Top 20 WORST Games of the Last 10 Years

In a sense, video games are repetitive in nature, but a good video game hides that repetition through fun gameplay loops that feed into each other. “Watch Dogs: Legion” had something going for itself in how you could play as any character in the game. But that’s where the fun ideas stop flowing. Everything after the tutorial is your run of the mill “sneak into that place, silent takedown, grab reward, rinse and repeat”. It doesn’t help that what few interesting stories were introduced are cut short before they can tell something compelling while the difficulty fluctuates between every mission. Ultimately, you’ll stop playing out of either boredom or frustration.

Following a mass exodus of frustrated Capcom leads, one alumni of the publisher, Keiji Inafune, ventured out to bring a game to the starved “Mega Man” fanbase. At one point, “Mighty No. 9” was shaping up to be a worthy successor from what little 2D art had been shown. Once we saw the game’s new 3D visuals for the first time ever, everything went downhill at an almost neck-breacking speed. First came the infamous “anime fan on prom night” insult, then the livestream that told audiences the game was “better than nothing”, and finally, release day, which revealed just how mediocre and uninspiring the entire game was. Inafune’s reputation was stained, and we have yet to see him or developer Comcept bounce back from this.

In the world of video games, we’ve seen all kinds of creative depictions of aliens across a rainbow of games targeted at different audiences. Rarely do we ever see a frightening interpretation of the traditional gray “moon men” in the same way “Greyhill Incident” approached it. It’s also rare that we see a creative idea tank miserably in terms of quality. “Greyhill Incident” forced players to use stealthy tactics to progress only for AI to be unfairly buggy, thus breaking the whole point of stealth in the first place. What’s worse is that if you were caught by the aliens, there was no telling how far back the game would send you as checkpoints were unevenly dispersed. It all makes for a somewhat infuriating experience, and we’re only a few entries into this list.

It’s important to look out for folks who will say and do anything to exploit you and take your hard-earned cash in exchange for a lazy product. Case in point, “Super Seducer: Hot to Talk to Girls”. In this game, self-proclaimed pickup artist Richard La Ruina tries to “educate” the player on how to approach women, get a date with them, and eventually, sleep with them. Not only are the situations presented here unrealistic and hokey, they also portray women in a way that makes them seem formulaic, one-note, and nothing more than objects for the sake of self-fulfillment. Of course, some folks did not like these criticisms levied against La Ruina and his game. So, they bought the game out of spite and gave him enough money to spawn two more sequels. Classy.

2016 was already a rough year for the “Ghostbusters” IP. A solid video game could have helped remedy the backlash against the 2016 movie a little bit, but this title wound up being even worse than the film. In addition to the mundane gameplay of going room to room and fighting ghosts, “Ghostbusters” was abysmal in technical performance with its constant stuttering and drastic dips in frame rate. The game was such a financial failure that developer Fireforge Games closed its doors not long after launch. As for the game itself, it was delisted from all storefronts in January 2019.

Yuji Naka and Naoto Ohshima will forever be remembered as a couple of SEGA’s most influential game designers in the company’s history. However, “Balan Wonderworld” was not the kind of game anyone wanted from these two when they announced they had partnered with Square Enix for a new 3D platformer. “Balan Wonderworld” boasted a unique theme centered on musical theater…and that’s pretty much the only nice thing we can say about it. Everything else about the game is a befuddling mess. Why does every button do the same exact action? Why do objects de-render when you get closer to them? Why are we only allowed to have three costumes at once instead of a wheel or focus the level on just one costume? Overall, why is the game so overly complicated in how basic it is? And we may never get answers to any of them. Ever.

Be very, very skeptical of whoever is screaming about how “Generation Zero” has “improved” since launch. At launch, “Generation Zero” was indeed an utter trainwreck. Crashing, bugs in AI behavior and pathing, broken stealth mechanics, constantly recycled assets in places that made no sense, and worst of all, poor implementation of resources that could put a player, such as our writer for this video, in a position where it is impossible to bounce back into a stable position for survival. While some of these problems have since been remedied, there is no fixing a generic world design, there is no fixing recycled assets, and there is no fixing bland visuals, audio, and character design. “Generation Zero” is an absolute zero.

