7 Popular Game Series Sequels You’ve Never Heard Of

Spoiler Warning!

There are some spoilers ahead for all the games involved. Proceed with caution if you intend to play any of them.

Alone in the Dark: Illumination

Alone in the Dark (AitD) is a survival horror game series that began in 1992 for the PC. The identically-titled launch game was based on works by H.P. Lovecraft and continued through six more titles for a total of seven games. The last of which, Illumination, was released in 2015.

Unlike the previous titles in the series, Illumination was played entirely online and in a multiplayer setting. Players took the role of one of four characters, two of which are descendants of the first game’s protagonists, Edward Carnby and Emily Hartwood.

Players entered the town of Lorwich, Virginia, a once-bustling community kept up by its rich coal mine. Out of nowhere, a mysterious flood destroys the mine, forcing the townsfolk to evacuate immediately.

It is believed a presence known only as The Darkness has taken up residence in the town. Stories of a dense, never-ending fog covering the entire area and twisted creatures lurking within it assure that Lorwich will never be re-inhabited.

As they do, a billionaire named Mitch Preston buys and re-opens the mine. His company, Deluge Multinational, is looking to cash back in on the once-lucrative coal mine in Lorwich. They hire new workers to live in the town and get production moving again.

It doesn’t take long before problems emerge, however. Soon, there is talk of strange animal attacks and accidents occurring. Then, one day, the whole town goes quiet.

When no form of communication is received, Preston sends in some of his people to investigate. They never check in or return.

Eventually, Theodore Carnby, a private investigator for supernatural happenings, is contracted to discover what happened. Along the way, he encounters three others with similar missions.

Celeste Hartwood, a low-level witch searching for her coven sisters, all of whom went missing while investigating a mysterious psychic call for help from within the mine.

Gabriella Saunders, an engineer with a knack for creating groundbreaking gadgets, is trying to find her father, who vanished right before her wedding. He left obscure clues alluding to his destination that led Gabriella to the very mine that seemed to have destroyed him so many years earlier.

Father Henry Giger, a Catholic priest from the secret society: The Holy See. Henry is already well-acquainted with the supernatural, having fought against it his entire life. He is sent to Lorwich with no other instruction than to find an elevator shaft within the mine.

The premise itself sounds interesting, and the character’s stories make you want to follow their paths to the end. Unfortunately, little is done with it after the gameplay starts. It is a great concept with poor execution.

Players had plenty of complaints. The major ones were:

• Little to no sound effects or voice acting
• Poor lighting
• Bad graphics
• Long loading times
• The game was boring
• Tedious missions took away any fun
• The game was unbalanced and unplayable in single-player mode
• Generally seemed unfinished

The idea was for the players to work together to enhance each character’s abilities, but the game ended up clunky, mediocre, and overall uninteresting.

Developers believed introducing new playable characters would bring new players to the series and pull established fans back. However, the character’s stories and personas were weak and did little to drum up interest.

Metacritic dished out a 19/100 Metascore with a 1.3 user score, while IGN gave it a 2.8/10. Illumination is considered the worst AitD game by fans.

Batman: Dark Tomorrow

Batman: Dark Tomorrow starts players out in the well-known Gotham City as Batman, fighting several battles and ridiculous plot points all at once. He is struggling with a gang war led by Black Mask and The Ventriloquist while also learning his old pal Commissioner Gordon has been kidnapped and left to die inside Arkham Asylum, which has once again been overtaken.

After fighting and sneaking his way to the Asylum, Batman encounters many of his biggest adversaries before he finds The Joker, only to learn that the entire scenario was simply a ruse to keep him busy while Ra’s al Ghul destroys Gotham with a weaponized satellite.

Still with me? Yeah, a lot is going on, and it doesn’t end there.

Now, with Gordon safe, Batman must travel to the League of Assassins’ fortress in the Himalayas, presumably, Nanda Parbat. Here, he works with Ra’s al Ghul’s daughter, Talia, to stop Ra’s ultimate plan to flood the world so that he can recreate it in his image.

