Horrible / Video Game Generations: Seventh Onwards

"The Seventh Generation was rough, y'all. Dog rough, because breaking through those skyrocketing budgets and Unreal III's poor texture loading, and coming out the other side as a success was a fairly rare occurrence."

— Matt McMuscles

Ease of access to the Internet around the turn of the new millennium opened up lots of opportunities for online gaming and for smaller, independent game developers to promote and distribute their products. Of course, the Internet also made it a lot easier to spot bad games a mile away.

Important Note: To allow opinions to properly form and give the developers a chance to patch out any glaring issues, examples should not be added until at least one month after release.

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Seventh Generation (2004–2017)

• Aha! I Found It! Hidden Object Game is a WiiWare game developed by A-TEAM. The graphics look like a 3-year-old cut bits of construction paper out and pasted them together, and some have claimed to have gotten headaches just by looking at them. None of the hidden objects you are supposed to find look anything like what they're supposed to represent - for example, the "sea turtle" looks like a yellow letter C. And the plot is one egregious Excuse Plot: there are four aliens who want to find ways to help people, and it turns out that looking for hidden objects is how you help them. IGN reviews it here, as does YAYgaming.
• Alien Disco Safari is a shooter where you shoot aliens for... coming to Earth because they like disco. There's no disco-related content in the game at all aside from the backstory, so you're just shooting aliens for existing on their own ship. You have unlimited ammo for your main weapon, and that weapon kills most enemies in one hit and is perfectly accurate, which removes any sort of challenge. The campaign consists of the same six bland levels played again and again in order without getting harder.
• Survival Horror game AMY, released as a downloadable title for the PS3 and Xbox 360, boasts a novel premise (an Escort Mission game in which the player needs to stay near the NPC to survive), but has too much wrong with it to even bother. Controls are difficult (if even possible) to correctly use, the AI is very stupid, clipping and Hitbox Dissonance are far too common, and the checkpoint system is unfairly sparse, resulting in repetitive Trial-and-Error Gameplay with a very high degree of Fake Difficulty. On top of that, the writing's clichéd, the voice acting's terrible, and the puzzles and scares seem shoehorned in. It was declared one of the worst games of 2012 before the year had even fully started, and Yahtzee explains why as only Yahtzee can.
• The Backyard Sports games released from 2006-09. At this point, they were the only reason why Atari kept the Humongous brand alive as well as to tie-into other sports titles. With their blocky graphics, lifeless voice acting (except in some cases), and awful controls, these games were universally despised when they came out (even by Ron Gilbert, creative director of the original Backyard Baseball). X-Play gave ''Baseball 2007'' a 1/5 (their lowest possible ranking), and IGN gave ''Baseball 2009'' a 1.0 out of 10 (only three games in the history of the site have gotten worse scores). Shadow Streak refers to these games as the "Dark Era." These games wiped out what was left of the franchise's already-declining fanbase, and sales eventually got so low that Atari tried to relaunch the series with Sandlot Sluggers and Rookie Rush (which were reasonably well-received) before dumping it for good.
• Bad Day L.A. was something of a dream project for American McGee (of Quake and Alice fame), a grand satire of the post-9/11 mindset through a Black Comedy lens in the vein of Postal. Unfortunately, things didn't go as planned. The graphics look on par with a mid-tier Dreamcast game (despite coming out the same year as Gears of War and two years after Half-Life 2), there's a complete absence of basic graphics options such as changing the resolution above 1024X768 (despite being a PC-exclusive released in 2006), and the environments are repetitive and barren. Gameplay is frustrating and monotonous, with most of the weapons being pathetically weak (the shotgun can't even kill enemies in a single shot regardless of distance), most missions being themed around helping blatantly useless civilians, and the majority of enemies being difficult to fight (especially the snipers). And most pivotally, there are the attempts at humor and satire, which mostly comes through either racist stereotypes (one of whom serves as the wholly unlikable protagonist), crass Toilet Humour, or cultural references that felt out-of-date even then. The game received nothing but absolute scorn from critics, receiving a rare 28% on Metacritic and multiple "worst of the year" awards from publications such as GamesRadar and X-Play. Civvie 11, offering one of the more thorough takedowns of it, compared it to "a video game adaptation of a Seltzer-Friedberg film". Had it not been for Alice: Madness Returns, the game would have served as a Creator Killer for American McGee.
• Bomberman: Act Zero is considered one of the worst reboots in video game history (and one of the worst games, period) for a number of reasons:
  1. The single-player campaign is 99 levels long, and with no way to save your game between levels, you have to complete the whole thing in one try.
  2. The gimmicky "First-Person Bomber" mode (which is actually shown from an Always Over the Shoulder perspective) is difficult to control, requires manual camera adjustment, and serves little purpose beyond allowing you to take more than one hit before dying.
  3. For a series that prides itself on multiplayer chaos, there's no way to set up offline multiplayer sessions, even against bots.
  4. Finally, and most noticeably, Act Zero has a needlessly ugly Darker and Edgier aesthetic that clashes with the rest of the series' more cartoonish and cutesy theme. Matt McMuscles goes into further detail on all these issues and why they went with that kind of motif in the first place here.
• The 2009 PC game Cadetstvo (Кадетство) is often considered the worst Russian video game ever. 99% of the game consists of walking from place A to place B and watching cutscenes. It feels more like a movie than a game, but there's no real plot, and the only real gameplay is easy and boring minigames. Watch some gameplay footage here.
• CID The Dummy^note or more humorously, Crash Impact Dummy: The Dummy (even though CID dies instantly from fall damage), a 2009 game released for PC computers, the PS2, PSP and the Wii, transparently displays a thorough lack of effort and creativity only seen in few other games. The game is hefty on plagiarism; the story is a miserably bad copy of Mega Man, the gameplay being a poor man's Crash Bandicoot with all the fun replaced with large amounts of glitches that can even have you lose a level after getting to the score results screen, and two tracks being Suspiciously Similar Songs to Fatboy Slim and Final Fantasy VII. The Big Bad, D-Troit, is never given a motive for capturing B.M. Werken's daughter, while the titular "hero" is a shamelessly lazy, whiny and thoroughly-unlikeable jerkass right off the bat. This is especially emphasized in the ending, where he repeatedly insults the damsel — who, for reference, he'd never even met up until that point — and flat-out tells both her and her father he doesn't care about either of them and that he only helped because he wanted to get out of doing his usual work. The graphics, animations, and most especially the voice acting are borderline amateurish, with voice clips constantly looping during gameplay ("Not such a dummy now, am I?"). While the controls in the other versions are clunky and sluggish made worse by the fixed camera angles, the Wii version is by far the worst, as the vast majority if not the entirety of the controls are relegated to severely Waggle-laden motion controls that are prone to being highly sensitive or unresponsive in the most inconvenient times. See Rerez mock the game for what it is. PeanutButterGamer put CID at #4 on a list of his Top Ten Worst Wii Games, and he admits to being legitimately shocked that he was able to find three games that he thought were worse than the game at all, due to how much of a trainwreck he found it to be from every standpoint. Rerez retrospectively considers it (or rather, the Wii version specifically) their third-worst game they played in their "Just Bad Games" series (that no one else would seriously consider playing), with its gameplay only being considered better than Phix: The Adventure and fellow horrible entry Batman & Robin, both for the original PlayStation.
• Country Justice: Revenge of the Rednecks is a 2005 FPS that suffers from a number of issues: poor controls, enemies that take way too many bullets to kill, driving segments only slightly better than Big Rigs, previous-generation graphics, and a game so buggy it can stutter and crash at random even on excellent modern hardware thanks to poor coding, and it'll even run too fast if the graphical settings are turned down. The plot is also stupid and the voice acting is terrible. The game also suffers from extremely long loading times that may even cause the game to crash. The funniest issues are doors with no collision that can be passed through and enemy cows that glide with no walking animation.
• Damnation shows that basing a commercial release on a popular mod ^note (in this case, it started out as a total conversion mod for Unreal Tournament 2004) is not always a good idea. Though everyone agreed the premise (involving an Alternate History where steampunk weaponry severely extended the length of The American Civil War) and the concept of an "acrobatic" third-person shooter could have been cool in a better game, it was bashed for its insanely idiotic friendly and enemy AI, inconsistent game design (for example, being killed by gunfire boots you back to a checkpoint but falling to your death respawns you immediately on the spot for some reason), laggy aiming, boring weapons, and an insane number of bugs. Developer Blue Omega Entertainment went bust immediately after releasing the game.
• Dark is a prime example of a good idea gone wrong. It's a stealth game about a vampire named Eric, who has many supernatural vampiric 'skills' at his disposal while lurking in the shadows. What could have been an enjoyable experience is hampered by clunky controls, ugly and dated visuals, a boring protagonist who's an insult to vampires (especially laughable when the manual opens with an angry screed directed at The Twilight Saga and its "metrosexual vampires"), laughable voice acting (despite the presence of pretty notable voice actors like Doug Cockle), a story that keeps raising more questions than answers, completely broken AI that are either dumb-as-rocks or are frequently breaking the rules of the game that go against the design of a stealth game, Game-Breaking Bugs that render the game almost unplayable, and a skill-tree system that is almost completely pointless due to how easy it is to exploit the game's glitches and enemy AI and that all the powers require a cool down in order to continue using them, all topped with pacing so slow that it will infuriate and bore gamers to the point of abandoning the game and uninstalling within the first level. These glaring issues resulted in the game getting a 3.5 out of 10 from Gamespot, a 2 out of 10 from Game Informer, and a 38 on Metacritic. DX put this game on his Worst Games of the Decade video under the games that are bad at being bad as it wasn't terrible enough to be compared to the likes of Ride to Hell: Retribution and The Quiet Man (mentioned below), but is still deserving of a title to be on the list. Yahtzee also reviewed it only a week after the aforementioned Ride to Hell, which made him question if it was “Absolute Garbage Awareness Month”. Rerez also covered this game in their "Just Bad Games" series, with them even disliking the Bloody Mary cocktail recipe printed in the manual.
• Dimension Witches, a free game that at one point was apparently for sale at a price, plays off the Touhou Project style of Bullet Hell but fails horribly. The gameplay's botched, and the designs of all the characters are even worse and cliched. It was taken down from the IndieCity site and would've been forgotten if it weren't for MikeNnemonic posting a somewhat NSFW video of him playing it on a livestream on his YouTube channel.
• In 2010, Nintendo made a £10 million deal with the BBC to make games based on the Doctor Who license. The result? Doctor Who: Return to Earth on the Wii, developed and published by Asylum Entertainment. Gameplay mostly consists of running around a spaceship as the Doctor and Amy to collect coloured crystals that you shoot at floating targets. Thrilling. Unfortunately the crystals move through the air painfully slowly and you can only carry a few at a time, resulting in a ton of backtracking to collect more when you inevitably run out by missing the targets, which is only made worse by the game's crappy camera. The rest of the gameplay is a handful of uninspired minigames, such as rolling a ball through an obstacle course or moving asteroids around. For a Wii title it's also shamefully ugly, with hideously-outdated models and environments with flat textures that would be more at home on the PS1, along with dull, barely animated cutscenes. Australian game review show Good Game rated it one of the worst games they ever reviewed in the show’s history. Return to Earth's only saving graces are perhaps that it makes the companion DS game Evacuation Earth (itself a low-rent Professor Layton ripoff) look better by comparison, and that it came bundled with an admittedly rather nifty sonic screwdriver Wii Remote accessory.
• Double Dragon II: Wander of the Dragons is a laughably inept attempt at remaking the arcade version of Double Dragon II for Xbox Live Arcade. The four stages from the arcade game are stretched out over the course of 15 boring and ugly levels, with the action occasionally broken up by setpieces that do nothing to make the game exciting. Controls are needlessly complicated, the graphics are quality- and personality-free, the background music plays on an annoying short loop, the voiced narration is terrible and often doesn't even match up with the subtitles, and the few special moves added to add variety to combat are worthless (as actually using them at any point in the game automatically gives you the bad ending for no particular reason). Wander does a disservice to its inspiration in every way imaginable, and is a sharp contrast to the quality of Double Dragon Neon (WayForward Technologies' 80s-flavored remake of the original game, released one year earlier) and the NES version of Double Dragon II (which was over 20 years old at the time).
• Dragonball Evolution is a terrible PSP adaptation of the already-pretty-terrible film, being a poor man's Dragon Ball Z: Budokai with cheap-looking graphics, lackluster sound and voice acting, a short and overall boring story mode (in case you didn't get enough of the film's cringeworthy plot), and such limited depth and variety that one can win simply by mashing the Square and Triangle buttons. Fans are far better off sticking with Dragon Ball Z: Shin Budokai.
• Duludubi Star is perhaps one of the biggest examples of a low-quality Chinese knockoff out there. Released in 2008 as a downloadable PC game by entertainment empire Fantawild to promote its theme parks across the People's Republic, it is a platformer that copies Super Mario Galaxy to a tee... minus the fun, innovation, and functionality.
  • For starters, you're stuck using the arrow or WASD keys plus the mouse button to jump, restricting you to eight-direction movement (though you can map the jump to the keyboard in the options menu). And your jumps have very little aerial control, causing many an unintentional plummet to your death. Couple that with the crappy camera and overall slow walking speed of Duludubi himself, and you'd be hard-pressed to avoid smashing your keyboard in anger from all the precision platforming required.
  • Levels are also crap, relying on the same dull goals (including one where you have to flip five switches in the exact order lest you screw up and start all over) and having the same Planetoids within the levels repeat themselves more than a few times even when you're in a different galaxy. And if you thought Galaxy was a super-linear affair, Duludubi takes it to the next level with a strictly point A to point B structure - unlike that game where collecting enough Power Stars can allow you to skip portions of the game, here you are unable to do so, so they might as well have just put goalposts in there and took out the Hub World.
  • Graphically, Duludubi is lackluster, looking barely above the Nintendo 64 in quality, though this wouldn't be so bad if the game didn't run so poorly, suffering slowdown during parts even on decent-for-the-time PCs.
  • And let's not forget the elephant in the room: the plagiarism. On top of the Galaxy stuff, the overworld theme occasionally plays the Jeopardy! Thinking Music (specifically, the version used to open Saturday Night Live's "Celebrity Jeopardy!" sketches). A majority of the game's sound effects are stolen from Klonoa, most obviously both the noise and voice used when jumping. And Fantawild couldn't be arsed to draw their own arrows, opting to swipe some from DanceDanceRevolution instead.
  • Here is a Destructoid article in detail.
• Fighters Uncaged was released as a showcase title for the Xbox 360's then-new Kinect motion controller. It was a mess from start to finish, with an overly long tutorial that treated the player like an idiot (forcing the player to attack several times with each limb individually before proceeding to the next lesson), a laughable story accompanied by dreadful writing and voice acting, the inability to register basic moves correctly most of the time, and sluggish fighting on the rare occasions that the Kinect did register the player's moves.
• Final Fantasy XIV's original 2010 version. Now popularly known as version 1.0, it was a completely different game from the MMO titan it is today. And a much worse one at that, a low point for the genre whose low sales and poor reviews nearly ended the money-printingly popular Final Fantasy series. While making a new MMO in the series after the success of Final Fantasy XI sounded like a solid idea on paper, XIV went wrong for several reasons: the dev team was obsessed with graphics over gameplay^note a non-interactable flower pot had as many polygons as a player character, most of the staff had no understanding of MMOs^note The game was developed on Crystal Tools, an engine built for single-player games that had previously contributed to the Troubled Productions of Final Fantasy XIII and XV, and believed that any issues could be fixed with future patches, while they procrastinated on fixing bugs. As a result, the game was so system-intensive that it consistently ran at under 10 FPS on all but the most powerful PCs on the market at the time. But even if your computer could handle it, actually playing the game felt less like an epic adventure and more like an endurance test; the controls were confusing, combat was slow and repetitive, the maps were tedious to navigate and full of Cut and Paste Environments, the story was spread thin and considered barebones for a series that prided itself on in-depth storytelling, the interface was convoluted, and the Fatigue and Leeves systems made even something as simple as leveling up into a chore. The game put such a huge dent in Square Enix's profits that then-CEO Yoichi Wada publicly apologized. It took an unprecedented amount of effort to turn the game's reputation around, starting with replacing several key members of the development team, most prominently making Naoki Yoshida the new head of development. And while Yoshida's team did put out several patches that made the game far less taxing to play, they eventually realized that XIV could never truly recover while stuck with the limitations of its current engine, so they managed to convince Square Enix to sign off on a risky gambit; nuke the game figuratively and literally, scrapping all but a handful of story beats and rebuilding everything else from scratch on a brand-new engine. The resulting relaunch, the fittingly-named A Realm Reborn, saved the game, the franchise, and Square Enix in one fell swoop, and XIV has since become one of biggest and most popular MMOs ever made. The 1.0 release was covered in a documentary by Noclip about the fall and rise of XIV, while ProJared took a look at 1.0 in the last third of his video on the game as a whole.
• Fireplacing isn't so much a terrible WiiWare game as much as it is a not-particularly-interactive screensaver. It's a virtual fireplace. You can choose about three themes (graphics for the fireplace/room) and whether to manually kindle the thing, but it doesn't provide anything of interest at all. Even the sound effect for the crackling logs is glitched and sometimes goes silent, besides the fact that there's no music. Nintendo Life gave it a 1/10, while N Gamer gave it about 0.1 out of 10 due to the complete lack of entertainment value.
• G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra was rushed to come out with the new film to make a fast buck. Its controls are awful, the graphics (if you can call them that) look like they were programmed in the early 2000s, and the sound and music are annoying. (German computer games magazine CBS said it was "the first game which is better WITHOUT sound.") If you try to aim at anything, the weapon will most probably fire at the enemy... then the bullet rethinks this and flies straight to any random object but the enemy. Oh, and if you die (which happens easily), you land right at the beginning because no save points exist. This is an unwelcome throwback. As if all that wasn't bad enough, you get to play as Cobra for one mission... fighting other Cobra troops as they say "GI Joe is HERE!"
• Guitar Superstar, a horrid ripoff of a certain then-popular rhythm game franchise. You have to see it to believe it. The songs (the most important part of the game) are ripoffs of well-known rock songs, which are done in horrible MIDI style. Watch Vinny torture himself playing it here. And it's not the only one of its kind: Ashens reviewed another extremely similar game once.
• Hour of Victory was a bizarre and terrible mishmash of Call of Duty, Commandos: Strike Force and Wolfenstein, starting out as another historical World War II first-person shooter before taking a jump off the deep end and turning into a game about the Nazis developing nuclear weaponry. As if that weren't bad enough, the brownish graphics were barely even of PlayStation 2 quality (despite the game proudly boasting on the box that it was the first World War II shooter to use Unreal Engine 3), the gameplay mechanics were screwed up beyond belief, the heavily promoted destructible scenery and vehicular combat barely even featured, and the multiplayer mode somehow managed to have fewer options than games released 10 years previously. There were even rumors of the player character's Quick Melee attack glitching out and killing everything in one hit, including tanks! It was one of the worst-reviewed Xbox 360 games to have been released until that point, and a temporary Genre-Killer for the World War II shooter, with only Call of Duty: World at War having met with any real success in-between Hour of Victory's release and a revival of the genre well over a decade later. The Blame Truth's attempt at playing the game showcases most of these flaws plus more.
• Hulk Hogan's Main Event for the Xbox Kinect was an absolute joke, and not in a good way. Meant to showcase the Kinect's capabilities, it was horribly unresponsive, with the menus nearly impossible to navigate through due to its poor motion capture. The wrestlers were just plain ugly, as was the gameplay. Cutscenes were done in a semi-animated comic book style with speech balloons that didn't quite line up with the characters. While it had the creative concept of having Hype gain you points, it wound up being something of a Golden Snitch (though not unlike actual wrestling, little fun to do). Ultimately, it failed to even show off Kinect, as matches boiled down to flailing one's arms to do nothing but punches. Game Informer gave it the "prestigious" honor of a 1/10, the first of its kind in years. Watch Two Best Friends Play tackle the game for their "Rustlemania" month and Caddicarus covers it here with a few other Kinect games.
• Jenga World Tour shows you how not to make a Digital Tabletop Game Adaptation. It does a poor job of simulating a game of Jenga, as the pieces seem to stick to each other, there's slowdown, and the game has you point, push a button and move the remote instead of actually making you feel like you're grabbing a block and pulling it out. The game also has minimal feedback (no vibration and barely any audio) and awkward camera angles to ruin your day. The presentation is no better, with muddy textures, bland music and muffled, poorly-sampled sounds. And while the digital medium allows for some unique additions to Jenga, none of them are remotely worth it — the location-based gimmicks are either pointless or turn the game into a luck-based mess, and the AI alternates between being overpowered and getting stuck for minutes. You're much better off just buying the physical game for a fraction of the price. Scott The Woz takes a brief look at it here.
• Jumper: Griffin's Story, published by Brash Entertainment, is an Obvious Beta if there ever was one, with too many Game Breaking Bugs to count. It hurts all the more because of how promising it was - Jamie Bell voiced the cutscenes quite well, and the teleporting mechanic came within hair's-breadth of being fun. The reason why the game ended up being nothing more than a rushed to market game released to meet the movie's opening date? A botched licensing deal with 20th Century Fox. Brash wanted to publish a game based on Night at the Museum but Fox made them secure the license to Jumper months prior to the film's release, which meant the developer hired by Brash had little time and budget to produce a worthy movie tie-in. The game was also a huge flop with both critics and sales and was one of the reasons for Brash's closure in November 2008. X-Play rated the game with a 1 out of 5.
• Leisure Suit Larry: Box Office Bust is a perfect example of a series going on too long. The sequel to the polarizing Magna Cum Laude and the second game without any input from creator Al Lowe, the game stars Larry Lovage, the protagonist of the aforementioned Magna Cum Laude, whose uncle (and original protagonist) Larry Laffer calls upon his assistance at his movie studio Laffer Studios, doing odd jobs and trying to uncover a mole from a rival studio who is attempting to sabotage his uncle's company. The gameplay mostly consists of repetitive, monotonous fetch quests, an awful mismatch of other gaming genres that are completely out-of-place for the franchise, such as clunky and unresponsive platforming and shooting sections and beat-em-up sections that are nothing more but spamming comically under-powered and sluggish punches and kicks toward enemies with ridiculous amount of health points until they go down, and it has multiple Game Breaking Bugs that render the game almost unplayable. The game replaces the witty sexual innuendos and double-entendres of the earlier installments with extremely childish sex jokes and non-stop profanity that make the whole thing sound like it came from the mind of an immature 12-year-old (something not even the extremely raunchy and sexual Magna Cum Laude went into). Following the franchise tradition and having some eye-candy shots of attractive girls in it would maybe at least make it a Guilty Pleasure, but it even fails at this, as the game's dated and hideous visuals (despite running on the Unreal Engine 3) resulted in many of the female characters looking ugly-as-sin. The game currently holds one of the lowest composite scores of any game on Metacritic, won many worst games of the year alongside fellow stinker Rogue Warrior, and reviews of it (which all received the game scores below a 2-out-of-10) can be found from Gamespot, Hardcore Gaming 101, and the Shady Corner. Al Lowe, the series' original creator, had no input on this game or its predecessor, and is all the happier for it.
• Limbo of the Lost was an irredeemably bad Adventure Game thrown together in 13 years by a group of three guys from UK with no experience in coding, graphic design, or writing, all ran by Steve Bovis, the project leader who had a severe case of Small Name, Big Ego. The results show all too well - the game combines all of the most annoying elements of the genre: Combinatorial Explosions, Pixel Hunts, Guide Dang It! moments, nonsensical puzzles, and resources stolen from more famous games, piled together using Wintermute Engine, a freeware adventure game engine with code almost entirely written by wide-eyed forumgoers who have yet to receive a single mention of gratitude for their effort and aren't listed in the game credits. Tying it all together is a dreadful (what appears to be a) generic fantasy story played out through terribly-modeled prerendered characters whose dialogue was practically phoned-in from across the globe (almost all voiced by the same guy). Fortunately, the game was pulled off the shelves by its distributors after they learned that the devs used stolen assets, for the greater good of mankind and the survival of the distributors. In response, at least two of the developers disassociated themselves from the project leader and nothing from the three of them, aside from the shameful piece of code itself, was heard of or appeared anymore. To top it all off, check out the ending... or experience it in all its traumatizing "glory" in Wields-Rulebook-Heavily's screenshot-and-comment Let's Play ^note (currently, all the screenshots are broken due to being hosted on Photobucket. A PDF of the playthrough can be found on Page 76). You can also see Cr1TiKaL's highlights here, in which he calls it a game so completely terrible he can't even enjoy it for its badness anymore - it just makes him uneasy instead, and the experience is something he wouldn't wish even on truly evil men.
  
