12 Worst Video Games Of 2015
12. Rainbow Six Siege
From that initial announcement through to launch day, it was one depressing announcement after another – and then we got hands-on with the retail code and realised Ubisoft had truly ballsed up yet another iconic franchise.
How, you ask? By all but removing the single-player campaign, including a series of small areas in its place and riddling the whole thing with microtransactions. That’s how.
The truly awful thing is that people (mostly younger gamers, unaware of the time when we actually got full games at launch) will still cough up the dough to unlock better equipment, weapons and items. The majority of the unlocks can be gotten through earning ‘Renown’, but that fallback of “Well they’re optional, so you don’t have to” is the most asinine thing going. Having any progression in your game supplemented by something you can pay for and therefore fast-track, immediately cheapens any worth in terms of personal achievement.
Overall, Siege lacks a level of graphical polish you’d expect from a titan of the industry like Ubisoft, and with gunplay as rote and phoned-in as the business model around it, this latest instalment is as forgettable as it is money-hungry.
11. Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate
Fair play to Ubisoft for righting the ship with their most lucrative franchise; AC: Syndicate is as good as an Assassin’s Creed game could be… but that’s still woefully lacking in every respect, especially when you look at the confidence exuding from every pore of Metal Gear Solid V.
Controls are refined to toggle between open-world exploration and stealth, but the A.I. on display will still spend most of its time staring at the walls or patrolling in pre-scripted sequences. The frame rate bogs down considerably whenever you take to the skies, which considering one of the best parts of AC is exploring things from a bird’s eye view, kills a major part of the appeal.
Combat has been sped up in an attempt to introduce a more visceral element to every encounter, but it just looks and feels bad. Enemies go into the same floundering “I’m hit!” animations, whilst twin characters Jacob and Evie hurry through their own attacks, rarely connecting with the appropriate sound effects. More often than not a fight will end with the thwacks and slams still sounding out.
Syndicate was a step back in the right direction, but at this point the overall franchise is so lost amongst its own plot contrivances and the general public perception as a broken product, it’s best to leave it be in 2016.
10. Screamride
Microsoft really needed something to show off the Kinect earlier this year (before they fully admitted it just wasn’t going to work), and thus, Screamride was the high-octane basket they were laying all their eggs in. When push came to shove though, the latter didn’t respond – as once again the patented motion-controlling tech failed the product it was supposed to be backing up.
Screamride wasn’t an atrocious experience, and there’s probably a handful of families out there that had a blast with it for an afternoon – but that was just it; nothing from the on-rails ‘racing’ sections to the weird destructible mode that saw you demolishing buildings felt remotely satisfying.
In the end, even Microsoft themselves barely promoted this, as by the time it had came out they were fully committed to releasing the Xbox One without the Kinect, the all-new dashboard that would come later in the year wiping its existence from their personal history books for good.
9. Alone In The Dark: Illumination
Remember Alone in the Dark? One of the original survival horrors that had atmosphere in spades, its very a name connoting your own personal worst fears?
Yeah, it’s now a third-person online shooter, because everyone knows ‘Alone in the Dark; should translate into gameplay where you’re buddying up with friends, Left 4 Dead-style.
As you can expect, this got the same treatment as the terrible Punisher: War Zone movie tie-in FPS, seeing the franchise’s characters and iconography stretched over a supremely bare-bones game engine that barely qualifies for the genre.
The graphics were muddy, the controls serviceable enough but ultimately unrewarding, and the previous instalments that at least attempted to put narrative and character history to the forefront of the mystery itself, were completely discarded.
8. Evolve
This is what you get, Turtle Rock Studios. You build a multiplayer-only game from the ground up “with DLC in mind”, and the whole world folds their arms and waits for your creation to both impress them and justify itself.
Turns out, it couldn’t. Evolve certainly packed quite the visual punch, and there is a lot to like about playing as a group of hunters, all hunkered down in various sweaty jungles as you attempt to slay a monstrous beast. However… that was it.
As was the case with Titanfall and Destiny at launch, this multiplayer-only setup (which granted, you can supplement with A.I. bots if you want to make it more like a ‘single player experience’) only hamstrings the game from the get-go.
