Top 10 Worst Games Based On Horror Movies

While the film series was a great choice for a video game spin-off thanks to its gritty atmosphere and focus on action, the game that graced consoles was nowhere near worthy of carrying on the same name. A beat-em-up where you’ll spend more time in loading screens than actual combat, players have to fight both their foes and the camera. Seemingly hell-bent on getting us to rage quit, all of the difficulty of this game came from just trying to angle Ashe Corven to actually hit anything.

With his trusty chainsaw in tow, Leatherface is an icon of the horror genre for good reason. After all, he’s big, menacing, and wears people’s faces as masks. How cool is it then, that all the way back on the Atari 2600 you actually got to play as the killer himself? As it turns out, not very. Your goal is to collect as many points as possible by hunting down your victims for as long as your chainsaw’s fuel lasts, but even by Atari standards the game doesn’t hold up. It’s hideous to look at, and every time a girl appears on screen and screams, you’ll swear you wish you were deaf instead.

Another game where you play as the baddie from the movie, this one moves away from the isolated jungles of Central America to pit the Predator “Scarface”, against Italian and Mexican-American mob bosses. No we’re not making that up, and yes, we know it has nothing at all to do with the movie. We could live with a lazy, nonsensical story, but Scarface is so awkward to control that actually killing your intended target is much harder than it needs to be and completely ruins any chance at redemption.

This monstrosity features crappy full motion video clips that are so compressed they’re almost unwatchable, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The game manages to have a decent gothic atmosphere, but the first time you try to move Jonathan Harker through the levels you’ll experience some of the worst platforming ever. While the SNES version was also pretty terrible, it’s the Sega CD version that embarrasses the source material most. The movements are so choppy you’ll constantly mistime jumps, and by the time you’ve killed your 800th bat you’ll just want to turn the game off and play Castlevania instead.

Failing to deliver on our high hopes, this sequel to “Hail to the King” managed to get Bruce Campbell to reprise his role as Ash, but that’s about the only interesting thing going on here. Swarms of enemies constantly harass you at every opportunity but are so weak that they never provide a challenge, so mowing them down one after another with our boomstick gets repetitive real fast. You’ll experience everything the game has to offer in about twenty minutes, and once you put it down you won’t want to pick it back up.

Escaping a wise-cracking nightmare demon in the dream world sounds like a can’t miss concept for a survival horror game, but unfortunately LJN decided to take this adaption in a direction that drops the ball in a major way. Ignoring everything that makes the films so great, gamers control a local teenager trying to dispose of Freddy’s remains while battling some of the least inspired enemies of all time – yup, you guessed it: bats and spiders. We were excited to finally come face to face with Freddy himself in the boss fights, but even those are so laughably easy! There’s no challenge, no depth, and no reason to play this game.

The first adaptation of the Saw films as a video game was nothing to write home about, but Konami’s follow-up managed to be worse in every possible way. Requiring players to navigate their way around the notorious traps by solving progressively more challenging puzzles is a good enough concept, but there are so many quick-time events we were constantly ripped right out of the atmosphere the game tried so hard to create. There’s some combat thrown in for good measure, but waiting for enemies to wander in just the right spots to trigger our traps isn’t scary - it’s boring. It doesn’t matter how much you like the franchise, give this game a pass.

Probably one of the most disappointing releases of all time, this title had so many problems at launch that it was practically unplayable – especially when you consider what the early gameplay footage looked like. While the single player story was hyped as being canon to the film franchise, it makes no sense and in many cases contradicts the source material directly. Other issues show up on the multiplayer side like unbalanced weapons, but the worst offender is the amount of glitches that just sucked us out of the experience each and every time we were about to get invested. Improvements have been made, but it’s still not worth your time.

Ignoring a gold mine of content just waiting to be exploited, this title didn’t even try to provide an authentic Crystal Lake experience to home consoles. Right from the start you’re dropped in the camp with very little idea of what to do or where to go, and to make matters worse you have to figure it out as quickly as possible while fighting the in-game timer. Jason will kill more and more counselors the longer you take, but it doesn’t really matter because you’ll never be strong enough to save them from his vengeful fists. You’ll spend the game wandering aimlessly until you die, and then never turn it on again.

Surpassing them all, this game is plagued with every issue in the book. It’s ugly to look at, confusing as hell, and has entire sections of the game with almost no music which helps make it one of the most boring horror games imaginable. Spray bullets towards a skeleton, then turn and kill a werewolf. After every few kills, use your special. Do this for the laughably short three hour story and you’ll have beaten the game, but we can’t imagine you’ll have lasted that long.