  How bad is the writing? Half the characters are an offensive stereotype of some sort, and the rest are just vilely disgusting and superfluous to the so-called "plot". The "plot" is barely even a generic fantasy story, but mostly consists of the main character wandering from one scene to the next and generally either acting like a dick for no reason or being forced to do something. One chapter has you collect 50 items, but you only use about four of them before a troll comes up and removes your items (no lie - a random troll barges in at the end of the chapter and shakes the guy down).
  
  Polish video game magazine CD-Action gave the game a -1 out of 10 (giving a negative score for plagiarism alone) for the first time in their history.
• M&M's Kart Racing is a textbook example of how even a concept as simple as "make a Mario Kart knockoff with mascot stars" can be completely botched, and exemplifies everything that can go wrong with a licensed video game. Everything about it is rushed and uninspired: the core racing has no substance, challenge, or strategy - there are no weapons, no shortcuts, and no techniques to exploit. The game doesn't even try to invoke a sense of speed beyond having a voice periodically shout "Approaching sound barrier!" The racetracks are so poorly designed that they often trap or bottleneck players - the fact that the vehicles have little to no grip just makes it worse. The unlockables are nowhere near worth it. The graphics are bland, owe more to older consoles, and have a very obvious draw distance. The sounds are obnoxious, and the soundtrack, levels, and bonus characters are all completely generic. On top of that, it still takes as many as 10 seconds to load a single screen. This Gamespot review says it best in a screenshot caption: "If you think this looks bad, just wait until you see the game moving." AbsntMindedProfessor shows off the game in motion...very, very slow motion. The game later got a second lease on life through a surprisingly competitive speedrunning scene. Unlike many bad games which end up ironically enjoyed by their runners, M&M's Kart Racing is overwhelming held in contempt by those who run it.
• Motorbike is a downloadable PS3 title that plays almost identically to Trials, except it does every single possible thing wrong. The presentation is horrendously dated, with PS1-grade textures and audio that makes motorcycle engines sound like wet farts. The levels are all thrown together in such a way that it feels like they were randomly generated. In addition, each level is almost impossible to win without sheer luck thanks to a major lack of checkpoints and wacky physics that sometimes send your rider sky-high just from hitting a bump in the road. Multiplayer is even worse, with a jittery splitscreen camera that frequently loses track of both players. To top it all off, the game is a buggy mess. The framerate drops all the time, and the game crashes just as much as your biker does. Gamespot gave the game a 1.5, rating it only slightly better than Big Rigs and Ride to Hell: Retribution (listed below).
• While Need for Speed: Most Wanted is considered to be one of the best games in the Need for Speed series, the same cannot be said for the Nintendo DS port by Sensory Sweep Studios. Beyond the blocky graphics that are comparable to Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing lies a myriad of problems. It's a port of the Game Boy Advance version (which was decent by the system's standards), except playing significantly worse despite being on a more powerful handheld. The car handling is very twitchy, seemingly understeering and oversteering at random, and lacking any sense of speed. The rubberbanding AI is even worse than the console versions, especially in regards to Blacklist racers and the police, the latter of which can drop spike strips without warning. These issues combined make the DS version a chore to play. Kacey discusses the game and its developer here, while DustinEden covered the game here alongside other Nintendo DS racing games, where he considered Most Wanted the worst racing game on the DS.
• Pacific Rim on PS3 and Xbox 360 could've been an awesome game about giant robots fighting giant monsters, but the final product was mind-numbingly boring and tedious. Both the Jaegers and Kaijus fight as though they're wading through molasses, the combat has the depth of a kiddie pool, the controls are highly uncooperative bordering on random, and much of the game's content (including new characters and Jaeger customization) is locked behind paywalls. The only positive thing Thomas McDermott from Darkzero had to say about the game was that it never crashed.
• The Painkiller series had already attracted criticism in its later years for basing Overdose on a fan-made game mod. Painkiller: Resurrection does the same thing, but not as well. Everything but a single monster (which looks like an orc made of raw hamburger and has three different sizes) and a single weapon (a reskinned "Battle Out of Hell" weapon) are taken pixel-for-pixel from earlier installments. The levels are the largest the franchise has ever seen, but are usually either too cramped to comfortably accommodate the sort of monsters found in them or so huge that the player must backtrack constantly to find a new monster spawn point. The clumsy storyline is shoehorned into the game with comic-style cutscenes à la Max Payne and mood-killing voice acting à la Resident Evil (case in point). It's loaded with bugs that no patch effort has successfully deterred - it crashes to desktop frequently, the weather effects slow the dated engine to a crawl, enemy AI tends to get hung up on the scenery, online co-op (a major selling point) was inaccessible at launch, the game crashed if a certain weapon was fired in multiplayer, and glitching out the final checkpoint was common and made hour-long levels Unintentionally Unwinnable. If putting on "Painkiller" (or even Pain Killer) and downing some painkillers won't make you quit playing Painkiller, then nothing will.
• Ping Pals was a completely pointless (and paid!) clone of PictoChat, a close-range peer-to-peer chat function that already came bundled in every version of the Nintendo DS by default. The few advantages it had over PictoChat (a customizable avatar, single-player and multiplayer minigames, and other such things) are either pedestrian or difficult to manage, and thus fail to make the experience any more compelling. Plus, the game actually omits certain features present in PictoChat. Nintendo Official Magazine, reviewing it for their DS launch special, described it as being "a bit like paying money to breathe air" and refused to summarise the review beyond a handwritten PictoChat message reading "POINTLESS". Allegedly, WayForward were put on a really tight schedule and only agreed to produce this so they could get devkits for the DS.
• While Plants vs. Zombies is a well-loved game, this NES bootleg version of it is horrendous. The first problem with it is the music, which is bad even for bootleg standards. Once you actually get into the game, you'll notice that the sprites are very Off-Model (Peashooter and Repeater outright don't have any color, simply blending into the color of the tile they're placed on) and none of the plants move at all. The game is also extremely difficult to the point of cheapness: a zombie appears before you can even place a Sunflower down, and the Potato Mine, which is meant to help you start in a round, is just as expensive as a Peashooter, making it entirely useless. But the worst part is that it seems that only half the sprites load most of the time, as the original game wasn't made for consoles with sprite limits. This all adds up to destroy the enjoyability the original had and isn't even fun if you're looking for Bile Fascination.
• Postal III, released several years after the critically polarizing but fan-favored Postal 2, was made by an unknown team from Russia with little input from original developers Running With Scissors, which completely shows in the final product. The game takes so many steps backwards from its predecessor that it's absolutely insulting. Gone is the free-roaming mayhem of its predecessor, replaced with a linear mission structure that plays like a "me-too" version of many first- and third-person shooters of its generation that also inexplicably uses a completely broken morality system in a franchise where the players can freely go postal. On top of that, the game sports terrible AI for enemies and NPC escorts alike, loading screens that give Sonic '06 a run for its money, and is so poorly-optimized that it glitches up and crashes constantly even on high-end PCs ^note  The game runs on the Source engine, the same engine used to run Half-Life 2 and other games from Valve released afterwards, which are known to run flawlessly even on the crappiest of gaming PCs . The actual shooting and combat is a complete mess due to nearly all the weapons being completely underpowered, unreliable, and unable to even register damage to the enemies because of the glitchy and broken hit-boxes, and a lot of the series' typical off-color humor is hampered by bad writing ^note  such as references to pop-culture and the news that became completely out-of-date after the game was released in December 2011, such as jokes about Sarah Palin and Osama bin Laden, the latter of whom was killed seven months before the game was released and flat, uninspired voicework. This resulted in the game getting nothing but absolute scorn by critics, receiving a pitiful 24 on Metacritic, an abysmal 1 out of 10 by Game Informer ^note  the second consecutive game of 2011 that they gave that score after the equally horrible Hulk Hogan's Main Event , and being seen as one of the worst games released that year alongside fellow horrible entry FlatOut 3: Chaos and Destruction (which happened to be released in the same month). YouTuber Civvie 11 tore this game apart in his review, where he considered this game the worst game he played on his channel so far, and that's including fellow terrible games such as Bad Day LA and Hunt Down the Freeman. RWS claimed the problems were due to developer and publisher Akella^note who published Postal II in Russia and was once positively considered the "EA of Russia" being forced to lay off most of their A-team as a result of the downturn in the Russian economy and moved the project to Trashmasters, a studio owned by Akella whose only other projects were shovelware that were often based on Russian-produced films that were never released outside their native country (though Matt McMuscles also notes that Akella's other coding teams were also fired as well before completing this game). RWS refuses to recognize it as a "true sequel" to Postal 2. Notably, the Steam bundle containing the franchise is called the 'Every POSTAL (But That One) Collection' and omits it, and frequently became a recurring punchline in Postal 2 to the point that the whole game was revealed to be just a nightmare that the Postal Dude had in Postal 2: Paradise Lost. It also served as the final nail in the coffin for both Akella and developer Trashmasters, as they both quietly went out of business after this stinker flopped. Thankfully, RWS learned from their mistakes as they decided to have full control of their games afterwards, with Postal 4: No Regerts being developed entirely by them and was released in early access in 2019. Its janky pre-pre-alpha state was still a more stable and functional game that Postal III ever was on release.
• Power Gig: Rise of the SixString is considered not only one of the worst Guitar Hero clones ever made, but also one of the worst rhythm games in recent memory. Its mission statement was ambitious: get players to "rock for real" by replacing the standard guitar controllers, with their colored buttons and strum bars, with a proper six-string guitar that works both in and out of the game, going so far as to make Take Thats for this reason. Now, one of their competitors did this - Rock Band 3 can be played with a real six-string - but the real guitar for Power Gig barely works in the game and sounds like what you'd expect a $150 guitar to sound like in Real Life. Worse, the game barely encourages players to learn to play real guitar: Aside from the "power chords", which can be turned off, the gameplay is identical to the game's chief competitors, except there are only six-string guitar charts - no bass guitars. The notes you play in the game aren't even close to how you'd play the song in real life, eliminating the reason to have a real six-string as a controller.
  