Multiplayer modes do not full games make, and although Evolve should’ve had within it the same devout ‘grab some pals and try to survive’ ethos of Left 4 Dead, it almost completely died off right after launch.
7. Saints Row: Gat Out Of Hell
Like a rollercoaster edging towards the apex of its drop, Saints Row peaked with part three, and although we were very much still just as enthralled with four to stay in the car for the beginning of the downward slope, Gat out of Hell just goes that little bit too far into the ludicrous for it to keep the company of its predecessors.
Gone is the custom character you’d come to craft and love, and in are both Johnny Gat and Kinzie as male and female options respectively. Gameplay remains almost exactly the same as Saints IV, with the story taking you into Hell itself in an attempt to retrieve the main character from the two previous games. The main problem wasn’t necessarily the increasingly outright stupid tone, but the execution of it.
Superpowers continue to break the game as the framerate creaks underneath, the world itself is way too similar to the Steelport we’ve been experiencing for years, and although its heart is in the right place when it comes to awesome references, this sadly felt too much like a DLC pack strung out into a fully priced product.
6. Godzilla: The Game
How do you mess up playing as the world’s most famous radioactive lizard? By having him move with the speed of a corpse being blown up a hill, that’s how. Thankfully, this article looks into how future developers could make a truly brilliant Godzilla game, but for now, this supremely ugly and shambling film tie-in is all fans have to play with.
There’s really not a whole lot to this you can’t garner from a screenshot, sadly. You’re tasked with playing as Godzilla as he embarks on thwacking all sorts of reinforced buildings and going fist-to-bullet with humanity’s fiercest weapons. Other famous Kaiju like Mothra and King Ghidorah (alongside plenty more) show up to also get in on the action, but the whole thing just feels so insanely cheap.
Areas themselves are awash in a palette of brown and grey, the buildings and other structures you’ll be destroying are devoid of their own physics models, and essentially Godzilla’s 2015 outing exists as the embodiment of what happens when a developer has zero competition to force perfection out of their own product.
5. Hatred
For a while there, Destructive Creations’ Hatred was the centre of attention for the entire games industry – albeit for the most forced and childish reasons possible.
By putting you in the angry army boots of an angry trenchcoat-wearing genocidal maniac, the entire thing played like the manifestation of every “Won’t someone think of the children!?”-spouting parent’s worst nightmares.
Literally all you do is run around a handful of levels, putting guns in the mouths of innocent people or lobbing grenades into shopping malls. Created in the Unreal engine, it plays well enough from a control standpoint, but the absolutely absurd nature of the project itself, the fact the developers had ties to neo-Nazi websites and the overwhelmingly tactless way it was rolled out, makes for something that was more akin to a shoegazing teenager screaming for attention, than a creation with something to say.
4. Battlefield Hardline
The gaming public are not as dumb as you think, marketers. Right from the off, Battlefield’s initial announcement as this cops n’ robbers spin-off from Battlefield 4 sounded like it should’ve been DLC, and despite the following months featuring EA getting out there and proclaiming it was a “full game” that would offer the same sort of quality as their standard releases, Hardline felt in every single way like an add-on.
The hook behind everything was that you were a cop, opening up the campaign to focus on all sorts of tactile insertion methods and ways to bring perps in without harming them. Except, once you understood that all translated into “Hold your badge out at someone to make them stop moving”, every group showdown turned into an awkward situation of entire armed gangs throwing their hands up, relaxing them and preparing to fire… and then stopping again.
Multiplayer was more of the same despite EA touting collapsible environments and ways to exfiltrate following some pretty neat-looking heists, and the story itself got away from trying to survive as a cop in Miami pretty fast, making the fact you could still hold your badge out to arrest guys incredibly dumb.
3. Raven’s Cry
Completely unabashed rip-offs can sometimes work, just look at Lords of the Fallen, which took Dark Souls’ core formula and iterated on it in some really neat ways. Or you could look at Raven’s Cry, a game from Reality Pump Studios, who literally saw Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag’s pirates n’ pillaging gameplay and thought “That’s never gonna get old, we can do that!”