Blizzard has screwed up in a handful of ways prior to “Warcraft III: Reforged”. No one will ever forget the launch of “Diablo III” and the infamous Error 37 message. But “Reforged” was the starting point where it seemed as if the company was actively trying to burn all of its goodwill with its fans. Not only was “Reforged” falsely advertising [allegedly] new cutscenes like the ones shown at preview events and failed to implement advertised features, it also enforced an exploitative End User License Agreement that deemed any and all mods made from “Reforged” to immediately become property of Blizzard Entertainment. All of this led to a mass review-bombing of the game on Metacritic, landing “Reforged” the dishonor of being the lowest user-rated game at the time. Blizzard would outdo themselves in 2022 when “Diablo Immortal” was review-bombed even more than “Reforged” and received an even lower user rating.

Konami knows it can publish great titles, but in the late 2010’s they were floundering hard. We’ll get to one of their major flops in a minute, but “Contra: Rogue Corps” was a total misfire in the most embarrassing way possible. Look, we’ll admit that the weapon upgrades and customization were cool, but everything else about this game felt like a desperate plea to get internet meme lords to buy in and buy in hard. Why else would we get a weaponized cyborg panda and graphics that look like they were ripped from a canceled piss filter era game? This was simply not “Contra” at all, and longtime fans quickly rejected “Rogue Corps” as they should have.

Here’s the thing about “Suicide Squad”, right - the gameplay is fine. It’s fun to move around in and blast enemies like an overpowered freak. But there are so many confusing layers behind the curtain that it winds up making the game look worse. Why are there SEVEN different currencies? Why can you not properly upgrade weapons outside of a couple of stat bonuses? Why does every main mission impose an annoying stipulation like “enemies only take damage from damage boosters”? Why does the endgame content offer nothing interesting outside of the same exact missions over and over again? These enigmatic decisions ultimately make “Suicide Squad” seem like a rushed job, which makes it crystal clear how the game caused Warner Bros to lose two hundred million dollars in revenue.

Back to Konami one last time. “Metal Gear” has always been centered on military espionage, secretive warfare technology, and topics relating to various subjects touched upon during the Cold War. “Metal Gear Survive” does none of that and instead wants you and your friends to fight crystal-headed zombies for some reason. Because, you know, this has always been what “Metal Gear” is about, right? Oh, and if you wanted to restart your character from scratch for whatever reason, well, better fork over more cash to purchase a new save file! Yeah, there is no reason for anyone to play this game at all.

Look, we’re all for games offering new perspectives from people with different mental or physical conditions, but “The Quiet Man” is not this riveting piece of art it pretends to be. The story is a confounding mess of characters speaking in riddles with no real rhyme or reason behind their intentions. As for the gameplay itself, there is very little of it. Most of your time will be spent watching FMV cutscenes with combat scenarios sprinkled here and there. And even when you unlock the normal audio, nothing about the game makes sense in its story and structure. So, what exactly is the point in playing this?

While the “WWE 2K” series managed to bounce back with “2K21”, things looked heavily grim for the series when “2K19” launched. Never before had we seen such a poorly cobbled together mess of physics, character models, and technical performance. The game launched in such a horrid state that the entire internet was laughing at 2K for a solid few months before the company came out and said the series was skipping a year. This was done to give developer Visual Concepts some time to iron out their ideas and figure out where they wanted to take the franchise since the previous developer, Yuke’s, was no longer in the picture as of “2K18”. And now, look at where the series is - back and better than ever!

PlatinumGames was already struggling to make ends meet by the time they developed “Babylon’s Fall” with Square Enix as their publisher. Unbeknownst to anyone, this would be their most humiliating release yet. Not only was this yet another live service to further saturate the market, it was built off of borrowed assets from “Final Fantasy XIV” that were implemented in cheap, lazy ways. Once you see the first set of corridors, it doesn’t get any different from there. “Babylon’s Fall” sold so poorly that when Square Enix announced the game was shutting down, retail stores began throwing away any and all copies from their store shelves. The game was on sale for less than a year.