  The track list does have some decent songs in it (including artists who have never appeared in any previous music game, such as Eric Clapton and the Dave Matthews Band), but very few songs are available from the get-go. Players will have to slog through the game's story mode, which has an idiotic plotline centered around collecting "mojo" from different bands to defeat the evil Headliner who has outlawed playing music in public. The accompanying drum kit seems designed to turn people off music games - it's simply four pads sitting on the floor, and you have to air drum over them. Yes, it's quieter, but it misses the point of playing drums. You also have to be absurdly precise to know which pad you're "hitting" - you get no touch feedback from air drumming, and keeping an eye on the screen and another on the floor won't let you watch your hands to be sure where they are. While you can use standard Guitar Hero and Rock Band drums and guitars, doing so for the latter case also defeats the "purpose" of the game, if any.
• Prisoner of Power (not to be confused with the 4X strategy game) is a Russian FPS released in 2008. It's notable for having horrible modeling and texture work for its time, complete with eye-searing orange textures. It's also obviously unfinished: the human enemies had no AI at launch, the physics are broken (hitting a single empty wood crate can somehow make a buggy fall over), and it featured a plethora of other bugs, mostly involving clipping through physical objects. The level design is atrocious, with the maps being littered with one-hit-kill mines that are impossible to see until it's too late. Its promotional material also had the balls to call it "The Genesis to S.T.A.L.K.E.R." despite having absolutely nothing to do with it beyond being an FPS based on a novel by the Strugatsky Brothers. This video (or this review, if you understand French) should give you an idea.
• Promethus (not to be confused with the film of the same name) was touted to be a spiritual successor to Metroid when Nintendo's releases for the series hit a dry period, albeit for the PSP. Quickly after it was announced, a demo was released on the PlayStation Store, astonishing anyone unfortunate to download it with just how the game utterly failed at everything it set out to do: The sprites were little more than furry edits of genuine Metroid sprites (the animations were a frame-for-frame copy of Samus from Metroid Fusion), the backgrounds were severely-compressed JPEGs, the music consisted of four notes, sound effects were outright missing, and the gameplay was beyond horrendous with imprecise jumping and shooting and a distractingly noticeable movement lag. Also rampant were random bugs that outright prevented advancing from the starting area. To make matters worse, the developers were extremely rude to people who confronted them regarding the quality of the game. Eventually, the demo was removed and the game was canned with the dev team disappearing without a trace, but the demo can still be found in the trenches of the Internet. Even though it never got a full release, it was still named one of the worst games - if not the worst game - released on the PSP. Enjoy this rather painful playthrough of the game in action.
• Rambo: The Video Game takes The Problem with Licensed Games to heights not reached since Superman 64. It's a Rail Shooter, with the only "movement" of Rambo being able to take cover behind nearby obstacles, which you will find yourself doing for about 50% of the game due to the ridiculous number of onscreen enemies and their accuracy. You can regenerate health by using the "Wrath" meter that is supposed to help you fend off enemies, but it barely lasts long enough and you will often find your shots missing due to the horrible targeting. Cinematic portions are progressed by lazily-implemented quicktime events (and an unlockable perk renders them infallible, making them pointless). The graphics are atrocious, muddy, and look like something from a PS2 game rather than an Xbox 360 or PS3 title with some absolutely ugly character models. The rail-shooter gameplay is stiff, simplistic, lifeless, and flat-out boring (for example, disarming cops requires no more than shooting them in the legs), and the perk and gun system is laughably trivial. Even the sound assets are bad - every single line of dialogue is directly ripped from the first three Rambo films with no normalisation of volume and repeated over and over. The bland music (that doesn't even come from the films' soundtracks) is just as annoyingly repetitive. Combine all this with hundreds of Game Breaking Bugs, frequent crashes, a ridiculously-cheap final level, and a total runtime of two hours for a $40 game, and you have a serious contender for worst game of 2014. Watch Angry Joe tear it apart here. Two Best Friends also played it for their "Mystery Box" series. Astonishingly, the developers actually released DLC for this game two years after release... though to their credit, said DLC was free.
• Ride to Hell: Retribution: 1%, a 1960s-themed biker gang adventure released in 2013. It was originally designed to be a Wide-Open Sandbox, but the version that eventually made it to retail railroads you onto a linear path at every turn, even when already at its most linear. The story, setting notwithstanding, is a confusing, disjointed Cliché Storm big on sleaze and devoid of charm or logic ^note (one such mission involves stealing a gas tanker and crashing it into a nearby power plant, murdering many innocent people along the way, just to get past a simple electric fence). It's full of obnoxious, one-dimensional, badly-acted characters; many exist solely to facilitate contrived, distasteful Rescue Sex in which no clothes are shed. It's also filled with long loading screens. The graphics and animation are dated, ugly as sin, and in several cases incomplete and error-prone. The combat sequences are brainless brawls that rely heavily on Action Commands, Artificial Stupidity, and faulty hit detection; this is most prominent in the driving segments. There isn't even a Game Over or "mission failed" screen - just the pause menu, but with "mission failed" in the corner and no way to unpause. The one and only saving grace in this game is that it has decent amount of customization for your bike, and even then, it doesn't do enough to make up for all of the travesties this game has.
  
  It came as little surprise to anyone that the publisher and developer refused to send out review copies of the game or release any of the planned spinoff games, and neither even lists it in their game catalogues. As if that wasn't bad enough as is, the PC version is actually even worse, with no options for changing the graphics or rebinding the keys - which you'll desperately need because the mouse controls are absolutely haywire at best. Not even the purchasing system was free from glitches: shortly after its release, the Steam version went on sale for 160% off, making it unbuyable. Before that point, it was an unheard-of error on the storefront. The game only lasted about a year before being withdrawn from all storefronts, but it didn't stop Angry Joe, The Completionist, Rerez (one for "Positives & Negatives" series and another one for "Just Bad Games" series), Darklordjadow1, DX, Scott The Woz or Yahtzee from trashing it, or GameSpot from slapping it with their second-ever 1 out of 10 score (Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing was the first). Media Hunter reviewed it for his 2K Subscriber Special. Two Best Friends Play also suffered through it, first as a one-off and later as a full playthrough, and Matt McMuscles later took a closer look at its Troubled Production on his personal channel.
• Konami had long-running franchises of drum and guitar video games in Japan, DrumMania and Guitar Freaks. These games, in turn, inspired the exponentially bigger Guitar Hero and Rock Band franchises. Faced with these new rivals, Konami had Zöe Mode directly imitate the style of its American competitors, rather than try to maintain the mechanics of the original game. The result was Rock Revolution, which came across as a poor cover version with bad-looking graphics and menus, disappointing note charts^note even on the highest difficulty setting, there are clear "holes" in the note charts compared to the actual song, and a severe lack of polish. All but two of the game's 41 songs were covers (by contrast, its main competitors - Guitar Hero World Tour and Rock Band 2 - both touted that their entire soundtrack would be master recordings), and were all quite bad. Critics were also divided over its top-down note perspective and giving the bass pedal its own column (carried over from GF/DM, except more like Guitar Hero in appearance than a tablature style). Konami also made the questionable decision to exclude vocals from the game so it wouldn't cannibalize income from Karaoke Revolution (originally developed in the first place by Rock Band studio Harmonix), nor produce a guitar controller specifically for it (in other words, bring your own five-button guitar) - although they did create a drum kit that falls into the depths of Idiot Design and Misaimed "Realism", with its "realistic" layout only making it harder to map each pad to the on-screen input. It also features a plethora of Game-Breaking Bugs in its charting, including what Etienne (a YouTuber who specializes in rhythm games) calls "the most broken chart in rhythm game history": most charts have instances where you must hit two separate notes at nearly the same time, making it much harder to get a Flawless Victory than it should be, even on simpler songs. In the end, it got scathing reviews, most arguing that the game probably would've been revolutionary had Guitar Hero or Rock Band not been released yet.
• Rogue Warrior is an FPS/stealth action hybrid title based on the exploits and autobiography of real-life Navy SEAL Dick Marcinko (voiced by Mickey Rourke), though using some artistic licensing liberties with his autobiography, with a multiplayer mode that was supposed to revolutionize online play with its randomized maps. First announced in 2006 under the development of Zombie Studios, it entered Development Hell and resurfaced in 2009, with its development having been taken over by Rebellion, who threw out everything Zombie Studios had worked on (not even the map randomizer made the cut). Bethesda was hoping that this would be their big game for the holiday season; instead, the game was roundly trashed for its completely broken enemy AI, hit detection, and stealth mechanics, a single-player campaign runtime of under two hours, and a script so foul-mouthed that it was more annoying than hardcore. The only redeeming factor was the So Bad, It's Good rapping that Mickey Rourke does over the credits. Here's Giant Bomb having their fun with it. If you want to see it in all of its glory, watch Chip Cheezum play through the game. Rerez also went through the frustration of the Steam version here, noting that it's the only way for anyone to actually play a downloadable version of the game anymore, even though that version is jam-packed with bugs that renders the game near unplayable. Matt McMuscles also looked at what happened with it here.
• Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer for the Nintendo Wii, based on the Rankin/Bass special of the same name. It was sold as a full Wii title, but wouldn't even be passable as WiiWare: The game consists of just four minigames, none of which require much effort, and the game can be beaten in less than 15 minutes. The voice acting is extremely annoying (for example, every few seconds Hermey the elf will shout "I'm a dentist!" if you play as him), and the music is just generic Muzak that has nothing to do with Rudolph or Christmas. If you're curious, you can see NintendoFanFTW's review of the game here, or the Wiiviewer's review here. (The latter would name it one of the worst games he reviewed in 2010.)
• Samurai Shodown Sen nearly proved to be a Franchise Killer for SNK's venerated weapon-fighting series. In the game's attempt to play like Soulcalibur (which is now Hilarious in Hindsight considering Haohmaru is a Guest Fighter in Soulcalibur VI), much of the series' defining features became diluted, including the trimming and nerfing of fantastical special attacks and Tekken-style dial-a-combos in place of strategic play. Combined with less-than-impressive graphics, unbalanced characters, janky controls, and a lack of modes (with the multiplayer lobbies being barren even at launch), it proved so crappy and terrible that SNK wouldn't even touch the franchise until the stellar 2019 reboot. Gamecritics called it "a miserable, frustrating, and graceless experience", while Eurogamer likened it to "a wandering ronin bereft of its former honour". The Quarter Guy placed it at the number one spot on his Top Ten Disappointing Games.
• Self-Defense Training Camp was a boxed Kinect release for the Xbox 360 that serves as a set of self-defense drills, ostensibly to ward against robbers or other attackers at close range. Surprisingly, the Kinect's functionality is quite decent compared to other games of its ilk, and the game looks fine as well. The problem is that there's no gameplay, for starters - it's just a series of repetitive motions as read by the Kinect, not actually giving you any sort of goals aside from following actions. There's no challenge or variety, or really any reason to actually play it when you could get just as much from acting out the motions yourself while watching a video. With no responsive feedback, you also have no idea how effective any of your movements will be if they're genuinely needed in a real-world scenario, so the limp slaps to the head or pokes of the foot that the game claims are effective might just make things even worse. It's not even good exercise, with the moves being too slow in sequence or too poorly guided to be of any help in maintaining good form while performing the motions. SDTC received a blisteringly harsh 1/10 score from IGN and a slightly less painful 35/100 from Official Xbox Magazine. YouTube reviewer Ahoy lambasted it as "little more than a genital kicking simulator", and if you really want that sort of thing just play God Hand and don't act like you don't like the Ball Buster.
• To promote the release of Serious Sam 3: Before First Encounter, Croteam allowed indie developers to make and sell games based on its Serious Sam series. While most of these were decent or forgettable at worst, the top-down shooter Serious Sam: The Greek Encounter was seriously lacking, featuring ugly, sloppy spritework, extremely short length (the game is very easy and can be beaten in 15 minutes) and shallow unbalanced gameplay due to the inexplicable decision to use a Universal Ammunition system. Most onlookers quipped the game wasn't worth the $1 it sold for.
• Shijuuhachi Kakkokari is a horror visual novel game where you listen to urban horror tales from Japanese culture. While the box art and opening cutscene just reek of typical Jump Scare material, the contents of the "horror stories" are anything but horror. The only thing that reeks of anything horror in those tales is the creepy music: The content they depict ranges from being humorous, Nightmare Retardant, tour guides, or even things that are unrelated to that province at all. After you read all of these "urban tales", the ending you get is either All Just a Dream or you were suffering from psychosis. This game has been considered a Cult Classic in the likes of Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing because of the sole fact that it is a horror game that manages to make itself complete Nightmare Retardant.
• Smash 'N' Survive is a PS3 vehicular combat game seen as one of the worst in the genre. Poorly made, the game is plagued with low res graphics, bland level design with broken hazards, gamebreaking technical issues in lighting and audio, a lacking soundtrack of only two songs, and an option menu with little option to change things. Gameplay feels awful, with sluggish driving, broken collision and hitboxes, buggy AI that either doesn't function or input reads, lacks basic displays including speed stats on cars or damage indicators on enemies, and lethargic pacing with low damage and an unskippable cinematic for every destruction. A game with less than an hour of content that doesn't even do that right, Smash 'N' Survive is a broken car wreck meant for the scrapyard before it even starts. Tactical Bacon Production reviewed it for their Twisted Metal clone videos, and claimed it as the ugliest and worst game in vehicular combat, while TERRORflops checked the game and described it a mess with nothing fun.
• Spanish for Everyone! is a mess of a children's Edutainment Game. Its most notorious feature is its absurd story that was criticized for featuring many Mexican stereotypes, having creepy undertones, and encouraging dangerous behavior like accepting rides from strangers. The attempt at teaching you Spanish consists of four lame minigames that require you to know Spanish already to play them. The presentation is just as bad - the music sounds awful, the graphics are blurry, the animation is terrible, and there are lots of grammatical errors. The only redeeming qualities are a useful 6,000-word dictionary, and that adults who pick up on the mature jokes might find the story (where the main character's best friend is all but stated to be the son of a drug lord, and the ending has him tasked with smuggling drugs to France) So Bad, It's Good. ^note (The development team was aware of the problems with the game but didn't have the resources to resolve them, so they added the mature undertones specifically in an attempt to give the game a redeeming quality.) The game ended on a Sequel Hook, but it was orphaned due to this game's failure. In case you want to experience the hilarity of the game's story without subjecting yourself to the torture of the gameplay, Retsupurae have made a video containing only the cutscenes.
• Spy Games: Elevator Mission for the Wii is a third-rate knockoff of the far superior Elevator Action series with a bit of Mission Elevator rip-off thrown in. Most of the floors in the building the hero infiltrates look exactly the same, with ugly textures and low-resolution polygons; even your gun is represented by a two-dimensional sprite. The music is full of laughably terrible MIDIs and almost every bad guy dies with the same groan. Levels feel aimless as there are no clues on where to locate the five secret disks and the halls look so similar, it's easy to get lost. And even if you do manage to beat the game, your only reward is a very short cinematic followed by very slow credits. The only satisfying thing one can do is shooting plants as they shatter with a glass-breaking sound effect. Have a taste of the gameplay here. The Bad Game Hall of Fame also tore it apart, including the ending.
• Stalin vs. Martians aimed for the So Bad, It's Good camp... and missed by a country mile. It's supposed to be a real-time strategy game, but instead is a buggy, unplayable mess of bad design decisions - bad AI, bad enemy placement, bad mission structure, and bad attempts at humor. Fortunately, a series of music videos were produced for the game, and they remain firmly in the So Bad, It's Good category. The best part? They're all available online, meaning you don't have to play the game to watch them!
• Star Trek is yet another example of The Problem with Licensed Games. Based on J.J. Abrams' reboot of the Original Series, the game has little in common with its namesake outside of its setting and characters and can be more accurately described as a very poor man's Mass Effect. Aping on another sci-fi game series, in and of itself, wouldn't be so bad if it was done properly, which Star Trek doesn't: ugly graphics that fail to do the actors' likenesses justice, more bugs than a Ferengi's dinner platter, puzzles that require the help of AI with the intelligence of your average redshirt, and gameplay that's otherwise mind-numbingly boring sink this game faster than the Kobayashi Maru. Gamespot's Mark Walton and IGN's Dan Stapleton both agree that the game is utter crap.
• Terrawars: NY Invasion, a PC game released in 2006 by Tri Synergy and developed by Philippines-based Ladyluck Digital Media. The game purports to be a budget-priced quality shooter inspired by The War of the Worlds. Instead, the game is about as shoddy if not much worse than its pricetag implies. Level designs are either incredibly bland or painful to the eyes. Most enemies are generic aliens with different colors. The story doesn't make much sense apart from "aliens invade New York", with phoned-in voice acting done by people who barely even pretend to give an American accent. Graphics-wise, it uses the dated Lithtech Jupiter engine (the same one used in No One Lives Forever) but manages to look even worse. To top it off, the gameplay itself is repetitive, slow, and just plain boring. Gamespot described the game as a rip-off that has to be avoided. The sad part of all this is that not only did the developers go through the trouble of making a scale recreation of NYC, but the game was also intended to be a showcase of a burgeoning Filipino gaming industry.
• Thor: God of Thunder is a towering symbol of every problem with licensed games. The last-gen graphics and phoned-in voice acting should be warning signs, but if you soldier on you'll find yourself confronted by a combat system that can't even get button-mashing right due to laggy controls and broken hit detection. Throw on tedious, mind-numbingly repetitive combat and more Fake Difficulty than you can shake an LJN cartridge at, and you've got Exhibit A for why not every game should cost $60. Even with Captain America: Super Soldier the same year being better reviewed, God of Thunder was enough for Marvel to pull their license from Sega, and outside of a handful of mobile and VR titles and LEGO Marvel's Avengers, no games directly based on the Marvel Cinematic Universe have emerged since. While this game was ported to different consoles, including the 3DS, the DS game was handled by WayForward and is actually a pretty good side-scrolling beat-'em-up.
• Tony Hawk's Motion, released in 2008 between Proving Ground and the disastrous Ride, attemped to emulate the latter's motion controls on a Nintendo DS by using a "Motion Pack" you plugged into the console's GBA slot (which was a bad move considering the release of the slotless DSi that year). The controls were uncomfortable due to the fact that you still had to use the D-Pad to do tricks, the motion controls were oversensitive so balancing manuals and grinds were impossible, only 4 levels (2 skateboarding and 2 snowboarding courses), dull graphics, boring and uninspired music, repetitive and uninteresting goals, horrible level design (Tokyo is mostly empty streets with barely any skate spots), and you can't even play as Tony Hawk himself. It's really worth telling that the bonus game it came with was better than the main game. It was the worst reviewed Tony Hawk game on Metacritic until the release of the equally-as-terrible Pro Skater 5. Square Eyed Jak gave it a rare 1/10 and destroyed the game box at the end of his review.
• In a bizarre reversal from the norm, the Uwe Boll movie Tunnel Rats was given a tie-in video game. The film is one of Boll's best-reviewed to date, but the game "makes up for it" by being simply bad. Not only is it infested with bugs, the story is also ruined by the protagonist's erratic characterization: It tries to portray Sanity Slippage by having him make angrier and more sadistic comments as the game goes on, but the game's shoddy programming means that the comments often play at inappropriate times (for example, he'll show remorse after one kill and then mock his slain enemy after the next). Gamespot, whose reviewers usually have at least one good thing to say about some of the worst games, couldn't even find a good point to fill in the summary.
• Unearthed: Trail of Ibn Battuta at first appears to be an ambitious adventure game with good intentions, but playing it reveals it to be more like The Mockbuster of the Uncharted series. It's programmed using the Unity engine but barely utilizes its potential, having graphics that are reminiscent of PlayStation 2 games and absolutely terrible animation. In addition, it has awful and broken controls and gameplay mechanics poorly nicked from Tomb Raider and Uncharted. Throw in a car driving sequence with terrible physics, an unlikable protagonist, a Random Events Plot, and bad dialogue and you have a game with all of its potential squandered by shoddy programming and game design. The best part? It's being released in really short episodes and the first one ends abruptly on a cliffhanger. Vinny from Vinesauce takes a look at the first episode in his stream.
• Vampire Rain is a piss-poor stealth-action survival horror game that features (among other things) a thinly-written plot with wooden voice acting, dreadful dialogue, lousy gameplay that shamelessly rips off both Splinter Cell and Metal Gear (and doesn't deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence as either), laughable enemy AI, and wildly inconsistent difficulty. You know a game is terrible when the most innovative thing about it is that your knife (a melee weapon) actually requires ammo to use! (The game attempts to justify it by making the knife explode inside the victim, but this doesn't make things less frustrating). It got an Updated Re-release on the PlayStation 3 called Vampire Rain: Altered Species that fixed precisely nothing, and may have made the graphics even worse.
• The War at the End of the Days on Xbox LIVE Indie Games is a very strong contender for the worst first-person shooter ever made. The game is clearly unfinished, the graphics are barely a step above a tech demo from 1995, the HUD and menus look like they barely left the drawing board, it has annoying MIDI-quality music, the sound effects are abysmal, the gunshots from your weapon are ear-piercingly loud, the level designs are horrendous, and your character moves and turns at a snail's pace. There's only one enemy in this game - a mech that looks as if it came out of MechWarrior - and they have the artificial intelligence of a rock. You can go through the entire game without bothering with the enemies, and when you beat all four levels you get booted to the title screen. You can witness the misery NavyBoy5499 went through in this Let's Play. This player was unfortunate enough to buy the full game, but the game thinks he's still playing the demo despite paying $1 for it - it's so broken it can't even handle business transactions properly.
• Windy X Windam was derided by fighting game enthusiasts for its choppy animation, bland music, repetitive sound effects, a small roster of characters (half of whom are Guilty Gear knockoffs), and a bug-riddled fighting engine coupled with extreme Artificial Stupidity that discourages any strategy beyond Button Mashing. The threadbare plot is done no favors by U.S. publisher Graffiti Entertainment's weak translation (misspellings and dropped commas and periods are commonplace), and the game's main draw - the chance to play as Izuna and Shino from Izuna: Legend of the Unemployed Ninja - is short-lived, as they can only be unlocked by finishing the game on the higher difficulty levels.
• Yaris, an advergame on XBLA made by Backbone Entertainment (now known as Digital Eclipse once again) and Castaway Entertainment (with it being the only game they ever made under that name after previously going by Blizzard North, the company best known for creating the first two Diablo games) that was intended to promote Toyota's 2007 lineup of Yaris cars. Even though it was a free game, it still managed to make its players feel ripped-off. Despite being released on the Xbox 360, it looks more like a game made in the PlayStation 2 era. The gameplay is boring, frustrating, and repetitive - the car selection is microscopic (a total of three Yaris cars to choose from), the tracks are all samey half-pipes, the enemies are bizarre (ranging from luchadors on mini-bikes to flying iPods to 20-foot-tall flame-throwing toasters on rocket skates), and the minimap is all but useless in alerting you to oncoming hazards (of which there are many, often placed around blind corners). The graphics are ugly, with basic zooming text effects, spherical explosions, and flat sprites to represent smoke and fire (excruciatingly visible when the aforementioned flame-throwing toasters leave a "trail of fire" that's just a row of individual sprites). There's no weight to the sounds of weapon fire or explosions, and your car is completely silent without even a token engine sound - making the action feel tiny and underwhelming. The music escapes Horribleness by simply being uninteresting; as with the rest of the game, it felt like it was straight out of the late 1990s. All of this added up to a metascore of 17/100 on Metacritic, the lowest score of any Xbox 360 game on the site. It was delisted from XBLA the following year. However, Rerez somehow had the foresight to download the game on their Xbox 360 while it was still available at the time to eventually review for their mega video on the Worst Racing Games of All Time that also included other terrible racing games like Spirit of Speed 1937 and Big Rigs: Over The Road Racing.

