So while everyone else is looking at doing the 25 best games
of the decade I decided not to do that in part because I'd rather not pick a
few games to hold up high and have people try to copy the genres or style when
they could instead innovate and create the next big thing the likes of which
no-one though possible. Additionally while a good game can be good the year it
came out then be surpassed by others later and I think it's a little unfair
really to look and try and compare games that could be close to 10 years old to
ones 10 months old or less. Many games build upon the foundation laid down by
others and so a game that basically made a genre hugely popular like PuBG can
easily be surpassed by another game like Fortnite coming along, do we deem Fortnite to be considered more
worthy than PuBG for being a game that works better on a technical level or
should we be rewarding the innovators who were some of the main people to
create the rough templates of a new genre or at least enough of a template for
others to work from?
This is why unlike everyone else I'm not going to try and reduce the decade to 25 good games because good games can age, they can be surpassed as time goes on. However for a game to be bad when it comes out, like really truly bad can mean it will stay bad and only keep being bad. It takes something special to make a truly bad game. Also its important to remember the mistakes of the past lest any developer end up repeating them in the future.
So without further nonsense from me, I present my 25 worst games of the last decade.
25
Starting off fairly soft in terms of bad games this one was bad in the sense of wasted potential. The game saw you playing as a bio weapon capable of possessing humans and having to use those humans to escape. The problem being it quickly turns into a precision plat forming game where screwing up and killing your host can make some levels impossible and force you to have to restart. Not that the game will tell you this it will leave you to kill yourself in game or run round aimlessly.
24
Jumping on the Minecraft train was Xenominer a game that I for some stupid reason I put in 5 hours worth of playtime. The game was boring with some mechanics poorly or not fully explained (so like Minecraft lol) but at least in Minecraft after 5 hours you feel like you've progressed but in 5 hours of Xenominer I was stuck only able to make basic equipment still with no idea how to progress further. A dull slog from start to finish and it had survival elements which meant having to find water to turn into Oxygen or you died.
If you want to read the full gruellingly boring review I did it on my old blog
23
22
A case of very cool concept but developers who I have to
think had their head in the sand as they made a multiplayer only PC game that
required 2 computers connected to play properly (so it wasn't even split screen
multiplayer) and they chose not to make online multiplayer but instead put the
time into hats and customisation of characters. This is here to serve as a head
on a spike to developers to get your core game working and running as well as
you can and made as easy as it can for players before you start trying to focus
on silly extra touches. Glitch Runners isn't the game that fell over at the
first hurdle, it's the game that grabbed the starting pistol and shot itself in
the foot.
21
I recently reviewed this one and it's boring repetitive game that can be finished in 2 hours but somehow those 2 hours will be more annoying and more of a struggle than doing a 2 hour exam in your least favourite subject. The game lacks basic common sense design choices such that it's actually possible to screw yourself over quite easily by building the wrong items with seemingly no option to change things out to fix your mistake.
20
With all the talk of Toxic Gamers and harassment thrown
round these days it's kind of funny to me one of the first ever stories of
threats and harassment related to video games was thanks to Kim Kardashain:
Hollywood when the game servers went down and loads of soccer moms and wanna be
stars couldn't "play" their mobile game they let loose at Kim herself on social media . A soulless mobile clicker
where you had to wait to get enough energy to do much with a paper thin shallow
narrative that makes reality TV look high brow. To top it all off it's a
proverbial head over the door to represent the absolute tumour that is the
exploitative practices of the mobile industry and just how worryingly lucrative
they are. This thing made $74.3 Million in the first 6 months from release and
managed to make $71.8 Million the year after it came out. This is also symbolic
listing because it shows how shallow exploitative pandering to uninformed
customers new to video gaming was seen as the way to succeed while far better
made, far more artistic games often struggle especially on mobile. Shame on you
mobile gamers shame on you. Goes back to playing a mobile game where you have
to tweak a robots nipple nuts to send out radio signals.
19
18
If this game had been sold as a parody of pretentious art games it would have won awards. Instead it was sold with the developers including a wine recommendations to have with playing the game and by wine recommendations I mean actual wine recommendations, not merely get yourself a few bottles and get pissed and maybe the game would be tolerable. Dinner Date is on this list to be made an example off to all those developers who make fart sniffing art Zines pretending their titles are so deep and thoughtful while themes are spelled out clearer than a Brecht play while other games manage to be far more enjoyable with far more complex thematic elements, it's just so few people talk about the.
