Most Interesting Games Reviewed 30/100 or Lower, Ranked

2 days ago 8

Griffin's Story, Infestation, Survivor Stories, Afro Samurai 2

Now that gaming has been in the forefront of the media world for about 30 years or so, we get to look at everything from the quality games to the absolute worst available. There are bad games, and there are terrible games, and then there are games that don't even fully register as being games.

I'm talking about the half-assed efforts that spit in the face of the paying customer. These are the games that you'd find in the red font of the Steam reviews, or games that try so shamelessly to emulate others but fail terribly in the process and lose sight of what makes games fun in the first place.

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We're going to check out the worst games ever registered in the world of reviews. Not just the worst, but the games that stand out in a way that is truly, spectacularly bad. Get ready, and feast your eyes on playable garbage.

10 Crime Life: Gang Wars

Grand Theft God No

Metacritic Score: 30

It was the mid-2000s, and everybody was trying to either copy or be the next GTA. It was the game name to beat by all metrics, and Crime Life: Gang Wars was easily one of the worst attempts at it. You play as a member of a gang called the Outlawz, and if that burst of creativity did it for you, then you'll love the rest of this terrible experience.

The gameplay is mission-based, with such thrilling objectives as robbing stores and shoplifting, and while that's all fine for the subject matter, it just feels so basic. Then there is the fighting, which is a world of pain in the worst way possible. The fighting is precisely two buttons, and the action looks about as in-depth. There are special moves where you murder other gang members, but none of them actually feels good to pull off or is particularly rewarding.

Then there are the graphics, which are truly revolting. These textures are hard to believe for 2005. It's blurry, it's ugly, and it's honestly hard to watch on a screen. It makes playing the game a literal test of your eyes, and not a good one. A game should never make you have to squint to understand what a character looks like, and yet that's what we had to deal with there.

9 Rogue Warrior

Spend a Day With Mickey Rourke

cropped-badvoiceacting-rogue warrior (3)

Metacritic Score: 29

In Rogue Warrior, you play as, let's say, a rough depiction of a real-life soldier and the first commanding officer of SEAL Team 6, Richard "Demo Dick" Marcinko. Mickey Rourke plays the character, and it's one of the most unintentionally funny performances in gaming history. If you've ever wanted to hear an over-the-hill actor scream offensive slurs and obscenities in your ear for 2 hours, then do I have a treat for you.

Rogue Warrior is painfully generic in every way, from copy-and-paste enemies, to brain-dead AI, and a desperate attempt to be cool in a time in video games where edgy was the name of the game. It just isn't at all fun to play, and once you get over the novelty of Mickey Rourke's routinely absurd performance, there is very little besides some bloody kill animations to keep you entertained.

This game is a sad time capsule of a bad era of video games that had very little sunshine in its constant sea of gray garbage.

8 Raven's Cry

A Pirate's Life Is Not For Me

Developers

Release Date

Platforms

Reality Pump Studios

January 30th, 2015

PC, Xbox 360

Metacritic Score: 27

Raven's Cry is a game that is so spectacular in its badness that it almost becomes an artform in the process. We don't see pirate games all that often, so it's a special kind of tragedy when one goes as wrong as this one does. First, the game barely even works, with so many bugs that the mere suggestion of a QA team is a comedy in of itself.

It's an open-world game, and possibly the start of the oversaturation of it. There is also ship combat here, clearly trying to emulate Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, but the result is anything but. You play as a pirate looking to avenge his parents' death, and the story here is told as badly as possible. The voice acting is awful, the writing is atrocious, and the mission variety rarely ventures beyond "go here and kill this."

The combat is a clunky mess here as well, with little strategy involved beyond rampant button-mashing. If all that didn't sound fun, well, I have more for you. The dialogue is full of racism, sexism, and homophobia. What a trinity. This game is perfect for the person in your life that you truly have disdain for. Wrap it in garbage for them this holiday season.