Eighth Generation (2011–present)

• Afro Samurai 2: Revenge of Kuma, a sequel to the 2009 Afro Samurai video game, was panned across the board for numerous issues including a bevy of visual glitches, disjointed storytelling that relied too heavily on flashbacks, clunky combat that tried to be strategic but almost invariably devolved into Button Mashing, and terrible sound mixing during cutscenes (characters speaking to one another would have their lines spoken at different volumes, and at times the conversations would either be drowned out by the background music or run overlong and bleed into a different scene). Only one of three planned episodes was released, with the game's publisher taking the whole thing down from Steam and the Play Station Network just two months after launch, offering refunds to everyone who purchased it and effectively wiping the game from existence. Cr1TiKaL showcases how bad it is back when it was still available to the public here.
  • When the PlayStation 5 was released, one of its selling points was backwards compatibility with PS4 games, with a small amount of exceptions. The PS4 version is one of those very few games that won't run on the PS5, even with a data transfer. In other words, a game that was already considered dead is now Deader than Dead. Needless to say, not many people cared, not even those who did play the game.
• Alone in the Dark: Illumination, released on PC in 2015, was a third-person co-op shooter that had little to do with the rest of the franchise. Despite being pushed back from an initial release date of December 2014, the game still comes off as largely unfinished: Gameplay is mind-numbingly repetitive with every level being a long slog through mostly empty environments with brain-dead, generic enemies and the same Fetch Quest objectives over and over again. Virtually no attempt to balance the game for both single-player and multiplayer was made, meaning single-player is unfairly brutal on any difficulty but Easy, and multiplayer (for the few players who could find a match) is too easy. The game visually looks on par with a crappy Steam Greenlight game and bugs, including frequent crashing and enemies able to clip and attack through walls, were rampant. What little story the game has is told through paragraphs of text with no voice acting or music at all. Sound effects, when not entirely absent, are very muted and limp. Critics tore Illumination to pieces, giving it a Metacritic score of 19. Not even longtime fans of the series, including Angry Joe and Jim Sterling, have any kind words to say about it, each ranking the game high on their "Worst Games of 2015" lists; in Sterling's case, at the very top. The game proved to be the final nail in the coffin for the franchise for nearly a decade, as it resulted in Atari losing the rights to the franchise, and the IP was later acquired by THQ Nordic in 2018, who eventually released a reboot of the original game in 2024; while the reviews for that were somewhat mixed, it was still more well-made and enjoyable than the series low point that was Illumination.
• Archery for the Wii U greets you with the generic Unity font, terribly textured generic shapes that would've been bad even 20 years ago, and no music or sound whatsoever past the title screen. If that isn't enough of a red flag, the help screen actually warns the player about getting stuck in the scenery. The gameplay itself looks barely better than the menus, with the player's animation for pulling the bowstring not matching up with the actual bow's (then again, it's a miracle there even is a bow and arm model, given the devs couldn't even find some different fonts to put in their game), and arrows just disappearing upon being fired, leaving the HUD (consisting of rectangles overlaid with more generic text) as the only way to know if the player hit anything. You'd expect an archery simulator to at least let you see your arrows soaring through the air and hitting targets, but that was, apparently, too much effort to put in. Gameplay consists of shooting at one target, then three, then five, and then moving on to animal-shaped targets according to the store description and splash screen, although this video ends before that. The bland gameplay and unpolished presentation would already be enough to qualify this game as horrible, but it gets an order of magnitude worse when you have to pay $20 for the "privilege" to play it, when this type of price is normally reserved for higher-end digital-only titles. The game might have been worth making fun of if it was cheap, but for this price nobody wanted to bother with it. The price was dropped by half later on, but even then, it's too expensive given the insulting lack of polish. PeanutButterGamer covered this game first in his video on the worst eShop games sold on the Wii U and 3DS before it's gone forever.
• Art of Stealth is a first-person shooter game made by newcomers Matan Cohen Studios and distributed on Steam. The studio describes the game as its first project, and it shows. The game opens with a narration that oozes of Dull Surprise and outlines the ludicrous Excuse Plot of a man falsely accused of a crime and then committing a real one by massacring innocent people and breaking into a mansion. This is then followed up by a trailer of the gameplay, which failed to remove the Bandicam logo and would be better suited to a Greenlight page. Despite the game's title, stealth plays no part whatsoever - you don't get a silencer for your guns, and it's very easy to get detected by enemies - since the stock assets purchased by the developer were designed for a shooter and not a stealth game. Guards are not programmed with proper animations, leading to them sometimes shooting while making no movement whatsoever. Graphics are similarly poor, with stock assets glowing brightly and confusing players and the backdrop not fixed in place, leading to some gamers feeling nauseated when they look outside of a window and move the mouse around. To add insult to injury, walking around has a random chance of causing you to fall through the world and after completing the first mission traces of the "Mission One" text are still faintly visible on your HUD. All of this can be seen on Jim Sterling's video, as well as from 0Bennyman. This would usually be "excusable" as a poor, low-quality asset flip, but what makes this horrible is the $6 pricetag for a blatantly broken game, as well as the developer's Can't Take Criticism attitude (which drew Jim to the game in the first place); MCS swiftly became infamous for censoring negative reviews on the game's Steam page, and then targeting Sterling and Bennyman for their first impressions videos by threatening them with legal action (clearly ignorant of the failed lawsuit from Digital Homicide in Jim's case) and a DMCA takedown of said videos, where the developer also started a flame war in the comments sections. This left a negative impression on most gamers (as well as a small Colbert Bump for Bennyman), as well as The Cynical Brit who defended Jim, but the final straw for Valve was the developer posting fake positive reviews to try and drown out the criticism; the game was subsequently forcibly removed from Steam. The developer has since apologised to Jim for their behavior, so there may be hope yet.
• Ashes Cricket 2013 was an incredibly glitchy Cricket simulation. Upon its release on Steam, players discovered mountains of bugs that rendered the game nearly unplayable and utterly confusing to anyone unfamiliar with the sport. With sub-par graphics, poor backgrounds, repetitive and annoying announcers, and terrible controls, it was so bad that the game's publisher, 505 Games, pulled it from Steam just one week after it was released, gave refunds to anyone who bought the game (then an outright rarity), and cancelled all development on porting it to game consoles in order to "protect the Ashes name and that of the ECB and Cricket Australia". Vinesauce streamed it with nary an idea on how Cricket is played. Similarly, the Yogscast forced themselves to play it as an incentive to raise $100,000 in the first night of their 2013 charity stream. This resulted in Duncan Jones and Sjin bailing so they wouldn't have to, and left Simon, Lewis (who had initially defended the game as okay), and Ridgedog (who also had no idea how the sport is played) frothing at the mouth by the end.
• Basement Crawl, a downloadable PlayStation 4 title, was intended to be a horror-themed clone of the Bomberman games of old, but is closer in overall quality to the infamous Bomberman Act:Zero. It's a multiplayer-focused game that supports up to eight players online, but the netcode is so sloppy that trying to find and get an online match working properly is almost like a mini-game in itself. And even when the game works as intended, the confusing user interface (the dimly lit arenas and lack of palette swaps for players using the same character can easily lead to accidental explosive death) and complete absence of available options for customizing matches make this game a dud. It's the second-lowest-rated PS4 game on Metacritic with a score of 27 (only Afro Samurai 2, listed above, is ranked lower), and the developers went so far as to apologize for the game, hit the reset button, and rebuild it from scratch as Brawl, which fixes some of the aforementioned problems.
• Call of Duty: Black Ops Declassified, a Play Station Vita Gaiden Game for Call of Duty: Black Ops II, is packed with game-breaking bugs, poor and ludicrously-obligatory touch controls, Artificial Stupidity, and poorly-rendered graphics. The single-player campaign only lasts 45 minutes and has bugs on the very first mission. The multiplayer is next to impossible to get working properly and has maps that are extremely tiny, such as Nukehouse, a scaled-down version of the console version's Nuketown, which is already considered very small. It also completely omits one of Black Ops 2's largest selling points: Zombie mode. Especially damning is that this was intended to be the PlayStation Vita's Killer App by showing the public that the system could handle console-quality games on the go, with Sony riding on this game to push units as evidenced by bundling the game with some systems. Instead, this game only served to damage the Vita's reputation early on, a blow it would never recover from. GameSpot employees past and present concur, as does JarekTheGamingDragon.
• The Culling was a relatively popular trailblazer in the Battle Royale subgenre, with the main distinguishing feature being a heavy focus on melee combat. Eventually, the game died off, largely due to constant changing of the core mechanics, eventually alienating its audience. Just six months later, The Culling 2 was released and skipped straight to the dying-off part of the process. A shameless clone of PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, The Culling 2 resembles the first game In Name Only - none of the melee focus that made the first game popular is present. Even as a PUBG clone, it's a failure: the gunplay is terrible, melee combat is even worse, movement in general feels horrible, and the map is far too big - despite having a player cap of 50, the map feels like it's built with 100 players in mind, and it's still too big for even that. Not that it really matters, anyway, since the game went and immediately died - as in, nobody was playing the game just a couple of days after it came out. The developers gave up just as quickly, to the point of even posting a gif of the "This Is Fine" dog on Twitter and pulling the game off of every marketplace after just eight days. IGN tore it to shreds, giving a 2 out of 10. One of the few, rare people that did play the game throughout the time it was done and out was Jim Sterling, and they give their full experiences with the game here, as well as notes the fatal flaws of games like this where they don't succeed immediately. Cr1TiKaL has also "played" the game, dubbing it "Steam's loneliest multiplayer game", and listed it as the absolute worst game he's played in 2018 due to the simple fact that the game launched with such little fanfare that it outright cannot be played.
• Day One: Garry's Incident is a classic case of trying to do too much with too little. It's an open-world first-person survival game in the vein of Minecraft and DayZ, but made by people without even a tenth of the talent needed to put such an ambitious title together. Combat is a mess of Button Mashing, cheap deaths, and random enemy attack damage, the framerate is incredibly choppy, gratuitous Invisible Walls restrict the main character's movement and make the "open world" feel like a joke, actions as simple as using a bandage require a cumbersome quicktime event, enemy AI works seemingly at random, and while the game looks decent enough when it's not moving the animations are hideous. As the icing on the cake, the game's developers attempted to have TotalBiscuit's extremely negative video of the game taken down from YouTube, but they wisely backed down after backlash.
• Earth: Year 2066 wasn't a game so much as it was an insultingly small sandbox put together with all the care of a tweaker cooking his own homebrew meth. Awful textures, no real missions or enemy variety, and bugs that would be laughable if the game weren't being sold on Steam for $20. It was pulled from Steam (with full refunds for all who bought it) for flat-out lying in its marketing, and it became a cause celebre for those demanding that Steam put quality-control standards in place for their Greenlight and Early Access programs. This is also without going into the rather shady practices of the developer when it comes to criticism, as described by Jim Sterling here.
• Eternity: The Last Unicorn (not to be confused with The Last Unicorn) took the top spot for Metacritic's list of the worst games of 2019, with a paltry overall score of 36. The combat is overly simplistic (with enemy AI being another strike against the game, since The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard), the Norse inspired aesthetic looks uninspired, and a combination of grinding, fetch quests, and Metroidvania-style backtracking pad out the game for longer than it ought to. All this on top of bugs and glitches that make the game even less fun than it was to begin with. Marcus Stewart of ScreenRant states that everything the game attempts has already been done far better by other games. Angry Joe also knew it was the worst game ranked on Metacritic that year and had it as the initial #1 worst game of 2019 as a fake out to his real #1 worst game that year due to no one expecting Eternity: The Last Unicorn to be any good whatsoever.
• Family Party: 30 Great Games: Obstacle Arcade for the Wii U is a shining example of deception in advertising. The graphics are bland, barely any more detailed than a Nintendo 64 game (on an eighth-gen console), and the sound is mediocre; the music at least would be tolerable if it weren't constantly drowned out by the obnoxious voice acting. Worst of all, though, every single one of the so-called "great" games is poorly designed (including a target-shooting game where the players are required to aim with the Wii Remote's Nunchuk attachment instead of pointing and shooting with the remote) and nearly unplayable. With a score of 11, it is officially the lowest rated video game on Metacritic. Game Revolution gave the game zero stars out of 5, the only game to receive such a score since the website switched from a letter-grade review system. Joe Skrebels of the UK Official Nintendo Magazine gave it 11%, styling his review as an Apocalyptic Log with a summary claiming it caused him to suffer an untreatable psychotic breakdown. The Wiiviewer didn't have a lot of nice things to say about it; he considers it to be one of the worst games he's reviewed, both in 2013 and his career. Finally, PeanutButterGamer considered it the second-worst party video game he's ever played, with the only reason why it's not #1 was because the other game ^note (Animal Crossing: amiibo Festival) was more of a disappointment to him.
• Fast & Furious Crossroads was originally meant to release alongside F9, but once the movie was delayed to 2021 due to the COVID-19 Pandemic, it had to stand on its own, even with Crossroads also being delayed to a summer 2020 release. Despite being co-developed by the same company behind Project CARS, the game often looks and feels like a budget movie tie-in game from the early-mid 2000s. The game's barely existent plot feels incredibly rushed, with cutscenes that offer little to no context as to what's going on with characters disappearing and reappearing out of nowhere, original characters with little likability or personality to them who take up far too much screen time compared to Letty and Dominic Toretto, the primary character of the franchise,^note Vienna is just some Sassy Black Woman whose motivation becomes an insufferable example of Revenge Before Reason for two thirds of the game and gets a bit of background in only two or three scenes, the biggest backstory bomb dropping only at the very end of the game; Cam is an infuriating Creator's Pet, borderline invoked Canon Sue, intended to represent nonbinary people and fails rather badly at suchinvoked due to being a nigh-continuous, impulsive Jerkass to nearly everyone, including their own team, coming off as painfully passive-aggressive rather than charming, somehow able to solve problems that they probably couldn't (they placed a tracking device inside of Roman's car before the group dropped it off, despite Cam not even being there with the car when Dom met up alone with Roman - nor had it been established that Cam even knew enough of the plan to add their own failsafe, ergo the tracking device was just a total Deus ex Machina - plus, Cam is the one who defuses the bomb strapped to Roman, when it's apparently just a velcro belt packed with dynamite, therefore anyone else could remove the bomb, meaning that it's just yet more pandering for Cam) among other scenarios), and never receiving any comeuppance for their obnoxious behavior and is instead built up as Dom's apparent pupil, despite them having no past history with him or the family apart from somehow knowing Dom's deeds with no explanation; Ormstied is a Generic Doomsday Villain who wants to Take Over the World For the Evulz with no backstory to be told, having no charm beyond Bond Villain Stupidity and a giant Cool Tank; his son Kai being even less than that; and Sebastian is just there to drop exposition with a goofy accent and then die and uninspired voice acting, despite getting several actors from the franchise to reprise their characters. However, said poor acting may have been a result of the terrible dialogue ("I've seen a lot of backseats in my time, never thought I'd die in one!"), further highlighting the incredibly poor overall writing of the narrative. In one mission, you can hear police chatter which is so muffled that it's almost impossible to actually understand what they're saying. The gameplay is so mindnumbingly boring that despite the game doing its damnedest to convey any sense of speed, it still feels like a slog just driving from point A to point B. Most of the time, you hardly even have to steer, due to the lack of obstacles aside from the occasional fragile enemy car. The game is also teeming with physics glitches and foibles, to the point where even bouncing off of obstacles constantly proves to be a useful strategy, and a mere harmless tap against the wall can decrease your health (which could be disastrous if you have minimal health left). Civilian vehicles will more often than not accidentally ram each other with such force that it sends at least one of them flying across the screen. The cutscenes seem to be in-engine, but in the actual game they seem to be prerecorded, and they have painfully limited amounts of mocap despite the game also showing a mocap photo that doesn't match anything used in the cutscenes^note The worst offender would have to be almost every cutscene with Dom, where he walks in and crosses his arms in the exact same way, every single time without fail. Even with an admittedly spectacular finale, featuring Vin Diesel surfing on a space rocket, the road to get there is long and winding and full of issues. Critics were not kind, giving it scathing reviews and slamming the game for all the reasons listed above, along with how the game barely lasts 4 hours, including cutscenes, and was still released at full price, in addition to a season pass for online multiplayer content... that is, assuming anyone can play it online, as lobbies require 9 players minimum to even play^note (three heroes, three villains, and three cops), and the PC version barely had 8 players online at once a week after launch, and shortly afterwards the multiplayer became absolutely bereft of life. Cr1TiKaL streamed the game in its entirety and held nothing back, later ranking the game at a 10% on his Moist Meter review and listing it as the worst game of 2020. Angry Joe also felt the same way, giving it a 2/10 instead. Yong Yea also had a rough time beating the game himself. Rerez also pointed out even more problems with the game that others likely didn't catch here. And for one last kick to the teeth, the game itself sold so poorly that after two years of action, it ended up completely removed from all available platforms.
• Fighter Within, Ubisoft and Daoka's Xbox One sequel to the above-mentioned Fighters Uncaged, showed little improvement over its predecessor, and is still considered a terrible game on its own merits. The few improvements it has over Uncaged owe only to the Kinect 2.0's improved capabilities compared to the Kinect's, save for the presence of a multiplayer option, which is local-only and has too many issues to be worthwhile.
• Flowers Are Dead, a downloadable game on the PlayStation Store, is a walking simulator where you simply just walk around looking for tape recordings. The problem is that you move incredibly slowly, and when you play multiple tape recordings at the same time, they begin to overlap each other, resulting in a terribly huge mess of voices all cluttered together. If you think the subtitles are of any help in this situation, think again, as all the subtitle text from all the currently playing tapes likewise gets displayed simultaneously, turning them into illegible blocks of gibberish that makes the cacophony of simultaneously playing tapes downright easy to decipher in comparison. You can even tell that hardly any effort went into the making of this game from its trailer, something that Jim Sterling can attest to in their trailer reaction/game review, both of which can be seen here. Sterling later mentions it as one of their 10 worst games they played in 2019. Caddicarus also covered it here as a series of games he bought under Sony's January 2020 sale alongside games like Life of Black Tiger and Skylight Freerange 2: Gachduine below. He even feels like this game's more like a "Dying Man Simulator" than a walking simulator game that he might have enjoyed.
• Guise of the Wolf makes all werewolf media feel ashamed for its existence. Like many awful, awful games before it, the art style disguises itself as cel-shaded to cover up its terrible textures ^note (and by "cel-shaded", we mean some outlines were just slapped on); if the player stands in certain spots, they can see the lines misaligned with objects and people ^note (from certain angles, the outlines clip through the guards' faces, because they're done by adding more geometry to the model instead of using any sort of actual outline post-processing effect) and it's often possible to just walk right through them. The options menu only covers music and sound volume. The mechanics are half-assed as the "stealth system" consists of crouching, causing nobody to see you; not that you'll know to use it at first, because there's no mention of it anywhere in the game, not even in the help menu. The central mechanic of turning into a werewolf is barely used for anything and doesn't have a significant impact on the gameplay. Moreover, the game is full of backtracking and instant death traps. Welcome to Corneria is present ("Good evening, milord! Helps to have a map!") complete with a dialogue volume that isn't normalized. Its ending is told through a series of bad drawings, like they ran out of money before they could make some proper animation. Finally, as expected of horrible games, there are loads of glitches: the Enter key can crash the game, sound effects can stack and distort to near-deafening levels, and you can clip through almost everything. And it doesn't help that the developer Can't Take Criticism, as they attempted to place a copyright strike on TotalBiscuit's videos concerning the game. While they denied putting out the strike, there is plentiful evidence that they had something to do with it - including issuing TB a "Final Warning" to take down his channel. The devs rescinded their claim after backlash, so the videos are back up and you can watch the research stream here and a full review of the game here.