17
It is technically a game. That game is a shitty mobile game that would be free to play with microtransactions. Only it wasn't it was an Xbox Live Indie Game but with the same mechanics and systems of a mobile game with an energy system which requires you to collect games to expand your allowed energy to actually be able to explore much of the Island. Your reward for this? Some pictures of anime girls in skimpy clothes. I played this while recovering from medical grade sedative when I reviewed it and still though it was awful
16
15
14
15
I liked Evolve. I have an Evolve T-shirt that I got free from an event. The idea of Evolve was one I liked but it's hard to argue it doesn't belong on this list. From a playerbase that got bored and shrunk to nothing to some stupid idea of having to unlock the different aspects of the characters. All down to a really bare bone almost single game type where the objective was kill the monster or stop it destroying the power thing in a sector. It has to be on this list as an example of the trend of multiplayer only full priced games that launch without enough content to sustain them, then sell all the new characters to you and an insane amount of mediocre skins too.
13
Shaqdown 2 is a mobile game. It's a terrible mobile game in the spectacle fighter genre and barely works existing seemingly only to try and extract cash from players. At this stage putting this on the worst list only serves to inform anyone who doesn't already know to avoid any game Shaquille O’Neal lends his name or image to.
12
You know how I said Dinner Date was on here to represent pretentious nonsense? Yeh turns out I felt there needed to be a second entry here and that entry is Mountain. A "game" where you do nothing. I'm not taking the piss you just sit and have it run and watch as your mountain changes over time. This was sold as some deep contemplative experience by people blowing so much smoke up the arse of its creator that said creator probably qualifies for an environmental grant for capture and storage of air pollutants. Consider this on here not just for being pretentious but for being one of those "But you can't say it's not a game" things where people can and will try to quibble that somehow Mountain should be called a game not a digital experience or digital tableau.
11
I never reviewed AAH Halloween pie. I did play it though and yeh it belongs on this list. For those who are interested in a more in depth commentary on the game Indie Gamer Chick wrote one. For those who want a far less complete one AAH Halloween pie! is an action adventure game whose core premise is trying to tease nudity but as it was made for the XBLIG the most you'll get is underwear shots. The game also isn't very good: Poor collision detection, stiff controls, cheap enemy placement and unskippable cutsenes before the game begins. AAH Halloween pie! is literally here because it's a game that's trying to sell on sex appeal to cover up its atrocious failings. It's worst crime though is it's just not sexy, not even reaching the level of those Adult entertainment games made by developers on Patreon using Renpy and Poser. Oh and to add more insult it's presently on Steam and is asking £5 as its price tag
10
I fully believe that anything can be made into a fun game by some-one with enough skill and innovative ideas. Grass Cutter seems like a game that should be a slam dunk: A unique theme and well implemented way to make it into an interesting game to play. The problem being and the reason it makes this list is just as you can make anything into a fun game it's also apparently possible to make anything into a somewhat anti-consumer mess of a game too. What Grass Cutter did was somehow take the economy of a mobile game and put it into a game on Steam and still charge for the game to begin with. The game has now gone free to play but before it did it was still selling consumable items and different power ups for the game and this is a game with leaderboards where such power ups do give you an advantage. For bringing an awful mobile game economy to PC and managing to take a unique fun concept and ruin it Grass Cutter is on this list as a warning to all to keep away.
9
Lootfest is a game I didn't want to put on this list really but it kind of has to be here. I have been critical of the developer in the past and when the developer explained the reasoning for their actions I felt bad because mostly their actions were a result of the woefully flawed XBLIG system and them having to work round it. When Lootfest came to PC I bought it because I really do believe the developer wants to make something good. However Lootfest has spent over 4 years in Early Access and when I finally came to play it this year I didn't manage to play more than 5 minutes before the game just crashing. The developer really does seem to want to make a good game but Lootfest belongs on this list mostly as a warning to developers to not let feature creep and ambition harm a game and instead to create something simple first then build upon it later.
8
Ah Bloodgate, a game I previously celebrated as a game of the year only to turn round the next year and put as a worst game of the year. (There would have been links here but Destructoid made it a pain to search through my old posts so screw it no traffic for them) What happened you might ask? Well the game was an early access title that required a connection to a server because of some PVP modes and stuff. It was really a nice game idea and while I felt it could have been exploitative garbage the game hadn't gone that route instead just being a game you bought one with all the lootbox stuff etc to get gear being given to the player at a decent pace and there being no way to just pay to get the best gear. The problem was the developers deemed the game non viable and rather than patch the game to work without the server they just shut the server down killing the game outright. The game never left early access and is no longer for sale on Steam because it literally can't be played anymore it's dead. If literally taking away customers ability to play a game they paid money for and was mostly a single player experience isn't reason enough to make a worst games of the decade list I don't know what is.
