Top 5 worst games of 2012

[Tiswas]

I hate using the term worst games. Mainly because I don't actively go out to buy or play bad games. Instead I prefer to go with Most Disappointing Games.

5: New Little King's Story (Vita) I bought the console mainly for this game, had it pre-ordered and everything. Notice how it says New in the title? Well guess what, it's a port of the Wii version with a 'retelling' of the story. Not to mention some kinda poor controls and some very poor slowdown making it barely unplayable towards the end.

4: Pirate Warriors (PS3) I am a huge One Piece fan and was so excited by this, a Dynasty Warriors game with One Piece, how could I lose? Bad adventure levels in the campaign, not enough focus on Nami, Usopp, Chopper, Robin, Franky and Brook in the main campaign. Square areas in levels, small roster, broken roster (Chopper missing half of his forms, Franky unplayable.) and the artbook showing lots of stuff that was cut (alt costumes for Robin, Nami and Usopp. Some chars having full movesets but not playable.) yet I know i'll buy the next one.

3: Final Fantasy XIII-2 (PS3) Terrible plot, terrible main characters, combat system is fun enough but not nearly fun enough. It did keep my attention to get the plat however. But the ending just annoyed so much.

2: Uncharted Golden Abyss (Vita) Ugh, this was the other one I bought a Vita for. Terrible controls, annoying touch screen gimmick. Drake as annoying as ever and the whole series just feels like it's gone stale. Any creativity Naughty Dog had with this series has gone now, replaced with a series that needs to either be rested or go into a new direction (Mainly a new lead character.)

and finally
1: Assassin's Creed 3: OK, it's got it's Naval Battles....which are just about the only saving grace. Main char is boring, supporting cast is awful. Only half decent one is Haytham, who shoulda been the playable one through the full game. Series just feels staler than stale bread. At least COD and Mario manage to shake things up a little bit with each game. And then they go and give the Vita a half decent Assassin's Creed with a decent enough main character.

Also wanna point out some other games that nearly got on the list. Kingdom Hearts 3D, for being pretty damn boring to playthrough and forcing you to change characters entirely in the middle of a boss battle was ridiculous. NSMBU/NSMB2, both are great enough games but them being released so close to each other just makes everything feel stale.

 

[PieMagazineReviews]

Assassin's Creed III was a terrible, boring, repetitive, story-screwed game.

 

[PieMagazineReviews]

Hitman Absolution: An incredibly frustrating game with poor stealth mechanics. Doesn't nearly live up to it's predecessors.

This is better than all its predecessors - except Blood Money. A lot has been fixed and made it a playable standard for the gamers of today.

 

[Andros83]

Lets get this started


5)Far Cry 3
Its rare when i feel a game wasted my time as poignantly as this did.
I will be the first to admit that while you are actually learning the world and mechanics the game is genuinely fun.
But just like Skyrim the moment you actually look at this piece of shit, it all comes tumbling down.
A utterly pathetic and disjointed plot that really falls apart at the second island, unlikeable characters aside from 3, very limiting area of actual destruction, a lifeless world with objectively terrible sidequests and becomes even worse when you realize when you clear areas you will never get groups from those areas, terrible stealth system and enemy AI and campaign missions that for the most part seem to lifted from the COD school of gameplay.
This game just outright sucks.
Co op and MP are too bland to even mention.
If anybody thinks Far Cry 3 even resembles a good game, you are in dire need of a psych evaluation.

4)Diablo 3
Oh god, what did they do this game?
Its not even the drop rates, or the fact that this was designed with the RMAH, or even the change in artstyle, it wasnt even the combat which i actually liked and thought with just a bit more polish it could be fantastic.
What really makes Diablo 3 a bad game however, is just how controlling this game is.
Diablo 3 is on rails.
Maps and dungeons feel linear.
The mission paths are a straight goddamn line
The plot is fucking awful.
And the itemization has no sense of depth to it.

God allmighty did i weep.

3)Hitman Absolution
How the fuck can you mess up Hitman?
A stealth game more interested in leaderboards than actual assassinations.
QTE combat, awful plot, on rails missions, slow mo action setpieces, taking elements from the atrocious Splinter Cell:Conviction and the simple fact that they have taken away almost every semblance of actually feeling like a hired killer.
Its not about difficulty, its not about the size of the maps, its not even about accessibility, its about wanting to feel like a Hitman in a game called fucking Hitman.
Fuck the defenders of this atrocity.