• Hell's House, a downloadable game on the Microsoft Indie Game Channel, is a Survival Horror Interactive Movie where all you do is simply press the onscreen button prompts as they slowly scroll across the top of the screen. The plot doesn't get brought up after the opening text crawl (said text claims the protagonist went into the house and was never seen again, yet the ending shows her leaving the house safely, turning the whole thing into Blatant Lies) - instead, the game consists of an actress wandering room to room in the house, attempting to act. Since the death scenes can only occur when you lose, winning only shows a boring night routine, with only two or three brief horror scenes that have very long intervals between them and turn out to be nothing at all. The death scenes might fall under So Bad, It's Good, but they're not worth going through the rest of the game (and only three or four of them are actual death scenes; the rest are of the actress merely uttering a Stock Scream and running from something mildly spooky). The incomparable Retsupurae duo give it the proper treatment - and even with their commentary, it's a chore to sit through!
• Hunt Down the Freeman is a fan-developed, but commercially-released title (it cost $25 at launch!) which is supposedly a Perspective Flip of Half-Life 2. You play as a marine seeking revenge on Gordon Freeman after being attacked by someone with a HEV suit and a crowbar. It's an Obvious Beta with a ton of bugs and glitches, some of them game breaking. It's so bad that most players need to use cheats and debug commands to even progress. Textures are badly done or missing outright, including an egregious Special Effect Failure near the end. It's also got Loads and Loads of Loading. The maps are poorly designed and laid out. They don't flow well; some have non-linear layouts that contribute to other problems, such as a lack of cover. The lighting design is also terrible. The storyline reads like a bad Fan Fic; its Plot Twist will leave you even more confused than you were before. Its cutscenes were more cinematic and look slightly better than the rest of the game — except they also contribute to the game's massive 60 GB size, if they even load properly. The game itself depicts an assailant wearing a helmet on top of his HEV suit, making his status as not Gordon Freeman into The Un-Twist instead. The dialogue is cringeworthy at times. The voice acting is inconsistent, both in quality and sound mixing. There are actually a number of noteworthy YouTubers among the voice cast (e.g. Mick "Ricepirate" Lauer as the Player Character, I Hate Everything, Sky Williams, Pyrocynical, and Keemstar — bizarrely playing the US President), but they aren't very good. The game was marred by allegations surrounding stolen assets from other games. Some of the game's assets are clearly higher-quality than others, and several don't even seem to fit within the Half-Life universe and style. It also makes what they did make stick out from a quality standpoint. Here's a retrospective from I Hate Everything himself, claiming the voice actors like himself didn't have anything to work with because the writers were making it up as they went along. Here's another retrospective from Pyrocynical, another one of the game's voice actors, which spends a lot more time reviewing the game itself. Here's a Let's Play by Connor Sheri Shaw, here's a dissection by Tehsnakerer, and here's a particularly merciless dissection by Jim Sterling. But the most vitriolic reviewers were this one by Ben Croshaw of Zero Punctuation and this one by DX, both of whom took it personally that the game butchered a franchise they loved, and both of whom rated it the worst indie game of the decade - indeed, Croshaw rated it as the worst game he had rated as the worst game on any "Worst Of [Year]" list throughout the entire 2010s. Despite all this, it's still on Steam, and you still have to pay for it. And even with an ironically timed April Fool's Day update in 2022, it's still not enough to salvage this game, as Rerez pointed out in their video on it.
• 東方虹夢化学 ～illegal Science～ tries to combine Touhou Project with the polarity mechanic of Ikaruga^note you can absorb bullets of your own color and change color at will, which a few other fan games have done well. Unfortunately, this game botches the execution: The bullet patterns are just normal bullet hell patterns with numerous colors haphazardly slapped on them. As a result, the polarity gimmick just lets you erase a few bullets. It adds very little to the experience, and it feels clunky to use because there are too many colors (up to seven!). Worse, a lot of the bullet patterns are plagiarized from official Touhou games and don't work well with a gimmick they were never designed for. The game also suffers from ugly graphics, a bad soundtrack and a price tag of ¥500 despite being a fan game.
• Into the War, a game sold on Steam that was both Early Access and Greenlit. The game aimed to be a type of arena shooter like Quake 3 or Team Fortress 2, but the developers put a bare minimum of effort into actually making a game. Graphics consisted of stock Unity assets. A few days after release, several levels were removed from the game because of problems with players walking through or falling through solid objects. There were four classes, which varied only in their starting weapon, and the shotgun used by the engineer was by far the most effective. Players had grenades, which made a sound and had a graphical effect, but didn't actually do anything. Lag was often unbearable at times, and players could be killed one second after respawning because there was no invulnerability or grace period. Running animations were bugged, and players looked like they were sliding along the ground or spinning in place while running. The developers took whatever money they made from the game, abandoned the project, and shut down their servers. For a while, the game remained listed on Steam, despite the fact that the only thing a player could do was look at the main menu, before the purchase option was removed.
• Iron Soul, a third-person shooter on Steam. Issues abound, including a text crawl intro narrated by what sounds like a text-to-speech program that can't pronounce words like "evil" and "hypothetical", a crosshair that has to be manually turned on instead of being on by default, a severe dearth of enemy types, an obnoxious Mission Control character (who's even called the Annoying Voice in the game's trading cards) that sounds like a mix between Mario and Jar Jar Binks, a laughable plot involving the world governments discovering possible life on other planets and then apparently immediately constructing an army of Killer Robots to fend off a "hypothatical" Alien Invasion, wonky jumping mechanics, and complaints of at least one copy of the game in which the first boss was rendered unbeatable by having no health meter. Watch Brutalmoose tear the game apart (at least up until the aforementioned boss) here.
• Left Alive was the first game in the Front Mission series to be released after just shy of a decade, but fans had every fear that it would end up being a Franchise Killer (which were thankfully unfounded given a remake for the first game was later announced for the Nintendo Switch in 2022). For a series that usually focuses on strategic, mechanical Wanzer combat, Left Alive tries and fails to imitate the Metal Gear series. The controls are obtuse, the enemy AI seems to hop between Artificial Stupidity and The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard and makes the difficulty too uneven (particularly since the enemies are way too durable while the player character can die all too quickly). The inclusion of weapons and a health bar seems completely pointless, as enemies are so relentless when you're spotted and your characters' health and damage output is such a joke that you will die in seconds the moment you're spotted. The Mission Control apparently has some level of short-term memory loss, as it continuously states "Caution. The enemy is approaching." at least a dozen times in gameplay. The frequent Escort Missions are almost impossible due to the horrendous AI and your aforementioned powerlessness, but the game actively punishes you for not doing them by giving you a "bad ending" that's so over the top and gratuitous in how bleak it is it borders on farcical Black Comedy. Not helping matters is the fact that the characters are forgettable, the story is a dull slog, and the multiple-choice sequences don't seem to make much difference in how the story pans out. Plus, as Rerez notes, the PC version has weird DLC involving advertising for the World of Tanks mobile game and the iconic crowbar from Half-Life that can get "damaged". As a result of its myriad shortcomings, Left Alive is often listed high on the list of the worst games of 2019 from a variety of sources, from Metacritic to Zero Punctuation to Angry Joe to Rerez. It's telling that the developers were so desperate to sell the game that they flooded the game's Metacritic user score with clearly fake-positive reviews, praising the game for stuff that is completely non-existent in the game, as if the "users" were playing a completely different game^note This practice was repeated to boost reviews for the below-average-but-not-horrible-enough-for-this-entry-Balan Wonderworld.. It also didn't help that it was released a mere three months after fellow Horrible entry The Quiet Man, which both happened to be published by Square Enix, bringing some concerns about the publisher's quality control.
• The Letter (not to be confused with the visual novel of the same name) is a low-budget exploration game in the vein of Dear Esther, Gone Home, or Proteus, but has barely a fraction of the flair required to match any of them, and wasn't worth the $2 it cost to download the thing from the Wii U eShop. Your player character gets a letter supposedly left by his parents, then fumbles around drab, empty environments trying to figure out what happened to them. It tries to pass itself off as a horror game, but there are no scares to be found whatsoever unless you count playing this crap. Worst of all, the game can be finished in less than 15 minutes, and ends with a trite All Just a Dream twist. PeanutButterGamer covered it in a video with him looking at some of the worst eShop games from the Wii U & 3DS here. The Wiiviewer covered it here, as well as its 1.1 version^note or 2.0, as he calls it here, and would later put the 1.0 version on his list of the worst games he reviewed in 2014.
• Life of Black Tiger was a crappy freeware mobile game which not only somehow found its way onto the PlayStation 4, but is one of a pair of substandard indie games to be promoted on Sony's official PlayStation YouTube channel (with music stolen from an independent musician doing a cover of themes from Parasyte) in 2017 ^note (the other, Skylight Freerange 2: Gachduine, is listed below), even though one can see from a mere cursory glance that it really should've been passed over by whoever runs the channel. Among the game's myriad shortcomings are an English translation that makes Zero Wing seem completely legible by comparison (which also results in some accidental racism), graphics that look like mere asset swaps from the Unity engine, and mindbogglingly boring gameplay that largely boils down to "approach prey, press button, hold button until prey is dead". It is no hyperbole when Jim Sterling, after playing it on their channel, declared it "The Worst PS4 Game in the World" and one of the shittiest games of 2017, constantly using it to showcase what they perceive to be the decline of the PS storefront. Eurogamer would also go on to declare it the worst PS4 game they'd ever played, as did DarklordJadow1 here. The Angry Video Game Nerd covered it and called it one of the worst things he's ever played, placing it on the same level as Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing and Plumbers Don't Wear Ties. Caddicarus also covered it here.
• The Monster is a first-person shooter/survival horror "game" "made" by Robogames that has been put on Steam Greenlight no less than three times, and voted against the first two. While Greenlight is usually subject to Sturgeon's Law on a constant basis, this game stands out as especially terrible for multiple reasons. To begin with, it's just made of prebought assets (from "REALISTIC FPS PREFAB") which aren't put together coherently, running atrociously slowly with low frames and having no coherent plot or even an Excuse Plot. Unlike most asset flips, this one takes the source material and tries passing it off as original work, having copied the pack more or less shot-for-shot. To make matters worse, the developer seems hellbent on resubmitting it despite the same criticism coming up repeatedly, censors any negative comments, and is blatantly lying about having plagiarised someone else's work. Watch Jim Sterling tear it a new one.
• The Mystery of the Missing Hotpot Recipe, ostensibly based on the long-running British soap opera Coronation Street. Start with cutscenes which consist of still images and uninspired dialogue, then add a frustratingly complex "click to find the item" game. What could have only been tedious at worst is made downright infuriating by several factors: The items are ridiculously small, some items are hidden in the background, if you click five times without finding anything the cursor swirls around randomly for a few seconds, and the "hint" button outright highlights the item for you. After a brief minigame, it's back to more of the same. Oh, and there is no music and very little sound...on a PC game released in 2011. Metro gave it 0/10, this forum thread is laden with negative reviews, and Caddicarus had no kind words for it in his review.
• Prehistorik was released on Steam and Apple devices in 2013 as a remake of the old platformer of the same name, and included several plot and gameplay elements homaging the other games in the series, Prehistorik 2 and Prehistorik Man. Sounds good enough, but the actual game is completely mediocre. It looks and plays like a middling Newgrounds game, with some obnoxious visual effects to make it seem prettier. The gameplay is as basic and repetitive as it was in 1991, but now the levels are much bigger and yet much duller, since they're mostly empty and there's no interesting gimmicks unlike in the sequel games. The controls are decent enough, but every now and then the caveman's club attack will randomly smack the enemies against the screen, only managing to obscure the visuals for a while. The tunes are lazy "tribal" tracks full of grunts and noises, and the "humor" is either nonsensical random pop culture references or stupid Toilet Humour which culminates in the final boss fight: a giant who's an offensive Camp Gay stereotype (because he's a Homo Erectus, geddit?) who is always creepily moaning and humping the air. And the final battle is no less easy or repetitive than all the other bosses. No wonder it was delisted from Steam and the developers don't mention it on their resumes.
• The Quiet Man is a combination of all the worst aspects of an arthouse film (appropriate, considering it contains a large volume of FMV footage) and a rushed video game, and it may be the game that was singlehandedly responsible for its developer Human Head Studios closing down in November 2019. A pretentious storyline in which the developers try to put the player in the shoes of a deaf man by having none of the dialogue audible and failing to make it comprehensible without audio^note you can't even rely on lip-reading because all too often, it's an in-engine cutscene or characters' lips are obscured in some way, FMV overlaid over action sequences for seemingly no reason other than to make it harder for the player to see what's going on, and a general lack of clarity on what exactly you're supposed to be doing. After the Answered update, there is now an option for audio... locked behind a New Game Plus, and the now-comprehensible story turns out to be a nonsensical, narmtastic mess. By being utterly incomprehensible without audio, not only does it miss the point of silent drama, it alienates the group most likely to appreciate it by accidentally portraying them as incapable of comprehending the worldinvoked. Even if it was comprehensible without audio, it plays ableist misconceptions about American Sign Language — namely, that signing and gang signs are the same thing, an assumption which has consequences in real life like deaf people trying to communicate being killed for fear that they're using gang signs — for Rule of Cool, meaning it would alienate deaf gamers anyway. Even if you ignore the storyline and presentation and focus purely on the gameplay, what you're left with is an utterly generic and monotonous beat-'em-up that just requires you to mash buttons for several minutes on end in order to win every single fight, assuming the camera doesn't screw you over too much. Here is Writing on Games' take. TieTuesday played through the entire game, both before and after the addition of game audio. Jim Sterling also played the game, and ranked it as the topper of their Worst Games of 2018 list, branding the game as a whole "an abject, stupid failure" and concluding "The only reason The Quiet Man can't hear anything is because its head is jammed that far up its fucking arse". DX also named it his worst game of the decade, not only ranking it below legit contenders like Rambo: The Video Game, Ride to Hell: Retribution: 1%, Left Alive,^note  which Square Enix also happened to publish a mere three months later and the next game below, but also ranks it among the likes of Bubsy 3D as one of the worst games of all time. Angry Joe also pulls no punches when he declares it as the worst game of 2018 in his own list, likening its story to a badly written emo fanfiction. Rerez also take a look in their hilarious but in-depth analysis of the game here.
• Raven's Cry (later renamed Vendetta: Curse of Raven's Cry) looks and feels every bit like a third-rate Risen 2 and Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag clone, but was sold at a premium price despite a mess of bugs (a few of the major game-breaking bugs were patched out multiple times after release, but rendered previous saves incompatible) and technical gaffes. The horrendous and wooden voice acting oozes Dull Surprise, at least when you can hear it, as many voiceovers were flat-out missing in the release version, which resulted in characters seemingly having telepathic conversations with one another. The combat is painfully generic and dull, and it ends up boiling down to "mash the attack button until everything around you dies" - that is if your weapon hits or equipment register at all. Characterisation is uniformly unlikable and at worst offensive. Even the only potentially good parts of the game end up being ruined - the music, while well-done, ends up playing at the most inappropriate times (e.g. having a sweeping orchestral playing during a conversation in a tavern); the graphics, while not always horrible-looking, will knock down the framerate severely unless you either turn the options all the way down or have an expensive graphics card; and the ship-combat often boils down to luck rather than skill. Gamespot gave this game a 1 out of 10 (one of only a handful of games reviewed that earned such a low score, owing as much to the terrible writing and characterization as the uninteresting gameplay) and Jim Sterling called it "disgusting on almost every level".
• Raywin is an RPG released on Steam in 2015, and a prime example of how not to make a game with RPG Maker. The graphics look terrible and inconsistent, with character portraits not matching the sprites at all (the sprites use the default RPG Maker VX Ace art style, whereas the portraits appear to use Poser models), the music is generic, the gameplay is utterly boring with a complete lack of challenge in battle, dungeons that were designed by RPG Maker VX Ace's random dungeon generator function, and the fact that the creator couldn't even be bothered to change the default menu sounds and font. Add to this a complete Cliché Storm of a storyline and total lack of content (it lasts about 40 minutes before an obvious Sequel Hook kicks in via a To Be Continued screen) and you've got a title that would have been terrible 10-20 years ago, let alone today. Watch Charge Shot's review of it here.
• Secret Agent Files Miami is a 3DS eShop title that sells itself on the CIA-employed protagonist being falsely given a burn notice, and needing to clear her name. Unfortunately, that generic-sounding plot (which also sounds like it was ripped off from Burn Notice) is the best thing about the game, since the writing is boring at best and downright awful at worst. During the first bit of the game, the heroine vandalizes her mother's house then runs off when she's caught, has her hidden funds stolen by her ex-boyfriend (who says it's her fault he was able to find and steal them) that she still somehow has feelings for after that, and steals a van simply because she doesn't want to walk across town. The "gameplay" isn't any better, as it's a Hidden Object Game with absolutely zero explanation that that's what type of game it is (even the description on the eShop doesn't mention it!) and has the game stop registering any taps after a few tries. The visuals and music aren't any better, as they look more like something out of a budget Game Boy Advance game than something on the 3DS.
• Shannon Tweed's Attack of the Groupies HD (which is incidentally not at all HD) is a blatant ripoff of Plants vs. Zombies, only instead of fighting zombies you defend Shannon Tweed's husband, Gene Simmons, from crazed groupies using robots with water guns. It suffers from sluggish, skill-less, and just boring gameplay, a clunky and fiddly UI ^note (for example, checking for robot upgrades requires one to pause the game, click on the robot, click again on "upgrade", and finally manually resume the game, every single time), and lazy game design that recycles the same environment for multiple levels in a row. The animated cutscenes and character models are hideously drawn, the voice acting is flat and wooden, and all that passes for music is one annoyingly repetitive track that doesn't even loop properly. But the icing on this cake of terrible is a Game-Breaking Bug that blocks all enemies from spawning when you quit during the tutorial stage or skip the intro cutscene, rendering the game virtually unplayable unless you start a new file. Watch TotalBiscuit savage it here, as well as Jim Sterling's equally negative playthrough here.
• Skylight Freerange 2: Gachduine may have been ambitious in its scope for an indie game, but its attempt at being a sprawling RPG in a similar fashion to Mass Effect fails spectacularly in every respect. The primitive graphics (that would be considered crap even for the 3DO) alone should be more than enough to turn players away, but those who brave visuals that can be described as "amateur at best" (which includes sex scenes that fall squarely into the ugly end of the Uncanny Valley) will regret their decision when confronted with a plot about a war against a cult that is confusing in its misguided attempt to be complex, and a clunky battle system reminiscent of the Final Fantasy series' ATB system, but worse in every way. Most perplexing of all, Skylight 2 had been rejected by Steam Greenlight (which by the time of the game's release had become infamous as a shovelware-infested hellhole) but was released on PlayStation 4 and Vita, and was even promoted on Sony's official PlayStation YouTube channel! Jim Sterling said it best in a video they made of this game: "IT WASN'T GOOD ENOUGH FOR STEAM!" Caddicarus also looked at this game here, noting it was even worse than Life of Black Tiger above.
• Takedown: Red Sabre was billed as a return to true tactical shooters to counterbalance the increasing popularity of modern military shooters. Sadly, this game has soured that statement thanks to its overall horrendous quality. Enemy AI is rather sketchy as they will either shoot in random directions or make their mark from miles away. Allies act the same way, but with the added bonus of standing around in gunfire like targets. Jarringly, despite being a tactical shooter, you cannot issue commands to your squadmates. The HUD, which was kept minimal for realism, only served to confuse players as they had no way to recheck their objectives or even figure out who is friend or foe. Add uninspiring levels, buggy menus, and network issues and publisher 505 Games may very well have put out the worst first-person shooter of 2013.
• Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5 already caused skepticism when it was announced a mere month before release, and to no surprise turned out to be an Obvious Beta with levels clearly slapped together from stock assets and graphics barely better than a PS2 game. There is no story, just a bunch of overly simplistic missions and challenges, which are still painful to do because its physics are even more broken than those of Pro Skater HD and the controls even less responsive than those of Tony Hawk: Ride and its sequel Shred, even though the latter two used Waggletastic skateboard peripherals. The new "slam" mechanic feels tacked on, the game was loaded with bugs and glitches before a patch weeks later, and it launched with a day-one patch bigger than the game itself - Allegedly, the disc contained only the tutorial, and the patch was the rest of the game. Watch Rerez shred this game as part of their "Just Bad Games" series here, and watch Square Eyed Jak rant about it here.
  
