Unreal 2 - After the incredible journey through an alien world the first game puts you on, it was extremely disappointing to suddenly be a generic grunt playing through painfully mediocre levels. It does have a few good ideas to be fair, like setting up defenses to hold a position against the clock, but overall it didn't help the game feel anything more than 'meh'
Simcity (2013) - ...
WoW - Mostly for what it did to the lore. By the end of Warcraft 3 I felt fascinated by the world that Blizzard had created and absolutely jumped on the first chance I got to play WoW. I only played for about 5 months or so, before the Panderia expansion, and I had an absolute blast with it. I only quit because of my deteriorating internet connection and work pressure. But ever since, every now and again I looked up what was going on in the world, and read up a bit about the extensive lore. That's when I get confronted by stuff like this:
"After intelligence spoke of an opening directly to the Lich King's private chambers, Jaina Proudmoore led
adventurers from the Alliance while Sylvanas Windrunner led
adventurers from the Horde into the Frozen Halls."
Perhaps it's just me, but that
really annoys me. It annoys me because I feel the power, or authenticity of the lore if you will is compromised by jamming in the player characters like this. And this is not the only example.
Then there is the overall direction of the lore itself which I despise, from Avengers type flying 'carriers' to the imprisonment/banishment of Sargeras, again somehow with the aid of a haphazard collection of adventurers! Sargeras for that don't know is
the biggest meanie in the Warcraft universe, analogous to Melkor/Morgoth in LotR.
Commandos 3 - Not bad in of itself, but pales in comparison to C2. For starters I spent a good few hours trying to figure out how to increase the resolution beyond what turned out to be the maximum : 800x600. This after I enjoyed C2 in glorious 1280x1024. Though, I wasn't surprised that the max was so low when it dawned on me just how small the levels were compared to C2.
Empire Earth 2 - It's not a bad game by any means. It's just that I loved the first game and wanted more of it, and somehow EE2 just didn't feel right.
WarGames - The screenshots I kept seeing in gaming magazines fascinated me to no end back in the day, but it was only several years later that I discovered a box copy for the first time in a type of pawn shop. Turns out I should've wondered more why someone would pawn it. I found completing most levels to be extremely frustrating. Perhaps I wasn't using the right strategy, but the game was just ridiculously hard.