2)Mass Effect 3

Put aside the ending and this game still fails on its own.
Tying 5 plus actions to one fucking button is equated to terrible combat but no, they also had to implement terrible hitboxes, obnoxious difficulty spikes and repetitive combat scenarios.
Alongside the plotholes, the on rails nature of this SHOOTER(this sure as fuck isnt an RPG anymore), the terrible sidequests, the ugliness of this game at times, the moral choices which simply equate to grumpy Shepard or happy Shepard and you have a dreadful experience all on its own.
The ending was the pickle on this turd sundae.

But no game made gasp me in horror any harder as to what it had become.

1)Resident Evil 6
A farce.
Just the terrible controls make this a waste of time but god allmighty this game is mind numbingly stupid and incompetent.
I have no words.

Just...wow.

 

[Revolutionary]

Butthurt fan-boys everywhere I look. The anger is strong with these ones.
Now some games that were actually legitimately bad : Steel Battalion, Inversion, MOH Warfighter, Amy.
>Mass Effect 3? Come off it you butthurt dwellers.
>The Walking Dead?? Are you F****** Serious? More like best GOTY.
Also I get why the purists are upset about Hitman but is it really this level of hate? I think not.

 

[Phoenixmgs_v1legacy]

To all the people posting Medal of Honor: Warfighter and Ghost Recon Future Soldier, did you actually play the multiplayer? Because that's what you buy those games for. Yes, MoH:Warfigher has a completely HORRIBLE campaign, but that is only half of the game at best. I'm not saying the campaign doesn't matter but you can't say the multilayer doesn't matter either; a bad campaign and great multiplayer don't make a shooter the worst game of the year (Inversion has to be way worse in both single player and multiplayer, the videos of gameplay are so very horrible). Both MoH:Warfighter and GRFS have great multiplayer gameplay with MoH:Warfigher completely blowing Infinity Ward and Treyarch out of the water by, perhaps, being the best online console FPS this gen while GRFS has, perhaps, the best cover system. And, GRFS's online multiplayer is actually balanced, which is a rarity for shooters these days. You can't do this in any other online shooter:

4) Medal of Honor: Warfighter
For having a stupid name and being the most generic game ever made, Warfighter brought nothing new to the table. It's the most vapid thing I've played in a while

Uhh... Does Ghost Recon Advanced WARFIGHTER and Ghost Recon Advanced WARFIGHTER 2 ring any bells? You're not only a WARFIGHER!!! but you're an advanced WARFIGHTER to boot.

MoH: Warfighter has brought something new to the FPS table, and that is the slide and shoot mechanic that you WILL see probably every FPS from now on borrowing, sliding around a corner and shotgunning a camper is extremely satisfying. The fireteam buddy is a new great feature as well to multiplayer. And MoH:Warfighter brought something back to console FPSs that has been missing this whole console gen, and that is LEANING. Any FPS without leaning is an embarrassment to the genre. There hasn't been a FPS control scheme on a controller where you can't fit in the leaning mechanic, there's no excuse to not have leaning.

 

[Rawne1980]

People only hate ME3 because of the endings. But as an Escapist columnist already stated in one of their top 5's... the game itSELF is actually great.

To be fair, I hated Mass Effect 3 for far more reasons than just the ending. It's also my worst game of 2012 for those reason.

On Topic....

5. Ghost Recon - Future Soldier. I loved the first 2 Ghost Recon games. Then the series joined CoD in run and gun fests and went to shit.

4. Diablo 3. Fortunately my wife is a WoW player and did the year sub thingy and we got it for free (she was playing WoW anyway so would have paid for the sub it just made sense). Thank the lord of cold ale that I didn't pay £40 for it, the game was utter shite. The auction house removed any need to do what a dungeon crawler is designed for. Why run through dungeons when I can sit on my arse and buy the damn gear.

3. WarZ. I admit I fucked up on this one. I bought it when it appeared on Steam without reading up on it first. I've played some shit games in my time but this one sucked giant hairy monkey testicles. I'm not about the controversy surrounding the game and Sergey Titov being an absolute tool, the game itself is shockingly bad.