7 Jumper: Griffin's Story

The Spinoff Literally Nobody Asked For

Metacritic Score: 29

Releasing a day before the movie Jumper, it was clear this was supposed to be a big-time series, as most movies don't get a video game tie-in out of nowhere. I bet they also thought people would be really compelled with the film's side character Griffin, but no, no they were not. The movie bombed terribly, and the game didn't do much either.

To give the game some credit, it was written by Steven Gould, who wrote the initial Jumper novel and subsequent books in the series. However, this story has nothing to do with those books, as Griffin was added to the movie and never existed in the books. That leaves the story feeling wildly disconnected, giving us a basic revenge plot and not much more.

The gameplay, though, is world-class awful. It has an interesting premise for combat, as you're a jumper, so you can basically blink out of existence while attacking, and the way enemies guard shows you what direction they'll be vulnerable from. The problem is that there are only 3 enemy types in the game and 5 levels total.

This game lasts maybe an hour and a half, and it was a full-priced release. The story was awful, the graphics looked like a generation behind when it came out in 2008, and despite having the talent of Jamie Bell behind it, it was such a lifeless and low effort cash grab and one of the honest-to-goodness, worst movie tie-in games ever made. That's a tough list to top.

6 GoDai: Elemental Force

A Fakeout for the Ages

Developer

Release Date

Platforms

The 3DO Company

January 21st, 2002

PS2

Metacritic Score: 27

GoDai: Elemental Force looks pretty great on the surface, the graphics have a unique art style, and the game seems like it has a lot going for it at first. But that's where it all falls apart. As soon as this game is in action, it's nothing but god-awful animations, terrible sound quality, atrocious voice acting, and some of the most mindless combat ever conceived.

You've also got limited lives, so if you can manage to even get a grip on the combat system, every fight becomes needlessly stressful due to possibly having to redo the mission. This was 2002, not 1992; there was no need for trash mechanics like this anymore, and yet, we got them.

There was also one of the most laughably low-effort stories you can think of here. Big bad comes to kill your parents at the start, you're saved by a ninja, then big bad comes to kill you later. Why? Who knows and who cares. The enemy AI is also sufficiently broken in the game, and despite the decent arsenal you have to play with, none of it feels good because of how stupid it all feels.

It's got multiplayer, but I would only ask a friend to play this with me if I was considering ending the friendship forever directly after. This game will always live on as one of the worst PS2 games of all time, and it wears that badge proudly.

5 Aquaman: Battle For Atlantis

Trying to Make Aquaman Happen

Aquaman: Battle for Atlantis

Metacritic Score: 27

Aquaman: Battle for Atlantis was an attempt to get Aquaman into the mainstream, at least from a video game perspective. It tried to release alongside a TV cartoon series, and the rush is dreadfully apparent, as everything feels half-assed from the level design to the combat.

The combat is pretty much all you'll be doing throughout the game. You start a level and swim around and fight, and then swim around and fight some more. While there are enough ways to fight with various combos and special moves, a lot of this is difficult because the camera is its own enemy. It moves whenever, wherever, and this was an era where camera work in games was paramount and could easily ruin the experience. It sure as hell does that here.

Aquaman at least looks pretty cool here from a design perspective. There are also a few levels where you'll pilot a submarine for some reason, but other than that, it's as bland as humanly possible. The enemies repeat nonstop, the camera never stops sucking, and the city of Atlantis, which could've very well been this game's Spider-Man 2 moment, is empty and lifeless as you can possibly imagine.

4 Mortal Kombat: Special Forces

When a Series Gets Too Big

Mortal Kombat: Special Forces

Metacritic Score: 28

Mortal Kombat: Special Forces was a swing and a miss for the ages during a time when Mortal Kombat was in a bit of a transition period. Where do we even start with this disaster? Right off the bat, the graphics are truly offensive, and that's a big sticking point in a series where the graphics have always been pretty damn good.