Thus the result is a carbon copy of the base Black Flag experience, from mini-map placement in the corner of your screen, to the wait n’ counter feel of combat, to even the ship-based battling that’ll break up the rest of the monotony.
It’s assumed the only reason Ubisoft didn’t file a copyright lawsuit against this thing, was down to it posing absolutely zero threat to their sales, being its reviews and sales were this year’s equivalent to 2014’s godawful Ride to Hell: Retribution.
2. The Order: 1886
It sucks to hate on Ready At Dawn, because as a studio they’ve had a solid track record on PSP with the God of War and Daxter spin-offs, and The Order’s one overwhelming positive is its gorgeous graphics, which until Star Wars Battlefront or Uncharted 4 started showing up, were frontrunner for the best looking of all time.
Where it all fell down was in the gameplay – the absolute, utter lack of gameplay. For whatever reason, the developers decided to show off their graphics engine with an abundance of cutscenes and quick-time event set-pieces. It meant you’d only actually play for a couple of hours at most, although some entire ‘Chapters’ were just cutscenes, and you’d spend half your time ‘investigating’ the area by picking things up… and putting them down again.
On a base gameplay level, the gunplay was solid enough, but when it was touted to include a ton of unique Nikola Tesla weaponry, a ‘new level’ of blurring the boundaries between cinema and gameplay, and truly be the first title that would make people want to buy a PS4 – it couldn’t have fell down any more.
1. Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 5
Speaking of something that should’ve been a bonafide success, only to release in such an unfinished state it’s just insulting, THPS 5 marked the first instalment in eight years – and by far the worst fans had ever seen.
Glitches and bugs abounded from the version on sale simply not being playtested enough. The general presentation of everything on a graphical standpoint was nowhere near up to current standards, and the muscle memory-inducing feel of trademark Tony Hawk’s gameplay was completely ruined, thanks to things like a ground-pound move that now doubled as your grind button.
Since launch it’s received a handful of patches to get things back on track, but when the modes are regurgitations of the same “Collect all the [insert random object]’s around the level!” and the feel of skating is markedly worse than the 2012 reboot of the 1999 original, something, everything, is drastically and irreversibly wrong.
From that initial announcement through to launch day, it was one depressing announcement after another – and then we got hands-on with the retail code and realised Ubisoft had truly ballsed up yet another iconic franchise.
How, you ask? By all but removing the single-player campaign, including a series of small areas in its place and riddling the whole thing with microtransactions. That’s how.
The truly awful thing is that people (mostly younger gamers, unaware of the time when we actually got full games at launch) will still cough up the dough to unlock better equipment, weapons and items. The majority of the unlocks can be gotten through earning ‘Renown’, but that fallback of “Well they’re optional, so you don’t have to” is the most asinine thing going. Having any progression in your game supplemented by something you can pay for and therefore fast-track, immediately cheapens any worth in terms of personal achievement.
Overall, Siege lacks a level of graphical polish you’d expect from a titan of the industry like Ubisoft, and with gunplay as rote and phoned-in as the business model around it, this latest instalment is as forgettable as it is money-hungry.
11. Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate
Fair play to Ubisoft for righting the ship with their most lucrative franchise; AC: Syndicate is as good as an Assassin’s Creed game could be… but that’s still woefully lacking in every respect, especially when you look at the confidence exuding from every pore of Metal Gear Solid V.
Controls are refined to toggle between open-world exploration and stealth, but the A.I. on display will still spend most of its time staring at the walls or patrolling in pre-scripted sequences. The frame rate bogs down considerably whenever you take to the skies, which considering one of the best parts of AC is exploring things from a bird’s eye view, kills a major part of the appeal.
Combat has been sped up in an attempt to introduce a more visceral element to every encounter, but it just looks and feels bad. Enemies go into the same floundering “I’m hit!” animations, whilst twin characters Jacob and Evie hurry through their own attacks, rarely connecting with the appropriate sound effects. More often than not a fight will end with the thwacks and slams still sounding out.
Syndicate was a step back in the right direction, but at this point the overall franchise is so lost amongst its own plot contrivances and the general public perception as a broken product, it’s best to leave it be in 2016.
