What with Falllout 4, Witcher 3, etc, keeping gamers satisfactorily happy and busy this year, it’s easy to forget about some of the terrible titles released this year. Well, worry not, we’ve handpicked some of the worst games that you’d do well to pass up.
Watch the video here:
Read on, and don’t look back.
Battlefield Hardline: You know you might have messed up when an older game in a series has more active players than the newest one. That’s the case with Battlefield Hardline as, after a short spurt of interest, gamers have fled quicker back to Battlefield 4 than a suspicious sounding Kickstarter campaign. It’s not that Hardline is inherently a terrible game, it’s simply unnecessary. People complained before release that it looked more like a reskin of earlier games and it sadly turned out to be just that once gamers had played it for more than a few hours.
By taking the iconic Battlefield series away from the, you know, battlefield, Hardline serves as little more than a cheesy interactive episode of Cops that most avoided. It’s dropped significantly in price since release, but you may as well pick up Battlefield 4 instead. It has more depth and hooks than its spin-off and, even though it has more than its fair share of negative points, it’s a far better game.
Batman Arkham Knight : Let’s clear something up right away: Arkham Knight is not a bad game. It’s actually quite a good game, constant awkward shoehorning in of the Batmobile aside. The reason why its on this list is really quite simple: WB Games took a massive dump on PC players and released a port that was so broken , they had to retract it from steam.
Arkham Knight is what happens when a large studio hands over the job of porting a massive game to two people. Two people helped to “convert” the console version of Arkham Knight to PC, explaining everything to gamers who wondered how they could mess it up so badly.
And so, they re-released the game. And it was still mostly broken. A truly sorry way to say goodbye to one of the best series’ in the past decade.
Mad Max: Having sunk many hours into Mad Max earlier in the year for our review, I can honestly say that I remember very little about it at all. WB Games and Avalanche Studios managed to take one of the most distinctive franchises around and turn it into something vanilla and easily forgotten. Released at the same time as The Phantom Pain (a game I initially gave 10/10 prior to story completion, a pretty dumb move on my part because fuck that ending), comparisons between the two open-world games were inevitable, but there’s no question which was better.
The control system felt like it had been composed by a lucky dip as it went against all the norms gamers are used to. Combat was also very lightweight, feeling like a watered down Arkham game with half the fluidity that the series is famous for. Worst of all, Max as a character was deeply unlikable. Don’t even get me started on the plot as it doesn’t exist, merely serving as an excuse to point you in a direction and pick up that thing to put in another thing. A wasted opportunity after the success of Fury Road.
The Order 1886 : One of the best examples of why graphics aren’t always important in games, The Order: 1886 is undoubtedly one of the year’s prettiest games, astounding many with its facial animations and alternative Victorian landscapes. Look past the graphics, though, and you’re left with one of the most shallow games of the year that was anything but the PlayStation 4 shifter people expected it to be.
The action is about as revolutionary as a ham sandwich, offering nothing but a shooting gallery of enemies for you to shoot from cover for a few hours. I say a few hours because that’s unfortunately the length of the “story”, which finishes just as it’s getting interesting to set up the inevitable and cynical sequel. If you paid full price for The Order on its release, you might have been left feeling robbed of your money. If you want to pick it up now, the price has dropped an embarrassing amount to its actual value. With the inclusion of any kind of replayability, a multiplayer or more interaction with objects that isn’t just turning them over in your hand, The Order might not have been such an afterthought of 2015.
Evolve : Evolve showed such promise before it released. It had an interesting premise. You’re tasked with either playing as a monster or hunter in deceivingly small arenas and must kill the other, and that’s about it. After about the fifth round of inconsistent online matches, it becomes obvious that there is just not that much to it other than being a skeleton of a game that needs to be dressed up with DLC to unlock its full value; quite irritating trend from this year.
There’s no solo campaign to speak of, meaning you’re going to have to find some capable teammates if you’re going to want to survive online. There’s no real sense of progression or purpose to anything in Evolve, disappointing considering it looked like an interesting proposition in early previews. Players have moved on to bigger and better games from this year and you can hardly blame them.
Godzilla : So we finally arrive at a game from 2015 that is not only disappointing, but generally awful in almost every aspect. Quite how developers can continue to mess up Godzilla is almost ridiculous; never has wreaking havoc and mayhem as a gigantic lizard felt more boring than it did with this digital fart from Bandai Namco and Natsume, the team behind the phenomenal Reel Fishing and Big Mutha Truckers.
Even if you could look past the fact that Godzilla can barely even aim his attacks, buildings collapse like wet cardboard boxes and the main bulk of the game taking just a few hours to complete, it would be impossible to not be rattled by the price tag. Charging full price for what is essentially a port of a PlayStation 3 game that would be more at home on the PlayStation 2 was very naive and greedy. Fans of Godzilla have been clamouring for a decent game based on the homewrecker for years. They are going to have wait even longer.
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