The year 2023 draws to a close and it was a really good year for video games but more importantly remakes of old school games. The year was filled to the brim with many outstanding titles like Zelda Tears of the Kingdom, Baldur's Gate III and so forth but of course this year was NOT with its share of biggest of the biggest lonesome, shameful and disgraceful pieces of garbage and as well as providing nothing but absolute disappointment to many, many people that paid full price on them. I am here as always to look back at the glorious games as well as look at the most disappointing and awful and shameful excuses of games that have come out in 2023. Let's begin with the worst of the worst of the video games released throughout 2023 and give them the shame they deserve.
10: Call of Duty Modern Warfare III (2023)
Developer: Sledgehammer Games
Now let me explain, Call of Duty is easily the most go to first person shooter franchise for people who want to get their online multiplayer FPS fix as well as having an epic single player campaign that is very cinematic and breathtaking. We all know that every single November we are expected to get a Call of Duty game even if it is little different from the last entries but that doesn't stop people from buying it because it is an easy target of many holiday season pickups. However, oh good heaven's lord what has happened with this year's entry. Since the day it launched this third part of the Modern Warfare reboot trilogy suffered with so many problems. The single player campaign sucked, it was so embarrassingly short with a terrible storyline and also recycling environments from Warzone. The multiplayer was bad because of the awful weapon level up and progression system and it reuses maps from the 2009 Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 game, exploits were even found on certain maps which players could use to cheat out in matches and the developers had to remove the maps just so players couldn't do any of that. Then you have the Zombies which may be the best part of this entry but it is still awful, and seriously a Zombies Mode in a Call of Duty Modern Warfare game, talks about being out of place in terms of the setting. Call of Duty, we can agree, has had its high and low entries throughout the years but this year's Call of Duty game is without doubt the worst in the series yet. Some many people hated this game because it got the lowest review score of any Call of Duty entry including the PSVita game Call of Duty Black Ops Declassified. People even confused this game with the original 2011 game that they accidentally gave that version low scores on metacritic whereas this game deserves all the low review scores. Let's not forget something, this is from Sledgehammer and not Infinity Ward who had done incredibly well with the Modern Warfare reboot games and Sledgehammer claimed that this “took” eighteen months to make. I swear even 2021's Call of Duty Vanguard that they also worked on was way better than this.
9: Greyhill Incident
Developer: Refugium Games
If grey aliens did come to our planet, they would be more interested in abducting the game designers that unleashed cheap filled trash like this one. Despite the overall atmosphere having decent environments and visual design this is a tedious experience that suffers from a nonsensical plot with horrible voice acting, terrible gameplay with really bad stealth mechanics and it has a ton of bugs. Also having the lack of waypoints made the game confusing about where to go or what you are supposed to do, making it even more frustrating. There are so many other sci-fi alien related things that are more worth your time and money yet this garbage charges ￡19.99.
8: The Last of Us Part 1 (PC Version)
Developer: Naughty Dog, Iron Galaxy Studios
Oh boy, do I have to mention this game again? Really do I have to? *Sigh* fine. Okay so the PlayStation 3 masterpiece The Last of Us had a fantastic remaster on the PlayStation 4, got a rather pointless remake on the PlayStation 5 which was more or less the same exact game as it was on the PS3 and PS4 systems but then this year they had to bring it to the PC. Look it might be fine bringing in a classic game like this to the PC but it wasn't given to the hands of the right people who have done some good work bringing some of the famous PlayStation 4 titles like Horizon Zero Dawn and Uncharted to PC. The version on the PC was handled by Iron Galaxy Studios who have had their share of missteps and oh jeez, what the absolute **** have they done with this PC port. It suffers very, very badly from a massive list of technical performance, gameplay and graphical bugs so that it is impossible to keep track of every issue that this version has. Animations where broken and characters often wouldn't work properly, characters would appear all wet despite being on dry land, graphical quality looked way worse even on high settings and if you turn down the graphical settings every character look like hideous diseased mess. Like what happened to you Joel, you look horrible and look like you turned old in the worst possible way. The game runs bad and it even crashes a lot, especially if you dare to try and run it on the Steam Deck. The original Last of Us is still something that you can look back at on the PlayStation 3 and the PlayStation 4 and see what made the game so good whereas remaking it for the PS5 was pointless and this version hurts the reputation it once had even further. It's no wonder why Naughty Dog has now cancelled the Last of Us Factions Multiplayer or why nobody wants a remaster of The Last of Us Part 2 after how much that disappointed us.