  As it turned out, Activision's Tony Hawk license was expiring at the end of 2015, and Pro Skater 5 was made as a final cash-grab while Activision still held it. The game was released on the very day the license expired, which explains the above patch: the game wasn't even finished when a build had to be submitted for manufacturing and the rest of the game was developed while the boxed copies were being distributed. The game's online services were shut down in 2017, so the "day-one patch" can no longer be downloaded, but PSN still had the game on sale in 2018, and Microsoft has placed it on the Xbox Game Pass. Jeff Gerstmann, known for giving Pro Skater 3 a perfect 10 back when he worked at Gamespot, gave the game one star out of five and had the review's byline simply state "Don't play this game." Entertainment Weekly called it the worst game of 2015, and it's in the top five of the lowest-rated games on Xbox One and PlayStation 4. The game scorched the earth enough that it was fully assumed to be a Franchise Killer; however, Activision returned in 2020 with Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1 + 2, a Video Game Remake of the first two games developed by Vicarious Visions of Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy fame ^note  who also happened to have developed the GBA ports of the franchise, from Pro Skater 2 to American Wasteland, which released to critical and commercial acclaim and ultimately restored the franchise's dignity, although the same can't be said for developers Robomodo, who also developed the maligned Tony Hawk Ride and Shred, with THPS5 being the final nail in their coffin.
• Underworld Ascendant is widely considered to be the worst Immersive Sim of all time and for good reason. The game released in an Obvious Beta state despite a perpetually-delayed four-year development cycle and completing its Kickstarter goals, and a later patch did little to improve the game. The gameplay is janky and takes Artificial Stupidity to new lengths, where, like in Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing, the AI doesn't even work some of the time. The story is also nonexistent, with cutscenes being outright nonsensical with terrible voice acting. The gameplay doesn't even feel like an Immersive Sim, with solutions that would otherwise be usually hidden being spelled out at the player. The game was going to be Ultima Underworld III before EA said no and only gave them the rights to use terminology from the games but not market it as an Ultima Underworld game, placing the game in a weird limbo between an actual sequel and a Spiritual Successor, and yet it does not stand out from other games in the genre, coming across more as a cheap knockoff of the Ultima Underworld games rather than a sequel to them and failing to innovate from later immersive sims. The performance is so unoptimized that framedrops are normal on top-tier PCs even with the game's outdated graphics and low system requirements. The game was so broken that Rock, Paper, Shotgun refused to review the game due to being unfinished, while Eurogamer gave the game an Avoid consensus, stating that the game is "a blatantly unfinished and uninspired nostalgia project that sheds a certain, peculiar light on the immersive sim at large". Charlatan Wonder also gives his in-depth review here, which goes into detail on all of the sins of the game.
• Uriel's Chasm and its sequel are both messes of haphazard Christian symbolism, sci-fi themes, and pure nonsense with constant shifts in gameplay style. The first game even has a framing device with fictional Internet critics showcasing an unlicensed Biblical game (which is the game proper) like a bad creepypasta. The whole package would have been So Bad, It's Good if both games weren't hideously unbalanced, with obtuse mechanics and Sensory Abuse. The games are intended to be satires of unlicensed Bible games, but most people reacted very negatively either way - at one point, the first game was the 4th lowest-rated game on Steam (even lower than "classics" like Day One: Garry's Incident).
• The War Z was an absolute mess of a game that exemplified everything wrong with the quality control (or rather, the lack thereof) on Steam. Desperately trying to piggyback on DayZ's success, the game tried to present itself as an open-world survival sandbox set in a zombie apocalypse, but was extremely lacking in zombies to kill. Even when you found zombies, they were so easy to kill that you were in more danger from other players than you would ever be from the undead. This was in addition to the game being incredibly glitchy, the utilization of microtransactions in ways that would make EA take notes, advertising the features that were not included in the final product or were greatly exaggerated, and poor relations between the developers and players (with one notable example being a developer, himself infamous for working on Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing, referring to campers with homophobic slurs, with the additional reports of developers bullying, banning or bribing those who criticized the game only adding further fuel to the fire). The game was eventually pulled from Steam and everyone who bought it was offered a refund (a case of rare generosity from Valve back then), only to be re-released as Infestation: Survivor Stories due to trademark issues related to the upcoming World War Z film. Aside from the title, it was the exact same game, glitches and all. The re-uploaded game is still on Steam (albeit no longer available for sale), but the multiplayer servers have been shut down following a serious hacking incident - although considering how few players even played it, hardly anything of value was lost. Finally, this game was reuploaded once again under a new title: Romero's Aftermath (again, without any improvements whatsoever) before it met the same fate.
  • A new iteration of the game, Infestation: The New Z, was released by a separate group of developers in the wake of Survivor Stories sinking, which is ironically led by the person who developed cheats for the aforementioned game. Much like the previous version of the game, it is still a buggy and glitchy mess, albeit now with a battle royale mode because it worked so well with Fortnite and H1Z1. The only positive going for this one is that it's free to play.
• The Youthdrainers is a 2016 NSFW horror puzzle game about a group of pregnant women being held hostage by little people in bright yellow coats who want to experiment on the babies. The B-movie plot is difficult to take seriously, and the game itself is plagued with problems, with even the game dev apparently admitting it wasn't finished. The puzzles, where you move a flashlight around a bunch of shelves, are dull. The audio is terrible despite the game requiring a headset to properly avoid enemies. The poor attempts at fanservice with the topless women falls flat because of the ugly art. Controls are sloppy. Worst of all, the game can easily glitch out on the tutorial making it impossible to proceed (which happened when the Game Grumps played it). Steam reviews are almost entirely negative (the only couple of positives likely being tongue-in-cheek) to the point the publisher had the game unlisted.

