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Decline What's the worst non-RPG sequel ever?

DraQ

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Q2 disappointed because it wasn't really a sequel and turned everything into super bland
Yes.
and low iq
So that's why Unreal is so butthurt about it. Makes sense.
humans versus robots thing, but the game itself was OK.
Other than being terminally EZ, you mean.
Also, blandness IS a problem.

But yeah, fix difficulty, blandness and a bunch of shamefully wasted opportunities in mechanics, and it could have been fun, if lowbrow romp.
 

Norfleet

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Duke Nukem Forever
Honestly, DNF wasn't even really bad. It was just disappointingly mediocre.

You want Worst Non-RPG Sequel Ever? SimCity 5.

Also, blandness IS a problem.
Blandness is a problem, but blandness itself isn't equivalent to badness. To dig in the depths of truly bad sequels, the sequel needs to be not merely bland, but actively BAD, and it has to be so much WORSE than its predecessor, as a bad sequel to bad original represents no real change.

And for this, the leading contender has to be SimCity 5.
 

sser

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Civ6. I actually gave Civ6 some space to develop as both 4 and 5 were also bad at release, but from the start I thought the game's foundations were way too off the mark to work. Two expansions in, and that remains the case. I like that Civ as a series is willing to try new things, but for me this one just didn't work at all. On the flipside, Civ6's failures have opened the door for competitors like it's 1999 again so that's cool.

The totality of the Close Combat series after the third game. It isn't that they're individually bad, it's that they almost aggressively pursued zero change.

Splinter Cell: Conviction & Rainbow Six: Vegas are the flashpoints where both series turned into generic mainstream muck.
 

Joggerino

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Civ6. I actually gave Civ6 some space to develop as both 4 and 5 were also bad at release, but from the start I thought the game's foundations were way too off the mark to work. Two expansions in, and that remains the case. I like that Civ as a series is willing to try new things, but for me this one just didn't work at all. On the flipside, Civ6's failures have opened the door for competitors like it's 1999 again so that's cool.

The totality of the Close Combat series after the third game. It isn't that they're individually bad, it's that they almost aggressively pursued zero change.

Splinter Cell: Conviction & Rainbow Six: Vegas are the flashpoints where both series turned into generic mainstream muck.

Agreed on close combat. They've been releasing the same game for 20 years.
 

Reality

Learned
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Dec 6, 2019
Messages
391
Just thought of it and it's obvious to me


Lemmings 2: The Tribes

On the surface there is nothing glaringly wrong with it but - Lemmings 2 encourages you to save EVERY lemming, on every level - this takes away a lot of morbid but fun levels that were present in the original - almost any Level in the original that required Blockers would end with those Lemmings being left behind - and there were also plenty of more advanced levels where Blockers were not allowed at all and you just had to cut-off the default bleeding of Lemmings fast enough to win - It really made the game more exiting, thematic, and actually added many challenges to the level design that wouldn't be possible if the goal was to always save everyone.

In Lemmings 2 on the other hand an indirect effect of the "all CAN survive" philosphy is that far more levels allow you to just trap the full group in an area - let 1 single guy go ahead and clear the path, then open the door only when the road is already clear - in Lemmings 1 you COULD do this for the first half of the game, but then the game would force you to "unlearn" this bad habit when it took away your safety blanket (usually with limited or total restrictions on the number of blockers allowed per level)
 

deuxhero

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Duke Nukem Forever
Honestly, DNF wasn't even really bad. It was just disappointingly mediocre.

You want Worst Non-RPG Sequel Ever? SimCity 5.

Also, blandness IS a problem.
Blandness is a problem, but blandness itself isn't equivalent to badness. To dig in the depths of truly bad sequels, the sequel needs to be not merely bland, but actively BAD, and it has to be so much WORSE than its predecessor, as a bad sequel to bad original represents no real change.

And for this, the leading contender has to be SimCity 5.

Yeah, the only thing that makes me hesitate to agree with the 2013 SimCity is the question on if it even counts as a sequel instead of a terrible reboot. It was a terrible game that was also online only, "solved" very quickly (build around a single winding road), and the main multiplayer "feature" it had was troll builds that made other players deal with increased crime.
 