Instead of a fighting game, we get your typical beat 'em up with terrible-looking animations, awful enemy variety, and, worst of all, nothing resembling the classic rosters to choose from. The levels are so bland here that it feels both like a rushed game and an unfinished one at the same time. The biggest tragedy is that this was clearly supposed to be a game made for the PS2, but they made it for the PS1 instead, and the graphical limitations are beyond obvious for what was trying to be achieved here.

It was clear as can be that this was not the "A" Team of Midway Games working on this one, and it shows in everything from the incredibly awkward combat to the nearly unusable gunplay. I remember picking this one up from the video store as a kid, and despite my obviously low standards at the time, immediately returning it, because not only did it not feel like Mortal Kombat, it was just an atrocious gaming experience in general.

3 Final Fantasy: All The Bravest

Designed to Kill Your Childhood

Final Fantasy: All The Bravest

Metacritic Score: 25

As a Final Fantasy fan, this game had the potential to be an amazing game. Taking heroes throughout the series and putting them in one game could be super cool. The result, however, was not super cool; in fact, it was awful in every way imaginable. The combat revolved around tapping your phone screen 100 times with 0 strategy behind it, and the game was full of terrible microtransactions. You literally had to pay money to revive characters; otherwise, you'd have to wait 3 minutes for them to revive.

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It felt just predatory in so many ways. You also had to pay money for a raffle of sorts to get your favorite characters. That meant you could maybe get Tifa, but you could also end up with Zell, so it could cost you money if you wanted one or the other. It's endlessly frustrating, and the title is just pathetic as it's barely a game and just fight after fight with some text in-between to make you nostalgic.

Producers even went so far as to say it wasn't a game, but rather an app, as if that could possibly excuse the ridiculous predatory practices being performed here. It was just a terrible experience and an insult to the Final Fantasy franchise.

2 Afro Samurai 2: Revenge of Kuma

Failing a Great Series

Afro Samurai 2: Revenge of Kuma

Metacritic Score: 21

This one hurts for me because I loved the first game of the series and the anime of the same name. Afro Samurai 2 fails both of those properties in so many ways that it drives up a deep rage. Let's get the good out of the way. The soundtrack is awesome, just as it was with the first game, but that's about all that can be said for the good.

This time around, you play as Kuma, who has a tragic past and dons a teddy bear head to make for a thoroughly unsettling appearance. The premise is intriguing, but it falls so far from delivering on that. The combat, which was a huge positive from the first game, is just not good here. They took what was a simple system and added a ridiculous amount of complexity to it to the point that it doesn't even make sense. There are prompts that appear during battle, but the window to succeed on them is never explained, and while Kuma is a lot more over the top in his fighting style than Afro was, they are needlessly so, and it detracts from the action.

All of the cool boss fights from the first game are missing here too, and are replaced by some pretty generic fights. It's got about 2 hours worth of gameplay, and half of it will be spent trying to get the game to run without glitching to high hell. It's a terrible experience and one of the most disappointing sequels of all time. The game was delisted shortly after release, so you can't even experience this nightmare for yourself.

1 Infestation: Survivor Stories

I'd Prefer a Zombie Bite

Infestation: Survivor Stories

Metascore: 20

I remember in the days of 2012, a new genre came to the table in the form of Day Z. It was a mod for ARMA 2, but for the greater gaming landscape, it was the first battle royale type of game. Immediately after came the start of the genre, and one of those copycats was Infestation: Survivor Stories. It was so poor in its imitation of a mod that it had to rebrand its own name several times just to stay afloat.

It managed to con tons of people into playing it, making for one of the most high-profile atrocities on this list. It was a game full of lies, from player features to the claims of multiple worlds, map size, and a variety of other features. Then there were complaints of stolen assets, horrible player support, and just ripping off the idea of Day Z in so many ways.

The gameplay was baffling, glitchy, and worst of all, offensive to your time and your wallet. For example, if you died, you had to wait an hour to respawn, or you'd have to pay to play again. Microtransactions were everywhere, from guns to literally any equipment you bought; it was ridiculous. On top of that, you'd lose it all if you died. It was one of the first Early Access game scams, and it gave out refunds for one of the first times in Steam's history.