Honestly, Bulletstorm had great gunplay, the weapons were fun, visually the game was fun to watch take place. The problem was the story, the characterization, the marketing and of course the level design, as is the problem with nearly every single player FPS since CoD4.
I'd love to hear why Tribes Ascend failed tbh. I have it a good try when it went public, but gave up after flying around aimlessly for a few hours and never being able to accomplish anything.
As is the problem with any failing arena shooter if you join late in the action, you will get your ass handed to you by the few diehard players. A good way to get into Tribes is to initially learn the classes in deathmatch on densely populated servers, then switch to CTF with lower player numbers after you get used to the gameplay.
Tribes Ascend failed because Hi-Rez did not listen to the players until it was too late, they had poor level designers and they did not give players the tools to make their own maps or modifications. Looking at TF2, one of the only succesful class based CTF arena shooters in recent time, should've shown given them a hint about how to interact with the player base.
TA was very much plagued by Hi-Rez's need to have complete control of the game, so that they could earn money on the free-to-play model. In order to properly enjoy the game, you either had to pay for weapons, or grind a lot of ingame currency (XP) in order to purchase upgrades and (at times) better weapons.
Eventually, Hi-Rez decided that TA was too expensive to maintain, so they gave the players the ability to pay a one time fee (about 40 dollars I think), which would give them instant access to all weapons and classes, and they changed the upgrade system, so that you passively gained upgrades as you played, instead of having to pay ingame currency.
tl;dr TA was ruined by a terribly managed F2P scheme, overall bad game design decisions and the need to control every aspect of the game, denying the players any control.