7: Redfall
Developer: Arkane Studios
Arkane Studios, the team behind the incredible Dishonoured games, has been acquired by Microsoft which would mean that the next game that the studio would make would be a big win for Microsoft and the Xbox brand right? Well not so with this one. The game would have been fine with it being a co-op shooter and one with vampires but the game suffers from a multitude of problems. Quests were super repetitive and boring from AI enemies that are absolutely dumb as bricks, objectives that are overly simple and progress was given only to the host player and lastly it had a ton of technical & performance problems on both Xbox and PC platforms. It was so bad that it ruined any chances for the Xbox brand winning with an exclusive title for their platform and for this to come from a studio like Arkane when they did an excellent on the Dishonoured game is massively disappointing.
6: Forspoken
Developer: Square Enix/Luminous Productions
Do you know what's bad? Either Square Enix's still making many controversial New Year resolutions involving NFTs and Blockchain being the future of gaming, Final Fantasy falling harder and harder or this. Forspoken is an abysmal turd, even the demo spilled out that it was going to be an absolute flop. Forspoken is an empty shallow mess full of large empty areas with nothing to them. Combat is ridiculously complex and it is just plain awful to get the hang off with a magic that is just not very intuitive. The worst offenders are the characters, Frey and her magic bracelet Cuff are the most annoying characters in all of gaming, so much though that you can even lower the amount of banter that they spew out. Luminous Productions tried to remedy the issues with patches but it was too late, the game flopped so bad that Square Enix failed to meet sales expectations, lost a ton of money from a project and studio Luminous Productions even closed its doors on the 1st May 2023. Yep, Square Enix just really don't get it don't they and even today they still haven't learned from all the recent disasters they brought to us.
5: The Day Before
Developer: Fntastic
Talk about a game where something that was going to be popular and why? because it got wish-listed by plenty of people on Stream. The Day Before was a multiplayer survival horror and extraction shooter game where you must traverse through a post-apocalyptic environment which is overrun with zombies. The game suffered greatly from a lot of things like a lack of melee combat, enemies having no artificial intelligence, poor world design and scale alongside various technical issues and game bugs, but the game was mostly criticized for being very uncreative. The development cycle and all of the cases surrounding developer Fntastic was what really killed this game off. The game's lengthy development time led to speculations and questions on whether or not every thing about the game or if development for it was legit only for it to be perceived as a scam. Fntastic even got accused of plagiarism and soliciting unpair labour with employees and volunteers who worked on the game with the studio trying to deny all accusations thrown at them. The Day Before went from announced in 2021 to then finally getting released on 7th December 2023 and only four days later on 11th December 2023 it was removed off Steam to the studio closing its doors on 22nd December 2023 with people getting refunds from spending money on this game and because it was an online game the servers are getting shut down on 22nd January 2024 making it impossible to play the game again. This game got announcements hyping it up, a troubling two development cycle only for the game to last only over a month before being shutdown.
4: The Walking Dead Destinies
Developer: Flux Games
The Walking Dead has had a decent run especially in recent times, the comics and TV series was good and Telltale did a really good game based on the license as well as enjoyable pinball game that came from Stern as well. Then you have the trash that came out from the license such as 2013's Survival Instinct which was pretty bad and then 2018's The Walking Dead game from Overkill which was seriously dreadful. This year Flux Games takes up The Walking Dead license with The Walking Dead Destinies and my god it is busted beyond belief. Everything about it is atrocious from the gameplay and the melee and shooting mechanics just being broken. The cutscenes were the worst introducing choices that you could make throughout the game except that they don't make sense considering that it is supposed to follow the plot of the comics and TV show. The cutscenes are also very, very lifeless with nothing animating and the characters all look so ugly and awful. The Walking Dead video game line-up continues to get worse and worse with the developers continuing to botch the license up and it hurts the fans who still watch the show. Well at least the Telltale Walking Dead games were good so at least that fans of the show and comics at least have something worthwhile from this that is decent but I would rather play The Walking Dead Survival Instinct or The Walking Dead Plug N Play TV Light Gun games than this absolute pile of trash.