2. Resident Evil 6. I admit this is partly because I view RE through rose tinted goggles but they have gone from the old "survival horror" to action shoot em ups with irritating as fuck QTE's. There is a parody song that says "you bash on the buttons and wiggle the sticks" which is funny because it's true. And it's so fucking easy it's insulting.

1. Mass Effect 3. New characters I didn't give a shit about (Vega and whatever the other guys name is that whined about his dead lover all game). Companions I didn't want (why the fuck would I want EDI following me around, she's fucking annoying) and Williams ... oh just go away. On top of that I lost out on people I wanted on the ship (Jack, Miranda and Samara) who just made cameo appearances (Jack was my love interest from ME2 and this game fucked that up completely). A large chunk of the story made no sense with regards to what was happening and the "built up to be huge" war against the Reapers at the end was pathetic. That wasn't a war, it was a playground tumble.

 

[Ed130 The Vanguard]

That doesn't have anything to do with my point, though. It's still biased due to the lack of randomness in the sample selection...had I seen the word "unscientific" in the initial post, I wouldn't have brought this up, since you pretty much say it's a guess at the whole and little more.

I did not state it was a guess, it's unscientific and probably as biased as hell but in no way a 'guess.'

I mean a guess as in an extrapolation to the entire community, unless you weren't actually doing that, in which case I misinterpreted something.

I think our different interpretations of the term 'guess' are conflicting with each other.

 

[ShinyCharizard]

Goddammit, Mass Effect 3 was good. The ending sucked, but I still don't think it deserves the bottom five.

\

Agreed. The ending was shit. But the game itself was just fucking amazing. Personally I see the entire game as the ending to the series, not just the last 10 minutes.

 

[OldDirtyCrusty]

5)Far Cry 3
If anybody thinks Far Cry 3 even resembles a good game, you are in dire need of a psych evaluation.

Your diagnostic abilities are amazing. I seem to be in dire need of an evaluation then. Opinion as fact throwers - my favorite kind of prick.

 

[Falseprophet]

Well...

There was a thread that did something similar...

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/9.395379-Worst-game-s-of-2012?page=8

And after 273 posts I tallied up the results, for Shits, Giggles (and because I'm insane).

I salute your data-mining dedication.

From this unscientific tabulation we have the top 5 worst games of 2012! (as decided by members of the Escapist who posted games in this thread)

1: Mass Effect 3 with nearly double the votes of its nearest rival.
2: Assassin's Creed 3
3: Resident Evil 6
4: Diablo 3
5: Medal of Honor: Warfighter

(Note: this thread predates the Escapist GOTY 2012 vote).

When this thread slows down I'll do something similar.

I note all these games are sequels/franchise installments, though in fairness, high-profile AAA games based on new IPs are rare these days. Solely out of curiosity, I wonder how many of these games are considered bad on their own merits (or lack thereof), and how many are considered bad because they fail to live up to expectations elevated by earlier installments of their respective series.

Of these 5, I've only played AC3 and ME3. I'm a huge fan of the AC series, but I've only just started playing AC3 so I'm not in a position to judge it yet. As for ME3, the endings don't bother me as such, because I thought the main plot of the franchise was already derailing at the beginning of ME2. The character stuff in the ME series stayed pretty strong throughout though, and ME3 was still pretty great at that. I suppose my big problem with ME3 was the story/gameplay disconnect. I thought Cerberus and anything connected to them was utterly idiotic from a story point of view, but the ME3 missions where you fought had the most interesting combat. Meanwhile, a lot of the non-Cerberus missions were better from a story/character perspective, but most of them involved a lot of boring, repetitive combat against waves of boring, repetitive foes. I have to give ME3 credit for actually bringing a multi-volume story to a definitive conclusion, however loathed it was, which is all too rare in gaming.

 

[Dosbilliam]

That doesn't have anything to do with my point, though. It's still biased due to the lack of randomness in the sample selection...had I seen the word "unscientific" in the initial post, I wouldn't have brought this up, since you pretty much say it's a guess at the whole and little more.

I did not state it was a guess, it's unscientific and probably as biased as hell but in no way a 'guess.'

I mean a guess as in an extrapolation to the entire community, unless you weren't actually doing that, in which case I misinterpreted something.

I think our different interpretations of the term 'guess' are conflicting with each other.

Yeah, I'll buy that...I think the term "educated guess" would be more accurate, aka "estimate."

