Top 10 Worst Video Games of 2020

In some cases, it can be assuring to hear a developer getting acquired by a publisher, exciting even! But in the case of Ninja Theory and Xbox Game Studios, things are looking rather bland, and it’s all because of “Bleeding Edge”. It was already a bad idea putting yet another hero shooter out in an already congested market. To charge sixty dollars for it when it’s lean on content and absent of ranked matches? Terrible idea, and many players felt the same way. Really, this is what you have the studio behind “Heavenly Sword” and “Hellblade” make?

Honestly, we’re not even surprised anymore - it’s basically become a tradition for WWE to find its way onto our Worst of the Year lists. Whereas “WWE 2K20” became the laughingstock of the internet with its horrendous bugs and glitches, there is nothing funny about “Battlegrounds”. The whole package is void of any personality now that wrestlers can share the same moves and everyone looks like a slightly melted Bratz doll. And as expected from a 2K sports game, you’ll have to grind your mind away or buy microtransactions in order to unlock all of the wrestlers. But with gameplay as boring and lifeless as this, you’ll likely delete the game and never touch it again. We’ll be damned if WWE somehow gets worse next year.

For someone as sweet and charming as Cooking Mama, one wouldn’t expect her to be shrouded in controversy. “Cooking Mama: Cookstar” was about as shady as moldy chicken covered in fresh teriyaki once it was found to be an unlicensed product and allegedly served as a means for mining cryptocurrency. Business controversies aside, “Cookstar” was just terrible all around. Gameplay was tedious and uninspiring, and Mama sounded like a condescending robot that had inconspicuously replaced the real Mama. The only way this game could be redeemed is if Mama was being yelled at by Gordon Ramsey as we jumbled our spoons about.

We had this version of “Mafia II” on our “Worst Games of 2020 (So Far)” list. Why? Because it IS terrible, and still is! Not only has the gameplay not aged particularly well with its chore list of objectives, but the performance is absolutely abysmal with more frames dropping than an art museum going through an earthquake. Given that this is a supposed “remaster” of a game released in 2010, we expected better for “Mafia II”. Why were the same mistakes from “Mafia III” repeated? At least the first game got better treatment in these “definitive” editions.

Bethesda has burned away a lot of goodwill since turning their IPs into live services. As if “Elder Scrolls Online” wasn’t enough, we got a second monetized experience in the form of “Elder Scrolls: Blades”. And, man, does it reek of pay-to-play! Overall, it’s dreadfully boring, but it tries so hard to get you to spend money with lengthy timers. Even if one was to pay every time they were asked, one would find a hyper-linear game that shows nothing of what makes “Elder Scrolls” so great. Besides, why play this when we can play “Skyrim” on a dozen other platforms?

What else do you expect from a game with a title this awful? What the hell is “remothered” supposed to mean!? “Remothered: Broken Porcelain” tries to skate by with a decent story, but everything else falters because of the terrible optimization, combat, and some archaic trial-&-error designs. Honestly, this probably would have served better as a TV show, but we already have a show about maids with strained relationships living in a bleak environment. The only difference between the two is that one doesn’t kill off characters mid-cutscene and run like PlayStation FMV sequence.

How do you take something as explosive and thrilling like the “Fast & Furious” movies and make them so unbelievably boring!? Most of your time in “Crossroads” is spent following insanely scripted events within incredibly repetitive missions. Really, how more monotonous can you get than “drive from point A to point B before you run from the cops with your tail in between your legs”? The optimization, on the other hand, is laughably bad as character’s will stutter mid-dialogue and cars will fly across your screen or crash into each other on more than a few occasions. Honestly, Vin Diesel’s head is way more polished than this!

You know, there’s a reason why the games industry as a whole has abandoned fixed camera angles. Overall, it makes controlling characters and performing simple actions like shooting more of a hassle than they need to be. However, this is the least of “Resident Evi--” I MEAN “Dawn of Fear’s” problems. Having terrible camera angles and broken weapons is one thing, but constantly bugging out in graphical glitches and performance issues is another. See, “dawn” usually implies the beginning of something, and since the game strikes every feeling BUT fear, it’d be more appropriate to call the game “Dawn of Bugs”, “Dawn of Crashes”, or “Dawn of a Mid-Afternoon Nap”.

Whereas Bethesda has burned goodwill through a live service brainwashing of its IPs, Blizzard has gained significant notoriety over how it’s treated fans as of late. You’d think they’d have learned to be more respectful after many other controversies, but then, we got “Warcraft III: Reforged”. Touting supposed graphical upgrades and more cinematics, fans found none of the upgrades at launch. Instead, they coughed up their money for texture upgrades and incredibly hostile user policies. This infuriated so many players that “Reforged” ended up receiving the lowest user-rated score on Metacritic.

Before we get to 2020’s absolute WORST game, here are a few Dishonorable Mentions…

A Good Setting Only Gets You So Far

...Aaannddd We’re Sleepin’!

Not Surprising to See Another Rugby Game on a Worst of List

Doesn’t Even Try to Do Anything Notable

Its Concept is the Definition of “Sounded Good at the Time”

What could be so bad about “Crucible” that it beat out aggressive policies, unstable optimizations, and glitches galore? Well, folks, the aforementioned titles at least have some significance behind them when it comes to how bad they were. “Crucible”, on the other hand, doesn’t even try to distinguish itself from the rest of the gaming landscape. The game looked generic, it played generic, and it sounded generic. In other words, there was nothing special about it outside of being a video game. Feedback was so poor that Amazon actually delisted the game a few days after release, putting it back into closed beta. Servers were officially shut down in November 2020, merely six months after launch.