Riskbreaker

Guest
Except it was.
The sheer, logic defying amount of jank wasn't by far the worst thing in Blood 2.
The worst thing is how soulless and unatmospheric it was.
It's not something that happens because of running out of funds.
Aye, even if one addressed the bugs and actually 'fixable' gameplay-related issues viz., the balancing/bizarrely varying weapon damage, there's no fixing just how bland and lazy the levels are even outside abandoning the themes and aesthetics of the first game. Even when the game teases you with something exciting, it just ruins it a couple of moments later. For example you have one section placing you outside this futuristic airplane in flight. Looks promising, right? Well, no. Because you then enter its interior and find yourself wading thru a maze of narrow, samey, ugly-looking corridors and small rooms.
 

DraQ

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Except it was.
The sheer, logic defying amount of jank wasn't by far the worst thing in Blood 2.
The worst thing is how soulless and unatmospheric it was.
It's not something that happens because of running out of funds.
Aye, even if one addressed the bugs and actually 'fixable' gameplay-related issues viz., the balancing/bizarrely varying weapon damage, there's no fixing just how bland and lazy the levels are even outside abandoning the themes and aesthetics of the first game. Even when the game teases you with something exciting, it just ruins it a couple of moments later. For example you have one section placing you outside this futuristic airplane in flight. Looks promising, right? Well, no. Because you then enter its interior and find yourself wading thru a maze of narrow, samey, ugly-looking corridors and small rooms.
With good design decisions we could probably still have expected something on the level of Shogo out of it, and Shogo, honestly, wasn't a bad game.
 

Riskbreaker

Guest
For sure it wasn't, tho its random critical hit mechanic plus its reliance on hitscanners could make its on-foot sections almost Blood 2-level infuriating on higher difficulty.
But that's more a case of some questionable choices marring a decent game whereas Blood 2 is like a piece of excrement wrapped in more excrement, inside a pile of excrement.
 
Joined
Feb 28, 2011
Messages
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Chicago, IL, Kwa
The adventure genre has a ton of terrible sequels. Just to name a few:

Escape from Monkey Island
King’s Quest 2
King’s Quest Mask of Eternity
Quest for Glory 5 (arguably an RPG I suppose)
Laura Bow 2
Phantasmagoria 2 (to be fair, the first one is a pile of shit too)
 

Morenatsu.

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May 6, 2016
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The Centre of the World
Except it was.
The sheer, logic defying amount of jank wasn't by far the worst thing in Blood 2.
The worst thing is how soulless and unatmospheric it was.
It's not something that happens because of running out of funds.
Aye, even if one addressed the bugs and actually 'fixable' gameplay-related issues viz., the balancing/bizarrely varying weapon damage, there's no fixing just how bland and lazy the levels are even outside abandoning the themes and aesthetics of the first game. Even when the game teases you with something exciting, it just ruins it a couple of moments later. For example you have one section placing you outside this futuristic airplane in flight. Looks promising, right? Well, no. Because you then enter its interior and find yourself wading thru a maze of narrow, samey, ugly-looking corridors and small rooms.
With good design decisions we could probably still have expected something on the level of Shogo out of it, and Shogo, honestly, wasn't a bad game.
Shogo was only barely better than Blood 2. Worse graphics, brain-dead gameplay, but no copy-pasted train levels therefore it gud lmao
 

Burning Bridges

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The totality of the Close Combat series after the third game. It isn't that they're individually bad, it's that they almost aggressively pursued zero change.

Agreed on close combat. They've been releasing the same game for 20 years.

Of course but you should know what happened. Those are not really sequels but waste recycling. The number of third rate hacks who had their hands on glorious CC2 is staggering, and even the weakest parts of the original actually got worse in the process.

I was enthralled by CC2. Man that took me to Arnhem so hard that I feel like a war veteran. CC3 was the same game but with the same problems and less quality content. Then came 4 which was simply bad (the popamole disease was beginning to rage) then 5 which was like 2 but lazy and buggy, then came Matrix who milked the franchise with pure garbage for a decade, then after 20 years Matrix announced a brand new engine which took forever and when it was released was complete shit. Have I forgotten something?
 

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