There are multiple endings to Dark Tomorrow, though most players were unable to stomach a second playthrough to achieve them all.

Considering the story was written by Scott Peterson, a veteran writer at DC Comics, and directed and partially co-written by Kenji Terada, who wrote the first trilogy of Final Fantasy games, most would assume that Dark Tomorrow would be a hit, but it wasn’t.

Years after production, Peterson noted that he had no idea Terada was even involved and that the two did not work together in writing the game. He believed Terada was brought in after he finished writing and then changed some of the writing.

Some of the issues with the game were:

Having two writers working on the same project but at separate times will turn out well. They cannot see one another’s vision without cooperating with each other.

The game was also super buggy and had repetitive missions, confusing mechanics, and dodgy camera angles.

Dark Tomorrow was released in 2003 for the Xbox and Nintendo GameCube but turned out to be so heavily criticized that a planned Playstation 2 release was canceled.

Metacritic gave the Xbox version a 25/100 and the GameCube version a 29/100. Its highest scores came from the Official Xbox Magazine (OXM) and IGN, both giving it a 3.5/10, but with IGN also being quoted as saying, “the Dark Knight gets his wings clipped in his latest adventure.”

It did catch some praise, however, specifically for the cut-scenes.

It is considered by some to be one of the worst games ever created and likely the worst Batman game of all time.

Not to mention, what is that face he’s making on the cover? It looks like he just saw or smelled something awful.

Hotel Mario

Hotel Mario follows Mario and Luigi after they receive an invitation from Princess Toadstool to visit the Mushroom Kingdom. Upon their arrival, they discover that Bowser has taken over seven hotels in the kingdom and trapped the princess in one of them.

The brothers must navigate through each hotel, defeat Bowser’s minions, and close all the doors to progress to the next level. There isn’t a lot to do other than go through doors until each one has been shut and collect coins. You can jump on a few heads, but it doesn’t have the same satisfaction-producing incentives as other Mario titles.

There are a few obstacles along the way, such as slippery floors and enemies hiding in suitcases, but it isn’t that difficult to get around.

It has a similar play style to old arcade-type games like Donkey Kong, which features an unmovable background picture and several stacked platforms the player has to traverse to reach their destination.

The game features over-the-top voice acting and silly cutscenes which depict Mario and Luigi’s interactions with each other and even the player. Some are even pretty stereotypical, like Luigi mentioning that he hopes the princess made them lots of spaghetti. It also sounds like someone is reading it into a mic rather than living through it, which destroys immersion.

Hotel Mario is yet another game published by Philips Interactive Media for the Philips CD-i console in 1994 with cheesy dialogue and goofy renderings. It doesn’t seem to take a genius to understand why this never became as successful as our Big Three.

The game has been called one of the worst video games ever based on its uninspired gameplay, poor controls, and the issues mentioned above. GamesRadar was even quoted as calling it “craptastic” and ranked it 48 on their list of The 50 Worst Games of All Time.

One possible reason the game was so bad was that despite being made for a younger audience, mainly children, the developers, Fantasy Factory, chose to test it on older adults. Some testers were said to have been beyond retirement age, leaving a lot of space for misinterpretation between ages and interests.

Overall, Hotel Mario seemed like a cash grab. It was uninspired and trivial, to the point of just being boring. It gave no depth to the Mario Universe and added nothing but another title. One that Nintendo likely wishes didn’t exist.

Mortal Kombat: Special Forces

Chronologically, Mortal Kombat: Special Forces is set before the events of the first Mortal Kombat, making it the official starting point in the series.

The creators are lucky, however, that it didn’t come out first.

You may be asking yourself why right about now, but I can assure you that I have the answer here.

Special Forces is a 3D action adventure with a mix of platforming, puzzle-solving, and third-person shooting gameplay.

There isn’t a whole lot to talk about with this title, as there just isn’t a lot going on.

The players follow Jackson Briggs (Jax,) a member of the Special Forces unit, as he attempts to stop the Black Dragon organization, namely Kano, from stealing a dangerous artifact known as The Eye of Chitian.