With “Burnout” being gone and “Need for Speed” missing the mark with every release, perhaps there was room for “Fast & Furious” to dominate the video game scene just as it claimed its own corner of the film industry. But guys, “Crossroads” was not the answer. The biggest crime this game committed was not the abysmal storytelling or the cringey voice acting. It wasn’t even for the awful controls. No, the worst part about this game is just how truly catastrophic the AI’s condition was! Around every corner, you’d see cars crashing into each other outside of races as you drive to your next objective. We won’t lie - it was hilarious to witness. “Fast & Furious Crossroads” was delisted from all digital storefronts less than two years after release.

Since its early days of publishing games like “Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing”, GameMill Entertainment has struggled in maintaining a reputable image in the world of gaming. Alas, when it continues publishing games like “Skull Island: Rise of Kong”, one has to wonder what’s going on. “Rise of Kong” was truly among the worst games we saw in 2023 with its piss-poor combat, uninspiring environments, and dreadful character animation. Even with its thirty-dollar price tag, nothing about this abomination told audiences “you need to play this” unless you were a YouTuber or streamer dunking on the game. And yet, that’s still not the worst we saw in 2023.

Out of all of the games that came out in the 2010s, nothing was more appalling than “Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 5”. Developed solely for Activision to squeeze as much money out of the license as possible before its expiration, “Pro Skater 5” almost killed any and all interest in the franchise. In addition to a weak roster of skaters, parks, and customization options, the game was unbearably buggy in its physics, animations, and general stability. What was more confusing was just how much storage space it took up on your hardware only for most of that storage space to be dedicated to the game’s audio! Developer Robomodo closed its doors almost a year after the game’s release while Activision would eventually allow Vicarious Visions to remake the first two games in 2020.

Whoops, hang on, folks…

Guess there’s something wrong with ChatGPT on our end, but no worries - we got the title fixed. After all, it was the only thing about “Gollum” that could ever be fixed as the game launched in a disgustingly unstable state in May 2023. Prior to release, “Gollum” did have a setting to turn on hair physics until Daedalic Entertainment notified the press (including ourselves) that the setting had to be removed due to it causing frequent crashes. And that’s not all. Even today, many game-breaking bugs are still present ranging from enemies forgetting to be hostile, collision detection failing to prevent the player from going out of bounds to see dev assets in the distance, and, even without hair physics, frequent crashing! While we did name this the worst game of 2023, but then our next entry showed its ugly mug at the tail end of the year.

Call it a scam. Call it a sham. Call it whatever insult you want to call it. There has never been a bigger case of suspicion and potential fraud quite like what we saw with “The Day Before”. This was an online multiplayer survival game that found itself in hot water with almost everyone in the gaming community, players AND press! Take your pick for what you believe was the primary reason: accusations of plagiarism in marketing, failing to pay contractors for their work, the abysmal technical state of the game, the questionable use of AI in its marketing, voice acting, and asset development… It’s one massive package of problems that made so little money that developer Fntastic closed its doors two days after launch. The company tried to bounce back in 2024 by announcing a Kickstarter for a game only for that whole thing to fail as well. “The Day Before” was such a monumental disaster that no one will ever trust Fntastic nor publisher Mytona ever again. And yet, that’s not even the worst game we’ve seen over the last decade.

The thing about “The Day Before” was that it was a somewhat more isolated issue as Fntastic and Mytona were new players that crashed and burned hard. “Concord”, on the other hand, was a game backed by Sony and was championed internally enough for the company to acquire developer Firewalk Studios before the game was even done. And they were so confident in the project that Sony dumped four hundred million dollars into this endeavor – two hundred million for development and another two hundred million for acquisition. What no one at Sony seemed to have understood was just how lackluster “Concord” was entirely. There was no unique game mode to differentiate itself from the market, no compelling characters to get behind, no campaign to wrangle in single-player gamers, no definitive plan to keep players coming back aside from new cutscenes, nothing! And it bombed. Hard. “Concord” flopped so horribly that Sony removed the game from sale immediately merely eleven days after launch and closed servers two days later. How mediocrity of this caliber caused so much money to burn away like this is beyond us, but maybe someday, we’ll get the full story as to what happened.


Did you suffer through any of these games for yourself? Let us know down in the comments.