 

[im-white]

anyone who leaves off revelations 2012 is crazy. that is by the worst game of the year next to war z

 

[IamLEAM1983]

Awesome. Another one of those topics, huh? "Here's what I didn't like this year, and if you happen to like something I didn't like, you're a moron, a Philistine and a subhuman wretch! So THERE!"

Okay, so for a slightly less contentious format, here are the five games I PERSONALLY didn't like. That's literally just my opinion, and if you like something I don't - cool beans. I won't throw around anything like comments suggesting that psychiatric evaluations might be needed, because I'm not fucking petty. People have different tastes. Deal with it.

5. The War Z

Spoiler

Does a bear shit in the woods? The only reason this doesn't make it higher is because being disappointed or angered by Sergei Titov is pretty much a trend, nowadays. It's the new Ugg boots of the gaming press. The guy has zero understanding of how patents are handled, pathologically lies about game features and deadlines, games his own system for his own amusement (and so do his moderators), falls back on bullshit excuses to justify his increasing delays and finally panders to his hometown by offering a Pay to Win package for the Russian edition of the game.

DayZ isn't exactly what I'd call fun. Flat-out surviving if you can't somehow thrive or build something out of your efforts at survival makes the very act of looking for food or weapons rote and repetitive. You can't hunker down and establish communities. All you can do is scrounge out whatever it is you need to keep breathing. Over and over.

The War Z adds its own slew of bugs and exploitable flaws to the system, and it has the gall to pass its own buggy mess as a "Foundation Release".

Yeah, we get it, Titov. Hammerpoint is in the pits and you have zero cash left to hire a decent QA department. Either that or you just don't fucking care. Get to flipping burgers or mopping floors, this way you won't be as much of an embarrassment to all game developers out there. It's like you're running for Tim Langdell's previously held title of Master Douchenozzle of the Gaming Industry.

4. Diablo III

Spoiler

It's a disappointment, overall. The structure's there, the Pavlovian addiction is there for the first twenty or thirty levels, but the Auction House becomes utterly prevalent as soon as you try you luck around Nightmare difficulty. It's not exactly expensive, seeing as I was able to correct severe gear-related mistakes at two thousand gold pieces a pop, but it still does set a pretty useless gateway for players looking to squeeze everything out of their sixty bucks.

Things become even more cringe-worthy once you consider that the cash-based Auction House is inflated to Hell and fraught with purchasers running behind bots. It goes to the point where I've seen addicted friends sink a thousand bucks on a SINGLE virtual item. For a VIDEO GAME.

It's just too bad, as the tactics and basic gameplay are fun. I loved my Monk to bits.

3. Endless Space

Spoiler

4X games were an integral part of my childhood. I remember being psyched to Hell when I first heard of this one and of its communal development model. The Pre-Beta community sees something they like? There's a feature they'd like to see implemented? They can theoretically bring it to the developers' attention. Before its official release, ES felt like a young planet of sorts, constantly shifting from build to build, looking for its identity in the spectrum of strategy games. That was a fun process to participate in as a player.

Now that the game's come out, I'm sorely disappointed. Rival civilizations are absolute weenies on the hardest difficulty level and are utterly passive on the easiest. No matter how hard I try to actually make bad decisions to hamstring myself, I come out of my rounds with flying colours. There's entire turns where the AI simply isn't researching new tech or developing its strategy or its arsenal. There's several hours in the setup phase in which you'll swear you're all alone in your randomly generated cluster of star systems. When you do see your adversaries, they flat-out ignore you.

The rhythm feels a little sluggish, as well. The game plays the ponderousness card very, very hard. It's hard to play as the Infinite Empire and to mount something that feels like a blitz occupation of an entire sector, as slow and deliberate as the mechanics are. Space combat is fairly anemic, depending on a sort of quick round of micro-poker to determine which types of projectiles you're able to fire in the allotted time window, where and how.

They've obviously tried to liven up the game with out-of-place humorous quips in certain descriptions, but these don't flesh anything or anyone out. It's hard to feel motivated, considering how the Infinite Empire, Sowers, Horatio or Hissho all control in the exact same way and have the exact same tech tree to develop. There's more races, but most of them are just palette swaps of the same basic generic AI.