The eye once belonged to a powerful sorcerer of the same name. It possesses the ability to open a portal to another realm to its current holder, making it a hot commodity among heroes and villains alike.

Most of the game consists of running through big empty corridors and beating up the sparse amount of enemies Jax encounters with his fists. While he can use guns and explosives, those seem fairly limited to certain areas and times.

There are only five levels, and they are all basically copies of one another. There isn’t much in the way of originality. The cutscenes are bland and unconvincing, with one showing Jax coming across the bodies of members of his Spec Ops team and stating, in a monotone voice, “Kano, you’re gonna pay for this.”

His movements aren’t any better. He doesn’t look like a man that just discovered his comrades’ mutilated corpses. Instead, he looks sort of like a badly-made character from 2004’s WWE SmackDown! vs. Raw using Triple H’s ring entrance taunt.

It’s not pretty. Though admittedly, I do love some WWE SmackDown! vs. Raw. Some of the ridiculous things I have encountered in those games are legendary! That is another article altogether, though.

Like many other games on this list, Special Forces earned the distinction of one of the worst games of all time, mainly due to its numerous technical issues, clunky controls, and repetitive gameplay.

GamesRadar+ ranked Mortal Kombat: Special Forces as the 41st worst game ever made and said it was the second most absurd Mortal Kombat offshoot, with Mortal Kombat: Live Tour being the only one worse.

The game was boring and unimaginative, with incredibly repetitive fighting, dialogue, and levels. Moving at a normal pace, it doesn’t even take two full hours to beat, with the top current speedrunner PNDMustard finishing it in thirty-seven minutes and twenty-five seconds.

The Legend of Zelda — Philips CD-i Releases

Nestled between Link’s Awakening for the Game Boy and Ocarina of Time for the N64 was a trilogy of games released by the Dutch conglomerate Philips.

The games were created independently of Nintendo and are non-canonical in the Zelda universe.

Originally, Nintendo and Sony were set to work together to create the Super NES CD-ROM System or SNES-CD that would incorporate CD-ROM technology into the current SNES via an add-on. Nintendo reneged on their agreement with Sony and chose to continue to complete the addition with Philips instead.

Ultimately, Nintendo decided to abandon the whole idea and gave Philips the rights to make a few games with their characters as a means of canceling their contract.

The games are as follows:

• Link: The Faces of Evil — Released in 1993 for Philips’s CD-i game console. Players took on the familiar role of Link on the island of Koridai, where he must conquer the Faces of Evil, giant statues on the island containing minions of Ganon.
• Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon — Released on the same day as Faces of Evil in 1993 for the same console. Players took on the new role of Princess Zelda after both her father and Link go missing in the land of Gamelon. Zelda travels to Gamelon and is prompted to find a magic wand that will defeat Ganon and rescue her loved ones.
• Zelda’s Adventure — Released in 1994 for the CD-i game console. Once again, players become Princess Zelda after Link was kidnapped by Ganon. Always up to no good, Ganon has also taken possession of the seven celestial signs and brought about an age of darkness in yet another new kingdom called Tolemac.

Unlike the previous CD-i Zelda games that were animated normally, Zelda’s Adventure was played as a live-action game. It was a top-down adventure, much like the original Legend of Zelda.

All three of the Philip’s CD-i games were campy, cheesy, and not well-animated or voice-acted. The plots were boring and all over the place, and the characters were wholly unlikeable. There was no correlation from one game to the next, with the games always introducing new and uninteresting characters and areas.

Much like the console, the CD-i games were not well-received and are now considered some of the worst ever made.

On an interesting note, since Nintendo went back on their agreement with Sony, Sony ended up branching off and creating their own game console. You can thank Nintendo for the PlayStation!

Another interesting bit of info is that Tolemac is Camelot spelled backward.

Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness

Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness is the sixth installment in the Tomb Raider series. It follows the series protagonist, Lara Croft, as she investigates a string of thefts and murders linked to a set of medieval artifacts called the Obscura Paintings.