7
A solid concept of a sort of chess style variant game were to take a piece you must beat the other players piece in combat. The problem being the game just isn't balanced as one side have Jets that fire machine guns while the other has jets that drop AOE bombs with a slight delay before they detonate meaning you have to get right up to the enemy to win and doing so is a great way to be torn apart by any kind of firepower the enemy has. Strategic Combat is here because it feels like no-one bothered to actually test the game was balanced at all.
6
The infamous Skyfish games series is an odd one. I never can tell if it's some-one taking the piss or just actively bad ZOMBIECRAFTT!!1 SAMPLER was a bad one even for a series known for being bad. A game with seemingly little objective where you "mine" blocks with boobs on them and every so often kill enemies that spawn. You can place the blocks you mine but there seems little to no point to doing so. At some point some-one thought this game was worth making, the question has to be just why?
5
Halloween HD is NOT a game. I'm not doing this in the sense of Mountain where there's something happening to look at but nothing else. Halloween HD was an XBLIG title that was little more than a glorified app whose purpose was to create ambiance. What this means is you can pick one of 4 stock images to show on your screen and it will play some scary music or sound effects and that's it. It was seemingly designed to set up if you're doing your own haunted house thing but really setting up a TV and buying this title to create such a set up thing is a lot of effort for what ultimately isn't scary and is kind of crappy as it will be one quite obvious screen.
4
Zombies Zombies Everywhere is a broken game that barely functioned and was missing a number of feature with the developer saying the extra features would be added in if the game reached a number of sales goals. You thought Deus Ex's augment your pre-order campaign was which saw more pre-order bonuses for given based on hitting pre-order numbers? Well this was a game that would only be finished if it sold enough copies and I really do mean finished as some features included things like health kits. This was wave based shooting game that could best be described as a light gun game only without light guns where due to how the game war programmed where bullets actually went was from the middle of the screen toward where you were aiming not straight toward it but whatever angle it was from the centre of the screen to the reticle. Headshots are only lethal when the game decides they are for some arbitrary reason. The game had me set a TV safe Zone then had zombies attack me outside of the TV safe zone. And somehow the developer came back to this pile a putrid puss moth piss and actually made it WORSE by adding a secondary weapon in that was entirely useless and worse than the weapon already in the game.
Oh and to the 5 people who likely will never read this but made my Zombies, Zombies Everywhere review the review I got most pushback on. NO I'm not putting this here to spite you. If I were putting it on the list to spite you I'd have put it in as number 1. It deserves it's number 4 spot on this list for being the first game I've ever seen have the audacity to say it won't be finished unless it manages a certain number of sales. Some developers abandon their early access games likely due to lack of sales to make it worth carrying on but they don't open from the start telling the customers who bought in that unless they get enough of their friends to buy it too the developer just won't work on it anymore.
3
Some-one online once remarked to me that "They should have called it Space Sex Splorers" and that shows just how bad the game is really that a the game didn't even bother with doing a pun title for what was supposed to be a strange erotic visual novel game. The thing is it breaks the cardinal rule right off the bat. The characters aren't sexy. The characters look like wax work dolls with the proportions of what I assume aliens think human women look like, and no not in the "Where are their organs" way puritans on twitter presently going after depictions of women I mean these look like ET banged Katie Price's wax work in Madame Tussauds. But merely not being sexy wouldn't be enough for a number 3 spot. The "game" wasn't actually finished with the story (that made little sense anyway) abruptly stopping dead. At least one character shown in the advertising material never appears in the game and when the game was on Steam it would spam you with achievements too. What truly earns it this spot however is the fact the developer went on to list a 2nd version of it which was allegedly more complete and not actually bother updating the version people had already bought instead expecting people to buy the 2nd version of it too. In the end the developer was banned from Steam, I can't say what for but I can say those games aren't going to get finished. This entry is here to be a head on a spike warning to developers of games who try to take advantage of their audience and basically peddle crap.
