Top 10 Worst Fighting Games

Lets start things off with a poor man’s Mortal Kombat clone, something you’ll see a lot of today. An exclusive title for the Atari Jaguar, you could tell thing was going to be stinker well before the fighting even started. (Show the intro crawl) With characters that look like they came from a stereotypes 101 handbook, highlighted by a Scottish highlander who flashes his kilt to shoot fireballs. Backgrounds that are a series of stock photos, and ridiculous Photoshop fatalities… cause you know that was the trend at the time.

A fighting game based on the movie based on the game, now isn’t that something? You remember how Street Fighter was all colourful and fast paced? Well you can say goodbye to all that in this dingy, digitized Mortal Kombat lookalike without a single hint of irony. There are actually 2 versions of this game, with the home version trying to emulate the classic series and the arcade version being…something else. Street Fighter: The Movie plays like any other fighting classic with all of the fun and flow taken out of it and lives on as Capcom’s most embarrassing entry into the series, that and the movie itself of course.

Yet another fighting game that utilizes digitized sprites that has you beat up opponents until you can deliver a gruesome finishing move, sound familiar? We’re not saying that Mortal Kombat has the patent on this look and style, but that ‘No Mercy’ font looks awfully familiar. What are not so familiar are the controls or the stiffness to every single one of its boorishly named characters. It’s dull in tone and just plain weird in its execution, the 2000 + fatalities the game bosts are clearly exaggerated and not very well animated. The only good thing we can say is you can watch a Nancy Kerrigan lookalike fart her opponents to death.

Nothing beats some Japanese monster fighting, unless they look about five foot tall. Shortness aside this fighter has much bigger problems such as its very high difficulty and poor, repetitive sound effects. The difficulty is the real kicker though has combatants are slow and plodding on the ground but can fly for miles off screen if they jump. Based off a really campy show from the 60s, it only makes sense that this would be Ultra crappy as well.

Sure it looks nice but that’s pretty much all it has. In 2043 you play as ‘Cyborg’ who is a bipedal humanoid fighting against computer virus infected robots, or at least that’s what we think since the plot is a complete mess. Dunno if you caught that, but that means there’s only one playable character. This game was massively overhyped at the time of realease, and boasted features that aren’t even in the game; there was no 360 degree movement as promised, and it boasted that opponents learn from their mistakes, which they don’t. Plus, on some CD-Rom Versions, you can’t even jump over your opponent. Megafail.

There was once a point when wrestling was immensely popular; there was also a point when The Simpsons were popular too but never should they meet again. Aside from the unsettling feeling of watching Homer mercilessly beat his wife, the game is a convoluted mess of broken animations with no focus on how fights occurs. Not to mention its poor hit detection and polar-like difficulty ranging from ‘Hard’ to ‘Stupid SEXY Flanders’!

What on Earth is this? This is the perfect example of graphics over gameplay, or at least we think since aside from the nice animations it still looks like terrifying. Obvious enough are the characters that all look like Andy Serkis filming Caesar’s motions, but we think even could program a fresher fighting game than this clumping mockery. Indistinguishable characters, messy gameplay and thick sound design make this a no go. ‘Dual Action Pampering’, what does that even mean?

Any fighting that uses the player with the Xbox Kinect is a doomed endeavour. We’re going to make a dangerous bet and say most gamers aren’t MMA fighters either, but that’s OK because now you don’t have to be with this simplistic and frankly ugly fighting simulator. If you can call this a simulation that is, combatants start off slapping each other for thirty seconds until someone accidentally wins and then you get to sit through a two minute loading screen. Sounds like fun right? Worst of all, this is Kinect we’re talking about: not the most responsive platform for a fighting game.

He’s been a basketball player, rapper, actor and now video game character but if Shaquille O’Neil had to choose against being one of those, we all know which one it would be. Famous for being as terrible as it is ridiculous, this little gem stars Shaq as a Kung Fu expert fighting mystic demons in a far off world. What’s a shame for Shaq is how terrible he actually is at fighting as the game’s terrible controls and brutal difficulty makes it almost impossible to beat the first opponent. But hey, if you don’t like your copy of ‘Shaq Fu’ you can send it to Shaqfu.com to be ‘liberated’ from existence.

Yes we actually found a fighting game worse than Shaq Fu, but before we endure that sucker punch, here are a few dishonourable mentions.

Way of the Warrior (1997)

Star Wars: Masters of Teras Kasi (1997)

Pacific Rim: The Game (2013)

Kasumi Ninja (1994)

ECW Anarchy Rulz (2000)

Truly the worst fighting game ever made would have to be the one that’s most broken and confusing. Martial artist Katalin Zamiar plays Chae Lee but that’s completely meaningless when you realise none of the characters are named. In a genre where characterisation, pacing and excitement are the key features it’s clear that the developers forgot all about that after going through MS Office Word Art for the fifteenth time. You can have more fun with your friends trying to guess how many ‘worst game ever made’ awards this travesty won than actually playing it… and there are a lot of those awards. Fun fact, the game’s performance isn’t capped, which means if you tried to play it on a computer today it’d run so fast that it’s even more unplayable than usual.

Do you agree with our list? Which fighting game would you tout as the worst ever? For more hard hitting top tens published everyday visit Watchmojo.com and don’t forget to subscribe.