There’s nothing quite like the hype train when it’s running at full speed, is there? Fantastic trailers, forums and megathreads teeming with speculation, and pre-orders flying left and right. We’ve all been there, thinking this is the one — the game that’ll change everything.

Sadly, sometimes, instead of genre-defining masterpieces, we get barely breathing shells of broken promises. While we thought that these would be ground-breaking games, they straight up collapsed under the weight of their own ambition or the pressure on their shoulders, whimpering, stumbling, and dying.

5 Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero

Came and went away like Instant Transmission

In 2024, when Sparking! Zero was a couple of months away from release, it was all the world could talk about. Dragon Ball fans were waiting for it like it was the Second Coming, especially considering that the last Budokai Tenkaichi had come out 17 years ago. It was also a game I played to death with my friends in the late 2000’s. Sparking! Zero looked amazing from all the trailers, the character-reveal trailers got us all increasingly hyped as they came, and it almost felt like it would even be in the GoTY conversation.

Then, the game dropped, and it was beautiful. The first two weeks with Sparking! Zero were some of the most enjoyable moments I spent with friends in the past year, barring some fantastic memories in Fortnite, of course. However, then came the broken multiplayer where players going with the meta kept trouncing every newcomer, myself included. The whole point of a fair multiplayer mode went out the window when the characters are lore-accurate. Once the novelty wore off in a month, tops, Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero kind of vanished from the public eye.

Don’t get me wrong — the roster is extensive and immensely impressive, but the offline mode took me nothing more than a day to run through, even with its branching timelines.

All that’s left now are dead lobbies and little player engagement, despite the game’s attempts to get the player base back. That said, Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero is still going to be my go-to couch co-op multiplayer game, thanks to its fantastic split-screen mode.

4 Anthem

The Iron Man fantasy that never panned out

Ah, Anthem. BioWare’s game was going to be a slick Iron Man fantasy with gorgeous visuals and fantastic flight controls. I still remember the reveal trailer and the sunlight peaking through the fabric awnings that had me going gaga over it. What promised to be possibly one of the greatest next-gen games in the looter-shooter genre turned out to be little more than just a pretty shell with nothing inside.

The missions were repetitive, the story was forgettable, and the whole “live service” structure fell apart faster than an IKEA dresser bought off of Facebook Marketplace. Despite its flashy flight mechanics, there was just nothing to stick around for — no endgame, no reason to grind, and definitely no meaningful updates to keep the spark alive. BioWare eventually announced a full overhaul with Anthem NEXT, and I’m always going to be mad about this one — I had to convince my folks to get me Anthem when it was at its lowest price ever, with the promised 2.0 version pending.

What was supposed to be BioWare’s big return turned into a masterclass in how to crash and burn with a jetpack.

3 The Day Before

The day before anything at all happened

The Day Before looked like a dream — a gritty, open-world survival MMO that somehow blended The Division with The Last of Us. Having loved both of these titles, I, too, had quite a bit of interest in the game. The early trailers were suspiciously polished, but people were still buying in, thinking this could be the next genre-defining multiplayer experience. Sadly, what became the most wishlisted game on Steam ever at the time, turned out to not even be a functioning game.

After multiple delays, studio drama, and total radio silence, The Day Before launched... and it was a disaster. The “game” turned out to be an asset-flipped, bare-bones extraction shooter with zero connection to anything shown in its trailers. It barely lasted a week on Steam before it was pulled, refunds were issued en masse, and the “developers” at Fntastic shut down entirely.

There’s a difference between hype gone wrong and full-on vaporware — and The Day Before sits firmly in the latter. It wasn’t just a whimper; it was an internet-fueled bonfire of disappointment, and arguably one of the most embarrassing releases in recent memory.

2 Mass Effect: Andromeda only made the original trilogy look better

And it only puts more pressure on Mass Effect 5

The Mass Effect trilogy remains one of the greatest gaming trilogies ever made — it has rich characters, deep lore, and moral decisions that haunt you for years. So when Andromeda was announced, fans were cautiously hyped. A whole new galaxy? New squadmates? This could’ve been the next great chapter. But wow, what a fall from grace.

From day one, Andromeda launched with some of the most cringe-inducing animations and baffling design choices of the generation. The writing lacked the nuance of the original trilogy, the characters felt flat, and the pacing was all over the place. I still liked the combat very much, and the friend who got me into Mass Effect loved driving around the Nomad, but none of it mattered when the emotional core was so hollow that to this day, we talk about the franchise as if Andromeda never existed.

What should’ve been BioWare’s bold new start felt more like a studio scrambling to find its footing. In the end, Andromeda didn’t boldly go anywhere — it just drifted off into the void.

1 Konami’s eFootball never made it big

A pro-evolution joke here would be low-hanging fruit

When Konami announced that their Pro Evolution Soccer series was going to be reborn as eFootball, it sounded like a bold, forward-thinking move. A free-to-play, constantly-evolving football platform? I, for one, was positively excited. This could’ve been what PES needed to claw back ground from the FIFA series. Spoiler alert — it wasn’t.

The gameplay was janky, the animations were laughably bad, and the player models looked like wax museum rejects. Even worse, their "live service" model barely lived at all. Updates were slow, features were missing, and the game felt more like a beta test than a full release. The worst part? Konami still hasn’t recovered. Even after some patches here and there, the player base never really came back. What was supposed to be a ground-breaking shift in football gaming ended up being a painful reminder of what PES used to be — and what it’s now lost.

Hype is often a dangerous thing

I will be more frugal in my hype next time.

Hype is a dangerous thing — it can elevate a game to mythic status before it even drops, but it can just as easily magnify every flaw when reality hits. When we expect the “next big thing” in the medium, and said games don’t meet those expectations, it results in them fading out faster than normal. The only thing they leave behind in their wake is dead lobbies and broken dreams.

Does that mean I still won’t root for the next game to blow my mind instead of breaking my heart? Perhaps not, but I will surely be more frugal in my hype next time.