3: Skull Island Rise of Kong
Developer: IgunaBee
It's simply shocking just how awful this mess of game is. Skull Island Rise of Kong looks like something that it was just barely started in development within about a day or so without even looking at the result. The graphics simply look atrocious with environments looking so bland and Kong looking so ugly hideous to even look at. The gameplay was also really bad, the combat and does nothing to innovate from all other actions on the market and also it is full of bugs. What's worse was the development cycle, the cutscene where Kong having a flashback to his past was so awful that it used a static image to represent the flashback it was so terribly thrown together that it went viral on Twitter. So, what happened with this turd? Well, it turned out publisher Gamemill Entertainment only gave developer IngunaBee only a year to work on the game with only twenty members on board and the staff were only given very little details about the game, forcing the developers to improvise. The game even got forced into a crunch period in order for the team to finish the project and yet it came out as a broken mess that looks unfinished. It wasn't because of the overall execution from IgunaBee, it was the incompetent business decision from Gamemill Entertainment that killed the beast.
2: The Last Hope Dead Zone Survival
Developer: VG Games
If you thought the PC version of The Last of Us was bad enough then get a load of this. This is The Last Hope Dead Zone Survival, a game that came out only on the Nintendo Switch's EShop and it is literally a complete rip-off of The Last of Us but that is being too generous, calling it a shameful bootleg is more the key term to describe this. How do you know this is a bootleg? well, that's dead easy, the little girl character Eva shares an uncanny resemblance to Ellie just giving us the face that she didn't want to be there, trust us we all know the feelings. The game even tries to play just like The Last of Us only that it gets every single ounce of gameplay mechanics all wrong. The gameplay was frustratingly bad from enemies that easily surround you and Eva who cowers when enemies get near her, supplies are limited from ammo to healing, you can use melee attacks if you are out of ammo but melee attacks drain your stamina which never regenerates and you can only replenish with an item which you can only find in limited quantities. Combine that with limited ammo makes for an experience were trying to fight your way out if spotted is nearly impossible. On top of that the game just looks so bad and it has a ton of bugs, glitches and technical performance problems which should not be excusable for a game released on the Nintendo Switch in 2023 that looks so awful. The worst offender was that it is the example of deceptive marketing that it was a shovelware title that slipped into Nintendo's Eshop looking like a complete bootleg of something else and then somehow got approved as its own identity. The game got massively panned so hard and eventually in August 2023 Nintendo saw what this garbage really was and removed it from the EShop while Sony removed all video trailers of the game. If you have friends who have bought this trash, do yourself a favour and never play this game not even for curiosity, prevent others from seeing this or even knowing that it exists.
Dishonourable Mentions
Crimeboss Rockay City - Ingame Studios
Testament The Order of High Human – Fairyship Games
Quantom Error – Teamkill Media
Collossoal Cave – Cygnus Entertainment
Hellboy Web of Wyrd – Upstream Arcade
1: The Lord of the Rings Gollum
Developer: Daedalic Entertainment
When this game got announced back in 2019 there were no expectations for it being good and absolutely no one even cared. Every single time it got announced or when it got further reported many people cared less and less and didn't even want to bring it up. Even after being delayed by its supposed 2021 release and getting released, the game turned out worse than what people said it would be. The Lord of the Rings Gollum was heavily panned and criticized not just because it is a super awful game in which it is, it wasn't just because it suffered badly from troubled development cycle due to awful working conditions. All of it was simply because nobody and I repeat nobody cared about this game, even the game designers overall lack of effort showed that they wouldn't have cared. Everything about The Lord of the Rings Gollum was bad from the boring and broken gameplay which involve climbing up areas and avoiding enemies which the majority of the time don't even work and even if the game properly worked everything becomes super repetitive. To top the whole thing off the game just looks so low quality resolution that makes an average PlayStation 2 game look High Definition quality in comparison. The game even suffers from many, many bugs glitches and technical performance problems that just make the game unplayable such as you getting stuck on the ledges, walls or other parts of the level geometry. The Lord of the Rings Gollum was so dreadful and it sold so poorly understandably that developer Daedalic Entertainment cancelled plans for a second game and even offered apology letters before closing their development division to focus more on publishing making this the worst game of 2023.
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