10. Screamride
Microsoft really needed something to show off the Kinect earlier this year (before they fully admitted it just wasn’t going to work), and thus, Screamride was the high-octane basket they were laying all their eggs in. When push came to shove though, the latter didn’t respond – as once again the patented motion-controlling tech failed the product it was supposed to be backing up.
Screamride wasn’t an atrocious experience, and there’s probably a handful of families out there that had a blast with it for an afternoon – but that was just it; nothing from the on-rails ‘racing’ sections to the weird destructible mode that saw you demolishing buildings felt remotely satisfying.
In the end, even Microsoft themselves barely promoted this, as by the time it had came out they were fully committed to releasing the Xbox One without the Kinect, the all-new dashboard that would come later in the year wiping its existence from their personal history books for good.
9. Alone In The Dark: Illumination
Remember Alone in the Dark? One of the original survival horrors that had atmosphere in spades, its very a name connoting your own personal worst fears?
Yeah, it’s now a third-person online shooter, because everyone knows ‘Alone in the Dark; should translate into gameplay where you’re buddying up with friends, Left 4 Dead-style.
As you can expect, this got the same treatment as the terrible Punisher: War Zone movie tie-in FPS, seeing the franchise’s characters and iconography stretched over a supremely bare-bones game engine that barely qualifies for the genre.
The graphics were muddy, the controls serviceable enough but ultimately unrewarding, and the previous instalments that at least attempted to put narrative and character history to the forefront of the mystery itself, were completely discarded.
8. Evolve
This is what you get, Turtle Rock Studios. You build a multiplayer-only game from the ground up “with DLC in mind”, and the whole world folds their arms and waits for your creation to both impress them and justify itself.
Turns out, it couldn’t. Evolve certainly packed quite the visual punch, and there is a lot to like about playing as a group of hunters, all hunkered down in various sweaty jungles as you attempt to slay a monstrous beast. However… that was it.
As was the case with Titanfall and Destiny at launch, this multiplayer-only setup (which granted, you can supplement with A.I. bots if you want to make it more like a ‘single player experience’) only hamstrings the game from the get-go.
Multiplayer modes do not full games make, and although Evolve should’ve had within it the same devout ‘grab some pals and try to survive’ ethos of Left 4 Dead, it almost completely died off right after launch.
7. Saints Row: Gat Out Of Hell
Like a rollercoaster edging towards the apex of its drop, Saints Row peaked with part three, and although we were very much still just as enthralled with four to stay in the car for the beginning of the downward slope, Gat out of Hell just goes that little bit too far into the ludicrous for it to keep the company of its predecessors.
Gone is the custom character you’d come to craft and love, and in are both Johnny Gat and Kinzie as male and female options respectively. Gameplay remains almost exactly the same as Saints IV, with the story taking you into Hell itself in an attempt to retrieve the main character from the two previous games. The main problem wasn’t necessarily the increasingly outright stupid tone, but the execution of it.
Superpowers continue to break the game as the framerate creaks underneath, the world itself is way too similar to the Steelport we’ve been experiencing for years, and although its heart is in the right place when it comes to awesome references, this sadly felt too much like a DLC pack strung out into a fully priced product.
6. Godzilla: The Game
How do you mess up playing as the world’s most famous radioactive lizard? By having him move with the speed of a corpse being blown up a hill, that’s how. Thankfully, this article looks into how future developers could make a truly brilliant Godzilla game, but for now, this supremely ugly and shambling film tie-in is all fans have to play with.
There’s really not a whole lot to this you can’t garner from a screenshot, sadly. You’re tasked with playing as Godzilla as he embarks on thwacking all sorts of reinforced buildings and going fist-to-bullet with humanity’s fiercest weapons. Other famous Kaiju like Mothra and King Ghidorah (alongside plenty more) show up to also get in on the action, but the whole thing just feels so insanely cheap.
Areas themselves are awash in a palette of brown and grey, the buildings and other structures you’ll be destroying are devoid of their own physics models, and essentially Godzilla’s 2015 outing exists as the embodiment of what happens when a developer has zero competition to force perfection out of their own product.
5. Hatred
For a while there, Destructive Creations’ Hatred was the centre of attention for the entire games industry – albeit for the most forced and childish reasons possible.