2. DOTA 2

Spoiler

The community more or less terminally soured my enjoyment of the game. I'll still run bot matches from time to time or play with my closest friends, but pubbers are utterly noxious and immature. I've checked out LoL, and came out of it with the same general impression. Most of the players are of the "go pro or go home" mentality, which makes it hard to take my time to learn my one or two favourite heroes, to enjoy the level design or voice work and to generally come to grips with the game.

I'd like to know if that's just me, though. Does anyone else who dabbles in Defense of the Ancients have similar stories of widespread aggression in Valve's take on the formula?

1. The Walking Dead

Spoiler

It's my personal best - and my personal worst. Best because of the gripping characters and storyline, worst because of, well, the gripping characters and storyline. I stormed through the five episodes like I storm through the AMC series or Game of Thrones, and the game succeeded in making me feel like shit. A personal first in my history as a video games aficionado.

I used to scoff or laugh at people who told me Aeris' death made them cry in Final Fantasy VII. I used to think Peter Molyneux was not only full of shit, but woefully off-key in thinking that Fable's array of Sims-esque interactions would foster some sort of personal engagement. I now can relate with the sizable chunk of gamers who had to look away in the final episode's last moments.

An electronic product, a chunk of motherfucking code and art assets, made me cry. Bravo, Telltale. Or should I say fuck you? I'm all confused...

 

[lacktheknack]

I liked both games I played from this year. (FTL, XCOM)

I feel left out. ;___;

 

[GoddyofAus]

Honorable mention goes to Sonic '06, because Game Grumps. Just WATCHING that game in motion, not even playing it made me want to punch the wall. Sonic Team should be reprimaded harshly for releasing such an insult to the public.

[HEADING=1]#5[/HEADING]
[HEADING=2]The War Z[/HEADING]​

Don't need to spend much time on this one. Essentially a hackjob and the developers should have their arses sued off them by anyone who is still waiting to get their money back.

[HEADING=1]#4[/HEADING]
[HEADING=2]Diablo 3[/HEADING]​

What can I say that hasn't already been said, such an atrocious turnout. It is a shame too, because its core mechanics as a game are really good. Just the Auction House and all the errors post launch completely destroyed the games playability. This was only the second game I've bought from Blizzard and will probably be the last. A complete "Fuck you" to their fanbase.

[HEADING=1]#3[/HEADING]
[HEADING=2]Halo 4[/HEADING]​

People will see this as an interesting choice and I wouldn't blame them. Halo 4's single player was amazing, let me make that clear. I loved it. The multiplayer however, was a different story. As an Australian, the whole experience was comprehensively ruined by horrendous networking issues. 343's automatic local search was just broken and I gave up after 3 weeks of waiting for matchmaking to stabilize. Very disappointed.

[HEADING=1]#2[/HEADING]
[HEADING=2]Steel Battalion[/HEADING]​

When you want to demonstrate to someone how and why the Kinect is a useless piece of shit, this is the game you show them. Jim Sterling explains far more eloquently then I can what is wrong with this game. It is broken and unplayable. Capcom had their heads up their arses.

[HEADING=1]#1[/HEADING]
[HEADING=2]Sonic Adventure 2 HD[/HEADING]​

*sigh* Sonic Team, give up. Just give up please. Your best days are behind you and now all you deserve is a shotgun shell to the cranium.

 

[Sassafrass]

1. The Walking Dead

Spoiler

It's my personal best - and my personal worst. Best because of the gripping characters and storyline, worst because of, well, the gripping characters and storyline. I stormed through the five episodes like I storm through the AMC series or Game of Thrones, and the game succeeded in making me feel like shit. A personal first in my history as a video games aficionado.

I used to scoff or laugh at people who told me Aeris' death made them cry in Final Fantasy VII. I used to think Peter Molyneux was not only full of shit, but woefully off-key in thinking that Fable's array of Sims-esque interactions would foster some sort of personal engagement. I now can relate with the sizable chunk of gamers who had to look away in the final episode's last moments.

An electronic product, a chunk of motherfucking code and art assets, made me cry. Bravo, Telltale. Or should I say fuck you? I'm all confused...

Try "CongratuFUCKYOUTELLTALElations." It works for me.
...Shit, now I've posted, I need to mention something. But I can only name one, Halo 4, and that wasn't a bad game, it was just the worst of the worst which somehow managed to be pretty meh at worst and OK at best.

Unless we count DNF in this. Got it two days ago and what the fuck was I thinking? -.-