The plot is interesting enough. Lara is called by her mentor-turned-rival, Werner von Croy, and asked to come to his home in Paris. Here, von Croy reveals that he was tasked with finding the Obscura Paintings but had been apprehensive about it.

Werner believes he is being set up and stalked and wants Lara’s help to stay safe. Lara, however, is still angry and untrusting of von Croy and refuses to assist him. As she goes to leave, a mysterious force knocks her out and murders von Croy. She wakes with blood on her hands and no memory, causing her to flee until she can figure out what happened.

As the plot progresses, Lara does eventually have to find the paintings and attempt to evade capture for von Croy’s murder and being killed by the painting’s creator.

It does sound interesting, like a good, fully thought-out plotline. It went wrong when the publishers decided it had to release alongside the movie version, Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life.

Here they rushed production to the point of cutting out huge chunks of gameplay and zones, effectively creating nonsensical plot holes and storylines. They also made the massive mistake of rushing the play-testing, nearly to the point of not doing it at all.

The game was originally highly anticipated, more so than any Tomb Raider before it, but because it was so unfinished and clunky, it became even more disliked.

Players were incredibly disappointed with the sad state of the game’s development. They also complained that there weren’t any actual tombs to raid and that Lara’s signature pistols were absent.

Angel of Darkness flunked so hard that Eidos Interactive took the entirety of the Tomb Raider series’ development away from Core Design, which had been making it since its inception, and handed it over to Crystal Dynamics, who rebooted it.

It is a shame the game wasn’t fully developed. It stood a chance at becoming the best Tomb Raider game in the series. Lara had been overhauled and had a trendy new look, the graphics were all updated from previous titles, and there was going to be so much to it that it was considered ambitious.

Instead, the final product had the look and feel of an unfinished game, which it was, making it hard to enjoy or understand.

Umbrella Corps

Umbrella Corps is a multiplayer first-person shooter released in 2016 for PlayStation 4 and Microsoft Windows. It is the 26th game in the series and happens twelve years after the official collapse of Umbrella.

The game is set in the Resident Evil universe and takes place in several recognizable locations, including Raccoon City, the Antarctic Base from CODE:Veronica, the Spencer Mansion, the Village from 4, and Kijuju from 5, along with a few others.

Players assume the role of mercenaries hired by different corporations to retrieve valuable data from various contaminated facilities. The goal is to take control of as much of Umbrella and Tricell’s research as possible. Everyone wants a piece of that BOW pie.

There are separate gameplays for both single-player and multiplayer. Single-player mode focuses on an agent known only as 3A-7 as he goes on missions to test company products being made with Umbrella’s technology.

Multiplayer is based around the aforementioned mercenaries competing with one another to retrieve the information. Players use some of the equipment tested by 3A-7 to combat each other, and the zombies still infesting the zones.

The game features a cover system, allowing players to take cover behind objects to avoid enemy fire. It otherwise plays like a typical first-person shooter, just incorporating some of its own weaponry.

Umbrella Corps received mixed reviews, with many criticizing its lack of content, poor graphics, and shallow gameplay. Some major complaints with Umbrella Corps were that it brought nothing to the Resident Evil world. It had small maps lacking any intrigue, and it didn’t really fit into the franchise in general.

Visually, it looks fine, nothing outstanding and a bit generic, but not terrible. It does have a strange waviness to the movements that can cause motion sickness in some people, though.

Audio-wise, when the player speaks, it sounds a bit like they are standing behind the screen, like commentary, rather than coming from the character, which is a bit off-putting.

The gameplay is also quite repetitive, though it is nice to see some familiar places. The enemies are different based on the current zone. If the player is in the Village, the enemies have the infected villager’s skins, same with Kijuju, and so on.

It did seem like a decent idea, just perhaps wasn’t perfectly executed. Either way, Resident Evil: Umbrella Corps never made the big leap to mainstream gaming like so many other titles in the series. Can’t win them all, I suppose.