Ninth Generation (2017–present)

• Cazzarion: Demon Hunting (2022) for Xbox Series X|S and Steam is a third-person shooter where, as the title says, you play as some guy who hunts and kills demons, and that's it - there's no plot, tutorial or goal besides shooting at everything that moves. The overly long yet generic description even explicitly states that you can't win and tries to pass off the lack of instructions, story, key remapping, etc. as pluses. As this review points out, it has no redeeming qualities: it is poorly-optimized, heavily glitched, with enemies spawning out of nowhere, crummy aiming and shoddy camera work that make it barely playable, dumb monster designs, mediocre music and sound effects, and generally nothing original or interesting about it. The Xbox version does not even have achievements, while the Steam one has 84 "Archivements" (as the Steam page calls them)! Perhaps knowing that their game was barely functional, developer "Zarpazo" tried to drum up controversy by adding in the game's rambling description insults against the so-called "woke culture", including describing the hero as a "toxic white old man" and listing among the enemies "Lesbian trans female werepigs", whatever those are, plus other bizarre statements like "small carbon footprint", "nonbinary story" and "worse than rock music". Predictably, besides a scant few (hopefully ironic) Steam reviews saying that they bought it to stick it to the "woke people", it did not generate enough interest to be boycotted like the developer hoped, though it was delisted from stores and then re-listed. Bizarrely, the developer also included a link to the review linked above on the game's Xbox store page, possibly because nobody else cared about it enough to give it a review.
• CID The Dummy from a few folders up was already not a very good game, but the same developers later created a 2D-sidescrolling Video Game Demake for mobile phones in 2012, which they later ported to PC, Nintendo Switch, and PS4 in 2019, simply titled Crash Dummy. With all of that time between the original game and this remake you would think that would be ample enough time to identify and iron out the flaws of the original game, but sadly the game is just as awful as its predecessor. The game feels extremely easy, with no real penalty for losing all your lives, while any attempts at actual difficulty come from cheap hidden hazards and traps and obtuse methods of level progression. Everything else about the game feels extremely lazy as well; the cutscenes from the first game have been remade in a new, rather cheap looking art style with Off-Model moments left and right, while the written dialogue is full of typos and grammatical errors and later levels are filled with out-of-place looking pictures of all sorts of random objects and people seemingly pulled from Google Images. The game is filled with game-breaking glitches out the wazoo, while the levels themselves get lazier and lazier designed as the game goes on. On top of all this, the console and PC ports were all based on the mobile version and it shows in every way, in particular with the slippery controls and fiddly game physics that make finishing the game a sheer test of will, and the PC port has no option to use the keyboard instead of a controller, rendering the game completely unplayable for those without one! About the only thing that the game actually improves on over its predecessor is that CID is much less of a whiny pest and no longer spouts "NOT SUCH A DUMMY NOW, AM I?" every few seconds, but that's not nearly enough to redeem it. Having covered CID the Dummy previously, Shane and Adam of Rerez covered this game as well and were torn over which version of CID was worse, though they ultimately concluded that while neither version is worth your time, the original was the less awful of the two.
• Crossfire X was released for the Xbox Series S/X (and Xbox One) in February 2022. It is a free-to-play FPS and a part of the Crossfire series of video games (which are very popular in China and Vietnam). The game attempts to introduce the series to a wider audience but fails horribly. The multiplayer is riddled with bugs (you can't aim down the sights with the M4 and the Scar has no aim assist) and there are horrible balancing issues: by getting only a few points you can get dual submachine guns and a ton of health. While the graphics aren't abysmal, they're bland and look like an Xbox One launch title. There is only one map for each gamemode, so you'll quickly get bored. There's a good amount of guns, but it's so much of a grind to get any of them that you'll have to spend money to unlock anything (the game is riddled with microtransactions). The controls are really bad: aim acceleration makes the aiming feel messy and inaccurate, and horizontal sensitivity is significantly faster than vertical sensitivity. Trying to bind the B button on your controller in the menu will cause it to unbind the button (as B is used to go back in the menu), meaning you can't rebind B! A single player campaign also exists (developed by Remedy Entertainment of all people), and things don't get much better there. Not only is the campaign split into four stories that need to be purchased separately for $10 each, it retains most of the issues with the multiplayer, and all of the stories are cliched, scripted and predictable with next to no enemy variety. You don't even get a decent selection of guns like in the multiplayer. The enemies you fight are dumber than bricks, sitting and just shooting at you in the open, shooting from cover, or just running into the open and getting gunned down, nothing more. None of the characters are interesting and the voice acting can be pretty bad. Needless to say, nobody was impressed: the game sits at a measly 39/100 on Metacritic from review sites (3.2 from users), with IGN giving scathing reviews of both the singleplayer, which got a 3/10, and the multiplayer, rated a 2/10. JarekTheGamingDragon found next to nothing positive to say about it, and neither MrMattyPlays nor DreamcastGuy were any nicer towards it. It's telling that even Microsoft had less faith in it because the game is the only "new" XBOX-affiliated titles to not get a PC or Steam release while Microsoft's first-party titles saw release on Steam since 2019 onwards. It was shut down on May 18, 2023, to no one's surprise.
• The Day Before, also known as an unprecedented example of why you should never trust a trailer, put a cap on the list of worst games released in 2023 alongside The Lord of the Rings: Gollum and Skull Island: Rise of Kong. Its 2021 pre-release trailer generated a lot of hype, and it was, at one point, one of the most wishlisted games on Steam. However, said trailer in no way reflected the actual gameplay. While it was advertised as an open-world zombie survival MMO, upon release, it turned out to be a simple extraction shooter made from stock assets. The game lacks content, the servers are highly unstable, the optimization is horrible and will struggle to run on even high-end machines, the zombies are few in number and suffer from Artificial Stupidity, many basic actions, such as melee combat, swimming, jumping, and climbing, are not available, and there are all sorts of ridiculous glitches ranging from stupid (like player models becoming hilariously deformed) to game-breaking (clipping into the floor or wall, which can force you to restart the whole game if it auto-saves while you're stuck). IGN gave it a rare rating of 1, and the official Discord was flooded with angry gamers calling it a scam. Fntastic Studios delisted the game on Steam four days post-release and abandoned the game altogether despite initially promising updates, citing "running out of funds to pay their sponsors", making it very clear that they just wanted to fill their pockets with gamer money and run (since this prevents anyone from being able to ask them or Steam for a refund). Thankfully, an unprecedented move from Steam allowed everyone who brought this "game" to issue a refund regardless of their play time, and savvy internet users recorded and saved everything about this scam. Ultimately, it was announced that the game's servers would shut down on January 22, 2024, less than two months after its release. Watch Penguinz0 tear it apart here, and Matt McMuscles' Wha Happun? retrospective here.
• From 1995 until the start of The New '20s, Konami's Pro Evolution Soccer (or Winning Eleven as it's known in Japan) was seen as a worthy competitor to Electronic Arts' FIFA series of soccer games. However, the series rebranded itself for the 2020s as eFootball, though they initially kept the original names of the series alongside it until permanently rebranding the series, starting with eFootball 2022. To celebrate the transition, Konami made the game a digital only, free-to-play game that started players out with only a limited selection of nine teams to play (for reference, FIFA allows hundreds of soccer teams to play in for their games, with the Pro Evolution Soccer series also having more teams than eFootball), with the rest of the modes locked up for people to pay for in the future. That's already bad enough, but the same company that had the gall to use microtransactions for extra save spots in Metal Gear Survive also had the audacity to sell users $40 lootbox preorders that couldn't even be used until two months after the game's release! While those were already bad enough, what helped seal the deal on its listing here is how things function within the game. Like with what happened with WWE 2K20 below, gameplay became glitched up beyond belief with character models going bonkers on collision, referees falling down at random, artificial stupidity players sometimes do with themselves, and faces verging on Nightmare Fuel for both the players and the crowds, with the crowds also acting stiff and robotic in the times they actually look okay. At one point, eFootball 2022 was even rated as the worst Steam game of all time due to how nightmarish it all was! Yong Yea covered the results of what eFootball became upon its release here, with Stephanie Sterling also looking at the game in great detail themself here. Angry Joe also saw it as one of the worst games released in 2021, with him thinking Konami effectively killed off the only viable competition to EA & FIFA there, with EA eventually separating from the FIFA brand by 2023 and creating their own alternative after the release of FIFA 23.
• Elva, The Eco Dragon is a Nintendo Switch eShop title that attempts to teach players the importance of helping the environment. As Elva, your goal is to just pick up trash to help clean up the environment, as well as plant trees to help our planet out. While it sounds simple on the surface, the ways these measures are taken are both inexplicible and inefficient, with trash either floating up to the sky via balloons or requiring you to find the right trash can to throw it away, and then waiting for the disposal animation (which consists of just having the trash slowly clip into a model of a bin) to finish each time before you can pick up more trash, resulting in a grueling experiment in tedium just by playing the game normally. Trees planted can also grow into places where they normally shouldn't grow, like on concrete streets in a city. What makes the game go from a potential So Bad, It's Good contender to something wretched is its visuals and interface. Not only does it have clashing graphic styles due to the creator purchasing assets from a storefront without any consideration for a consistent aesthetic, but the clunky interface decisions clutter up the game to the point of utter confusion on what the game expects players to do. The game also has hideously low resolution textures on both character and environmental models. To add further insult to injury, a locked game mode; Random Crazy Mode, appears to have no purpose other than to quickly load random levels in front of you every several seconds, which causes the game to jump and jitter to the point of either completely freezing the game or crashing it altogether. AntDude covered it as part of a video where he spent 100 more dollars on some more bad games on the Nintendo eShop, with him calling it "a load of bullshit."
• I'm looking for 3024 people is why you shouldn't disguise a scam as an Alternate Reality Game. Jauwn's game review explains with details, but the sketchiness starts with the ARG's business model, where to participate, you need an NFT that cost .03 ETH ($50 at the time of release), although it was later released on Steam for $5, unusual given that most ARGs are free. The ARG is split between three different sections, each more horrible than the last:
  • First, there's the ARG's website, which has vague instructions, videos with poorly-written AI-generated voice acting, and CCTV footage from the Izmir and Kocaeli municipalities in Turkey that has the watermark blocked by a very conspicuous black square. Using clues from the site, you can then proceed to...
  • ...the actual Steam game itself, which consists of solving a maze while blind, listening to more laughable AI-generated speech for clues, which is supposed to grant you a unique code needed to access to the next step of the ARG. Since the game files aren't encrypted, you can just view the codes in any image editor, rendering the maze moot. Using one of those codes, you can finally join the third part...
  • ...the Discord server, by far the worst part, as it expects 3024 players to each enter a unique code within a 10-minute timeframe that only comes once a week, and then send messages to control a livestream. Discord struggles with a tiny fraction of that amount of users, making the whole thing Unintentionally Unwinnable.
    