2
How bad is Banana Bananza? It's so bad the game was only on sale for less than a month before Microsoft pulled it from sale. It was a painfully awful clicker game with no real progression selling itself on sex and then containing nothing , not even cock teasing. To add final insult to injury the game was patched and the patch broke what little game was there and it was never fixed. After about a week Microsoft got involved and pulled the game from sale due to people bringing it to their attention. I just managed to play it enough to get a review written before it was broken and removed.
So what to draw out the suspense longer unless you literally scrolled past this part I'll point out: we've had grindy games; we've had games that felt like or literally weren't completed; we've had games pulled from sale, we've had grindy games; we've had pretentious games with ultimately little depth and we've had games that felt like they were trying to wring every penny from their audience. The winner of worst game of the decade for me managed to top these.
1
Bet few people if any saw this one coming but thinking back what else could be here? The Tomorrow Children is the perfect title whose corpse should be nailed to the proverbial side of the video game industry to rot lest people ever forget to not repeat the failures of the past. However I'm getting ahead of myself, we must first go back and follow the trail sewage from start to end.
The Tomorrow Children mostly came to people's attention due to its E3 trailer with unique art style. It further gained people's attention with a series of trailers showcasing some of the mystery of the world and the large monster and sort of soviet stylings. It then got a Beta which I played in and people still held out hope because the game and there was word it would be coming out free to play too. Before the free version there was a paid version which I think was £15 and I paid it because I wanted to see more I wanted to see what happened as I progressed. Would there be more exciting stuff in the end game? Would there be some cool plot revealed over time? The answer as I and others found out was NO. Once you'd seen most of the Islands and all 3 of the types of monsters that could attack the town that was it. The entire game was grinding and repetitive work. Mining some stuff and then carrying it to the loading dock or waiting in the town to move the stuff from the drop off point to the relevant storage area. Your tools broke and you had to replace them and to do that you needed the work token things which you got for doing work. However you could never get quite the amount needed to replace your tools just from mining or resource gathering meaning you had to do the more boring tasks like carrying materials about or sorting them or repairing the town or just running on treadmills to generate power for the town. You would get drops of premium currency each day you played for the first 1-2 hours of play (of course getting less to no drops at all by the end of the 2 hours) and this currency could be used to buy premium tools that were more efficient and lasted longer but of course you didn't get that much premium currency and it was also used for quick repairing things in town and cosmetic items like different outfits. The game was designed to make you want to spend premium currency to avoid the grind rather than save it to get outfits and everything became a grindy activity once you'd done it a few times. When you did complete a town you got a little cutscene celebration thing and then moved onto the next town. Things never progressed, the weird story that seemed to be just below the games surface never got any more depth added to it and nothing was explained. I never went as far into the game to get the licence to drive a tank and somehow the game made fighting giant monsters while driving round in a tank into a boring thing as you had to reload the tanks ammo and of course fill it with fuel which ran out quite quickly. The less tedious activities in game like shooting at the monsters and the block puzzles to craft buildings all were timed to kick you off after a set period of time to make it so others could do them and you had to go back to the basic grind of carrying resources back and forward. In many of the trailers it shows a weird mech thing, I don't think that ever made it into the game in the end, at least not from what I saw.
The Tomorrow Children earns it's place on this list for having what seemed like a cool imaginative and deep idea that ultimately turned out to be more shallow than a pretentious twat quoting poetry to and name dropping famous poets to try and impress women in line for the Miss World pageant auditions . It was a game sold on hype and marketing and the mystery of it all that failed to deliver much in the end beyond the surface. It's a game whose mechanics were boring and grindy; it's a game that asked £15 to enter initially and tried to get players to pay up or face a tedious and monotonous grind of a game that would put Korean MMO games to shame. It's also a game that shut down just over a year after it came out so everyone who bought stuff in that game or even bought in well tough luck there goes your money because presumably the game wasn't making enough for the developers to bother to add any more content to it as a live service style game so they shut it all down. Let The Tomorrow Children winning game of the year be a warning to other developers out there of the mistakes made by live service games, the mistakes made in monitisation, the mistakes made in design and the mistakes made by what was somewhat deceptive marketing. The Tomorrow Children was less an exclusive game and more an exclusive skidmark all across the Playstation brand and it doesn't have the excuse of being developed by a little indie studio and self published. NO this was published by Sony Interactive Entertainment and is such a stinker it's spot on this list is well deserved.
For those who want to tell me I'm wrong you can do so in the comments section (it's open you don't need a blogger account) or you can yell at me on twitter, where I can tell you just which hole you can insert those objections into because you didn't realise this is my list
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