticeable in side-scrollers), and HDR that doesn’t meaningfully do much because it only hits the baseline Display HDR 400 standard and doesn’t even have local-dimming. It’s a worse display overall than the previous 720p one on the Switch OLED, and probably would have been better off had a couple of those features just been cut in order to do a better job of the basics.
Jason Hawkins - Atelier Yumia
I absolutely adore the Atelier series, but after Ryza it doesn’t feel like they know exactly what to do with it. Atelier Yumia feels like a mobile game trapped in a full price game body. Running around finding random spots on a map, following a line to crystals to activate or solving a very simple light beam puzzle isn’t my idea of emergent gameplay. Then there’s the synthesising system, which has been simplified to oblivion. One of my favourite parts of the game was feeling like you got away with something when you broke the synthesising system to your will. In Yumia, it’s been simplified so much that it’s easy to do without much thought, breaking that dopamine hit I get from mastering the system. Huge bummer, would not recommend.
Jenn Christodoulou - Pokémon Legends Z-A
I think we need to hold giant corporations that have more money than god to a higher standard than we hold other companies. I think churning out essentially the exact same game every other year isn’t good enough for a company like Nintendo, and I think gamers need to be more annoyed when these companies smash out an imperfect game and call it a day.
I was so excited for this, I thought it was going to push me over the edge and get me to buy a Switch 2. I have bought every single (mainline) Pokémon game since Red and Blue, but I just can’t justify giving the Pokémon games any more of my money. Miss me with your Day 1 DLC, shitty textures, boring-ass city and low-effort gameplay.
Stephen del Prado - TOO MANY BLOODY GAMES
Cop-out phony answer, but also a real truth – I simply can’t keep up with the amount of good games coming out these days. Social media osmosis and second-hand excitement can only go so far and I’m increasingly frustrated that publishers and developers can’t slow down their output to cater to middle-aged dads like myself. I won’t ever be the type of gamer who locks into CoD all year, cursed to be am omnivorous gamer for all eternity. You really can’t play them all, and that’s my biggest disappointment of 2025.