    Thankfully, once players realized the thing was a scam, refunding the game was easy (unless they had the NFT version), since only the maze requires you to run the game on Steam, and completing it takes less than 2 hours, guaranteeing a refund. The stream that hosted the puzzle was later shut down, meaning that you can't even try to solve it. The dev also attempted to silence criticism of the game by putting out two positive fake reviews of the game for every negative review, and attempted to DMCA Jauwn's review, which didn't go through because the developer didn't sue him within 10 days of making the claim.
• While initially hyped due to the popularity of the anime and manga, Jujutsu Kaisen: Cursed Clash is aptly named; it has a reputation as one of the worst anime-based arena fighters ever made. Bandai Namco Entertainment is somewhat notorious in the anime community for pumping out mediocre licensed titles based on popular shonen fighting series, but Cursed Clash takes The Problem with Licensed Games to unprecedented levels even by their rather low standards. Right off the bat, it features very basic menus and an ugly UI that bring to mind early DVD menus. Its (incredibly short) story mode is equally low-effort, being little more than a retelling of the first season of the anime and the Jujutsu Kaisen 0 movie using slides and still images. To make things even more confusing, the mode suffers from ridiculous levels of Gameplay and Story Segregation, such as Itadori being able to use Cursed Techniques (including Black Flash) even before swallowing Sukuna's fingers. Gameplay is shallow, sluggish, and unsatisfying, with overly simplistic combos (most consist of mashing a single button) and lifeless, mannequin-like character models. Given the aforementioned, it should come as no surprise that game balance is close to nonexistent — characters with ranged options utterly eclipse those without in terms of power, causing most players to gravitate toward Gojo, Sukuna, Kugisaki, and Jogo. Even online play suffers from sloppy netcode. While Cursed Clash retains the series' lauded voice cast in both English and Japanese, subtitles for the Japanese audio are missing outright half the time, the English audio is held back by a massive Hong Kong Dub, and both casts mostly just recite the CliffsNotes versions of dialogue from the anime anyway. Cr1TiKaL suffers through the game in a video literally titled "This Horrible Trash Is $60", while Alpharad (a fan of the show) remarked during his own stream that Cursed Clash is one of the worst games he's ever played. On the bright side, similar to how the actual series swept the 2024 Crunchyroll Anime Awards in a record-setting victory run, Cursed Clash set a record of its own... for greatest number of Steam refunds in four days.
• The Last Hope: Dead Zone Survival for the Nintendo Switch eShop is a naked attempt to imitate The Last of Us, and let's just say the developers fell far short of the mark set by Naughty Dog. Look beyond the barebones Zombie Apocalypse plot told entirely through text dumps that reads like it was made on a first-generation chatbot, and you'll find an absolute mess of bad design decisions. The graphics wouldn't even pass muster on the Wii, with fuzzy textures, minimal lighting effects, and bland character models that never show any kind of emotion regardless of dialogue. The actual gameplay isn't much better; fighting the zombies in melee is ill-advised because your stamina runs out all too quickly. You can consume rations to replenish your stamina, but there's a grand total of three of them in the entire game, meaning using guns (of which there are only two, a pistol and an assault rifle) is the preferable option. You can replenish ammo by completing a Press X to Not Die lockpicking minigame to break into the trunks of abandoned police cars (which is how you get the pistol), but it's much harder than it ought to be since there's a delay between pressing the button and the game actually registering it-and the game world doesn't freeze during the minigame, meaning it's possible to complete the minigame only to die from the zombies ganging up on you while you were busy with it. To top it all off, the main character's female companion (who looks like a low-quality rip of Ellie's model) embodies every negative aspect of the Escort Mission-when zombies are present, she'll duck in place right in the open and refuse to move even when she's being attacked, resulting in a Game Over for you. Because ammo isn't plentiful enough to kill all the zombies you encounter, most of the time your best bet is to sprint to the objective and hope you make it before the zombies get to her. The game was eventually removed from the eShop after a month due to a copyright strike from Sony, but it remains a symbol of the lack of quality control on the platform. See Digital Foundry dissect it here, while Cr1TiKaL suffers through it here. Perhaps the harshest critiques came from Jim Sterling who not only held it up as an example of the eShop having a serious shovelware problem in the same way they considered Life of Black Tiger an example of the decline of the PS4 storefront, but considers it so utterly lazy in its design that they don't even believe it deserves to be called a rip off of The Last of Us as much as it is an attempt to make people think it was a rip-off just to get free attention.
• The Lord of the Rings: Gollum wasn't exactly highly anticipated thanks to its odd premise and uninviting price point, with features like an in-game encyclopedia and lore-accurate voice acting sold as DLC. On release, though, the game proved to be a disaster. For starters, the technical state is rough. Poor performance was reported on many systems, text tends to get stuck on the screen (most notably the assertion that "Gollum cannot kill Orcs wearing a helmet", which is only true outside cutscenes), and there is obvious animation glitching on almost every character model - especially on Gollum himself, whose appearance in this game is already divisive even without getting constantly stuck on his wide-eyed, uncanny-valley neutral expression. A hair animation feature had to be Dummied Out on the PlayStation 5 version because it proved so broken that it prevented an outlet from having a review ready on release. The combat-free stealth gameplay might not be a horrible idea on paper, but awful, unresponsive controls and wonky detection physics lead to a lot of cheap deaths and the occasional game-breaking softlock. The story is a confusing mess of political intrigue, prison drama, and an inexplicable sequence where Gollum has to hatch and raise a bird companion. None of this is helped by the fact that the game is blatantly unfinished; besides the bugs, much of the bare-bones interface is written in the Microsoft Office default font Calibri when prerelease screenshots show a much prettier, more refined interface. The cherry on top is the Twitter account making an apology post the day after release that not only felt halfhearted and misspelled the name of the franchise as "The Lord of Ring", but was allegedly written using ChatGPT and was handled by the publisher, Nacon, with the developers having no clue about it beforehand. The game received an impressively poor 34 on Metacritic and was widely cited as a serious contender for worst game of 2023, and not long after the game came out, developer Daedalic Entertainment laid off all their game development staff to focus on their publishing efforts. SkillUp's review and Angry Joe's review both go into the gory details.
• Pooplers for the Nintendo Switch perhaps represents the absolute bottom of the barrel of the Nintendo eShop due to being an unmitigated turd-covered disaster (figuratively and literally) on almost all fronts. The premise is eye-rollingly juvenile and just plain disgusting, being a turf war game a la Splatoon wherein players play as babies trying to cover their houses in their respectively colored poop. The graphics are either outdated-looking, unpolished, or, in the case of the playable baby characters and most of the NPCs, downright hideous. The sound design is absolutely unbearable, with annoying title screen music and constant farting and pooping sounds during gameplay. And speaking of the gameplay: the baby characters move extremely slowly for a normally fast-paced game genre, leading to rampant Fake Difficulty as the babies (under normal circumstances) cannot outrun any hazards or even come close to completely covering the stages in their excrement before time runs out, making for a very boring, frustrating game experience, plus the AI for the NPC and AI characters is atrocious. The other game modes are either near-impossible to win or just plain monotonous due to the already present flaws and just poor game design in general. Factor all of Pooplers' many flaws together and you end up with the perfect shitstorm of a game that baffles one as to how someone even thought it was a good idea to begin with. AntDude has this game as the "grand finale" of a video about bad games on the Nintendo eShop.
• Shadow: Treachery Cannot Be Tolerated has somehow managed to earn itself the title of "worst game ever released on Steam", which may seem hyperbolic considering the platform's reputation for attracting the worst Shovelware in droves, but many skeptics were convinced of the game's awfulness after playing or watching it. Booting up the game will show you the default Unity skybox along with a text blurb explaining the game's premise, which boils down to "kill all the enemies before they kill you". As soon as you click "play", you are dropped in the middle of all these enemies, who shoot you dead in a matter of seconds. You can't move, so the only way to survive is to have godlike reflexes and accuracy and kill them all first. This is even harder than it sounds, as the game suffers from ridiculous amounts of Hitbox Dissonance, a fact which the game's Steam page tries to pass off as "the most interesting feature of this game". If you're lucky enough to survive this ambush, turns out that's the whole game. All of the game's plot is contained in the ending cutscene: turns out you were playing as a female mafia boss who got betrayed by her superiors and is looking for revenge. This is told through an utterly dreadful Info Dump with uneven volume and oddities including "arrest" being mispronounced as "arist". The sound effect for the guns sounds like someone saying "pew" through a stifled raspberry, indicating that the dev was too lazy to even search for a stock gunshot sound effect and simply recorded his own gunshot sound in the most narmtastic fashion possible. The game was meant to be released in an episodic format and a continuation DLC was released, but it failed to make any improvements and eventually the game was unlisted for good. Finally, another major point of derision is the fact that when Shadow was first released, it didn't include any files: installing the game would only create an empty folder, making the game unplayable before it was patched. Maybe it would've been better off staying that way. See Jim Sterling tear the game apart here where they dub it the very worst game on Steam, and the worst that they've ever played (and considering this page's contents, this speaks volumes), and watch a full playthrough (which takes about 30 seconds including multiple restarts) here in case you want to see the ending cutscene for yourself.
• Rubber Hose Rampage is one of the games released after Steamboat Willie and its versions of Mickey Mouse, Minnie Mouse, and Pete became public domain. However, while some games of the sort were made earlier and only published after it became legal, this game's quality makes it seem like it was developed in its entirety after that date, being finished in less than a month. As an incredibly blatant Cuphead clone, it takes not only mechanics but also even UI elements straight from it with barely any attempt to disguise it, as well as the entire tutorial level. And that's not the only thing it steals from, as the bosses are all traced from various cartoons, many of whom aren't actually in public domain like Betty Boop. That would already be bad enough, but the game is also insanely poorly made, as chronicled in this review. It features such wonders as unpleasant jump physics, broken hitboxes, constant reuse of boss mechanics, missing music in some stages, glitchy as well as missing sound effects, a nonsensical Excuse Plot, inconsistent graphics (a mix of images ripped right out of old cartoons, stock images, and original art that looks like it was drawn in MS Paint) and such ridiculous Fake Difficulty (many bosses have attacks that create Bullet Hell without that genre's tiny hitboxes, making them impossible to avoid) that the reviewer was forced to use cheat engine to make himself invincible just to get past level 3, as well as most of the subsequent levels. He also pointed out some details that imply the game might actually be a cryptominer in disguise. As of right now the game is no longer buyable on Steam, and the page says it is Coming Soon. Was it actually an alpha version released by mistake? Who knows.
• Skull Island: Rise of Kong gave The Lord of the Rings: Gollum some serious competition for title of "worst game of 2023". Taking only a year of development time by publisher GameMill crunching their developers, it is a buggy, glitchy, half-baked mess of a game that controls about as well as a drunken gorilla. Its graphics are so ugly, it makes the primitive stop-motion effects of the original 1933 film look like a modern-day multimillion-dollar blockbuster in comparison - one of the cutscenes has an awkwardly-placed JPEG image suddenly showing up for seemingly no reason^note It's supposed to be Kong having a flashback to the dinosaur that killed his parents, but it shows up so suddenly that the context is hard to figure out, so it looks like it was a placeholder asset that was accidentally left in., and some enemies do not even have movement animations. The game also fails to convey that this is a Kaiju you're playing as, with most enemies being bigger than Kong and everything in the environment being scaled in a way that makes him look like a normal-sized gorilla, ruining the whole appeal of a King Kong game. It can't even be considered So Bad, It's Good, because at its core, it's just plain boring: combat is simple and mind-numbingly dull, the platforming is pointless, and what little story there is is presented so poorly that it's simply not worth it. To add the cherry on top of the shit-cake, the game window is literally titled "Monke", showing how little care is put into the game itself. IGN is emphatic in how utterly bad this game is, while Lewis Parker of PC Gamer names it one of the top contenders for the worst game of 2023, and the worst game he ever played — period. The Rerez team spent over an hour tearing the game apart in their "Just Bad Games" episode for it. Consensus is that if you want a King Kong game, Peter Jackson's King Kong, released all the way back in 2005, is a far superior experience in every way.
• Super Fight, not to be confused with the unrelated card game of the same name, is an asset flip of "Beat 'Em Up 3D Template" being sold for the price of $200 US dollars (meanwhile, the template itself only costs 98$ on the Unity Asset Store). The game is just as shallow as you'd expect from a template that you're only supposed to use as a starting point to build a full game from: it consists of one single level, repeated infinitely, presenting a myriad of problems such as rather poor controls, hideous graphics (the background, which is the only thing that was changed from the template, is just a still image of a Chinese city that doesn't even align with the level properly, leading to oddities such as alleyways that lead into store windows) and unnatural animations that would be laughable in the mid 2000s, almost zero difficulty to speak of (the weapon pickups can practically serve as One-Hit Kill weapons), two playable characters that function precisely the same, the most primitive AI imaginable combined with a grand total of one enemy model being reused endlessly, and dreadfully boring music and sound, all without a single shred of content beyond it apart from an Engrish-laden description. This would be the only game that the developer^note if they can even be called that, since they didn't do any work themselves beyond purchasing the asset pack and creating the store page, LGe, would produce, as not a whisper came from them since. This game would have gone utterly unnoticed by the general public...had it not been for Cr1TiKaL stumbling upon and playing it. Shortly after playing it, he relatively quickly dubbed it the worst game he had played and had ever seen ^note mind you, he's played a fair chunk of the games on this page alone, comparing even Big Rigs favorably to it.
• Vroom in the Night Sky could best be described as a remake of Superman 64 in all but name. With gameplay that consists mostly of flying through rings, poor graphics and controls, and one of the worst Blind Idiot Translations (a patch was released in an attempt to fix it but ended up making it worse) in modern gaming. Still, it might have been able to fly under the radar as just another piece of cheap, forgettable shovelware if it wasn't for the fact that it was also a launch day title for the Nintendo Switch; and given the console's small launch library, it was guaranteed that this unfortunate mess was one of the first things early adopters saw when checking out the eShop. The Angry Joe Show lists this as one of the worst games of 2017, and it has a 17 on Metacritic. To date, it remains as Metacritic's worst-reviewed release for the Nintendo Switch platform. The Game Grumps' playthrough of the game is aptly titled "Is this the WORST Nintendo Switch game?," and Danny reads some negative reviews while Arin plays the game.
• The Walking Dead: Destinies promised to give players a playable re-telling of The Walking Dead (2010)'s first four seasons with the added twist of being able to make their own choices to divert the course of the story. However, this gimmick couldn't save the final product from feeling like a textbook rushjob of a game - the gameplay is largely comprised of uninspired, jank-filled combat against damage-sponge enemies, characters look like nightmarish facsimiles of their show counterparts (likely due to the developers not getting the actors' likenesses), cutscenes have little animation and largely use still dioramas of the character models, and the cast repeat the same voice lines ad nauseum during gameplay. A lot of plot elements had been cut from the plot altogether, leading to cast getting reduced in numbers, and those who do remain get vastly underutilized. Even the anticipated "Defining Choices" mechanic seldom has any effect on the overall story, forcing characters into roles that wouldn't suit them in canon purely to fill in for characters who died (for example, if Shane kills Rick during their climactic duel from Season 2, he'll just fill the same role as Rick going forward with little deviation in personality or actions), and the game also has a habit of outright forgetting the choices you make sometimes! With this releasing just a month after the aforementioned Rise of Kong, Destinies only serves to further paint a picture of GameMill as a shovelware factory.
• WWE 2K20, the first game in the WWE 2K series following the not-so amicable departure of the much-beloved co-developer Yuke's. For this game, the developmental responsibilities were handled by regular NBA 2K developer Visual Concepts, who were only given about 3 months to complete the game in an engine no one on the dev team had any experience with, and it shows. The lack of many legacy features in the game and the poor, outdated-looking graphics and character models that only vaguely resemble the actual wrestlers are only the beginning. From a gameplay perspective, the game is a trainwreck of epic proportions, due to hundreds of often game-breaking glitches that run the gamut from clipping glitches that cause the player characters and ring to go bonkers, characters floating in mid-air, artificial stupidity out the wazoo, broken customization options, and, most infamously, a programming oversight that caused none of the game's features to function if the game was loaded after January 1st, 2020.^note While some of these glitches were carried over from the previous year's version and a few have been present since the series jumped to eighth generation consoles in 2014, many of them were things that were working perfectly under Yuke's. All of these and many more problems resulted in 2K cancelling next year’s edition to give Visual Concepts more time to fix the problems with the game, while also creating a new tangibly-related game, WWE2K Battlegrounds, which is at least able to not qualify for this page for mearly being at least playable, if not very impressive otherwise. Wrestling fans and gamers alike went to town on the game: Jim Sterling, a wrestling aficionado, shat on the game and 2K Games for just how bad they dropped the ball without the help of Yuke's across multiple videos. newLEGACYinc took the game to task both before and after the game had its first bug-fixing patch. Nerd³ wasn't able to even go through his signature "Rapid Roster Rundown" due to the awful faces sending him into massive fits of laughter. Angry Joe had it in his worst games of 2019 list, while the Completionist outright called it the worst game released that year. Even The Wrestling Observer Newsletter had their own things to say about the game, with their official review shedding light onto even more problems that aren't even listed on this page, and part of Figure Four Weekly's 10/23 episode being dedicated to Bryan Alvarez and Mike Sempervive trying to figure out which of parties involved with the game were at fault for how poor it turned out to be. It was even nominated for the WrestleCrap Gooker Award for worst event, storyline, or gimmick in professional wrestling of 2019, but lost to the Seth Rollins Vs. Bray Wyatt Hell In A Cell 2019 no contest match... which took place on a pay-per-view sponsored by this game. One of the only silver linings to the story is that Visual Concepts — after deciding to sit out 2021 — were able to bounce back with 2K22, considered by fans and critics alike to be a massive improvement and solid entry to the series all around.
• While 2003's XIII was a minor Cult Classic, its 2020 remake received overwhelming scorn. The decision to discard the original game's comic book-inspired aesthetic for a more generic Fortnite-esque art direction, though questionable, wouldn't be enough to put it on this page. What's less arguable is that the game launched in a blatantly unfinished state: audio frequently stops working or loops at random intervals, enemies are noticeably more braindead (that is if they don't stop moving entirely) and the framerate chugs on machines that should be more than capable of running the game. The multiplayer mode is cut down to the point of pointlessness, removing bot support and online gameplay and featuring only 3 maps when the 2003 release launched with 13. Doing nothing to justify its existence, the remake would launch to a rare "Overwhelmingly Negative" player rating on Steam and sold so poorly that one UK industry analyst pointed out that it managed to sell less than the 17-years old original version on its launch week. To add insult to injury, the pose of the protagonist on the cover of the remake is clearly copied◊ over from Splinter Cell: Conviction, which many Splinter Cell fans very quickly noticed. Matt McMuscles covered this remake on his Wha Happun? series, noting that the employees hired to tackle this project were filled with nothing but interns and junior level programmers and being micromanaged to the point of constant missed milestones.

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