By putting you in the angry army boots of an angry trenchcoat-wearing genocidal maniac, the entire thing played like the manifestation of every “Won’t someone think of the children!?”-spouting parent’s worst nightmares.
Literally all you do is run around a handful of levels, putting guns in the mouths of innocent people or lobbing grenades into shopping malls. Created in the Unreal engine, it plays well enough from a control standpoint, but the absolutely absurd nature of the project itself, the fact the developers had ties to neo-Nazi websites and the overwhelmingly tactless way it was rolled out, makes for something that was more akin to a shoegazing teenager screaming for attention, than a creation with something to say.
4. Battlefield Hardline
The gaming public are not as dumb as you think, marketers. Right from the off, Battlefield’s initial announcement as this cops n’ robbers spin-off from Battlefield 4 sounded like it should’ve been DLC, and despite the following months featuring EA getting out there and proclaiming it was a “full game” that would offer the same sort of quality as their standard releases, Hardline felt in every single way like an add-on.
The hook behind everything was that you were a cop, opening up the campaign to focus on all sorts of tactile insertion methods and ways to bring perps in without harming them. Except, once you understood that all translated into “Hold your badge out at someone to make them stop moving”, every group showdown turned into an awkward situation of entire armed gangs throwing their hands up, relaxing them and preparing to fire… and then stopping again.
Multiplayer was more of the same despite EA touting collapsible environments and ways to exfiltrate following some pretty neat-looking heists, and the story itself got away from trying to survive as a cop in Miami pretty fast, making the fact you could still hold your badge out to arrest guys incredibly dumb.
3. Raven’s Cry
Completely unabashed rip-offs can sometimes work, just look at Lords of the Fallen, which took Dark Souls’ core formula and iterated on it in some really neat ways. Or you could look at Raven’s Cry, a game from Reality Pump Studios, who literally saw Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag’s pirates n’ pillaging gameplay and thought “That’s never gonna get old, we can do that!”
Thus the result is a carbon copy of the base Black Flag experience, from mini-map placement in the corner of your screen, to the wait n’ counter feel of combat, to even the ship-based battling that’ll break up the rest of the monotony.
It’s assumed the only reason Ubisoft didn’t file a copyright lawsuit against this thing, was down to it posing absolutely zero threat to their sales, being its reviews and sales were this year’s equivalent to 2014’s godawful Ride to Hell: Retribution.
2. The Order: 1886
It sucks to hate on Ready At Dawn, because as a studio they’ve had a solid track record on PSP with the God of War and Daxter spin-offs, and The Order’s one overwhelming positive is its gorgeous graphics, which until Star Wars Battlefront or Uncharted 4 started showing up, were frontrunner for the best looking of all time.
Where it all fell down was in the gameplay – the absolute, utter lack of gameplay. For whatever reason, the developers decided to show off their graphics engine with an abundance of cutscenes and quick-time event set-pieces. It meant you’d only actually play for a couple of hours at most, although some entire ‘Chapters’ were just cutscenes, and you’d spend half your time ‘investigating’ the area by picking things up… and putting them down again.
On a base gameplay level, the gunplay was solid enough, but when it was touted to include a ton of unique Nikola Tesla weaponry, a ‘new level’ of blurring the boundaries between cinema and gameplay, and truly be the first title that would make people want to buy a PS4 – it couldn’t have fell down any more.
1. Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 5
Speaking of something that should’ve been a bonafide success, only to release in such an unfinished state it’s just insulting, THPS 5 marked the first instalment in eight years – and by far the worst fans had ever seen.
Glitches and bugs abounded from the version on sale simply not being playtested enough. The general presentation of everything on a graphical standpoint was nowhere near up to current standards, and the muscle memory-inducing feel of trademark Tony Hawk’s gameplay was completely ruined, thanks to things like a ground-pound move that now doubled as your grind button.
Since launch it’s received a handful of patches to get things back on track, but when the modes are regurgitations of the same “Collect all the [insert random object]’s around the level!” and the feel of skating is markedly worse than the 2012 reboot of the 1999 original, something, everything, is drastically and irreversibly wrong.
Post a Comment