With just about a month and a half to go until the decade is officially through, it’s time to reflect on all the great and terrible gaming moments we’ve experienced over the last ten years… and trust us, there’s been quite a lot of terrible.
RELATED:WWE 2K20 Is The Worst There Is (And The Worst There Ever Will Be)
From the hilariously bad eighth-gen console launch lineup to the atrocity that was most of the Wii U’s library, it’s fair to say that there’s been more bad than good over the last decade, and we’ve narrowed downMetacritic’s lowest-scored games since 2010. We’ve skipped over most of the shovelware, but these games still deserve a place in the bargain bin.
10Postal III (Metascore 24)
Though it was released in 2011,Postal IIIlooks like it released during the early era of 3D graphics. The third installment of this crass, irreverent series, has aged about as well as you could imagine, and the gruesomely dark humor is about as one-note as it gets.
Tasked with surviving a week in the life of “Postal Guy,” it plays like a broken-downGTAmod made by a college freshman with only a tenuous grasp on game development. Though the series has attracted a cult fandom and since spawned yet another installment in 2019’sPostal 4, that doesn’t make up for this big, fat failure.
9Fighter Within (Metascore 23)
Released to coincide with the launch of the Xbox One,Fighter Withinwas one of a very small number of titles that dared to go all-in on the new system’s Kinect connectivity. Gamers already weren’t thrilled that Microsoft had essentially forced the peripheral on them, and the lackluster games released for it ensured that the Kinect wouldn’t successfully make the jump to the next generation.
While nothing worked particularly well with the accessory, this title was downright broken. A fighter that failed to register player movements nearly one-hundred percent of the time, it was a frustrating exercise that left gamers flailing around wildly in frustration more often than not.
8FlatOut3: Chaos and Destruction (Metascore 23)
FlatOut3: Chaos and Destruction[sic] was, at one time, the lowest-rated game on Steam, and, given what the platform has become in recent years, that should be pretty telling.
RELATED:Ranking Every Need For Speed Game From Worst To Best
A racing game that seemingly struggles to run at more than fifteen frames per second,FlatOut3is the very definition of an unplayable mess. Painfully ugly and featuring vehicles as nimble and responsive as the finest of cruise liners, it was an outright atrocious experience. Oddly, the previousFlatOutgames were fairly well-received, which only makes this title all the more difficult to deal with.
7Rambo: The Video Game (Metascore 23)
Released seemingly out of the blue in 2014,Rambo: The Video Gamewas a perplexing movie tie-in title that came out thirty-some years after its source material.
It was also about as responsive as a game developed in the early 80s; an on-rails shooter riddled with quick-time events. Watching the originalRambofilm on fast-forward via a busted VCR player would be a more enriching experience. What’s more, the voice acting was literally ripped from the movie in all of its grainy glory, leading to surreal moments in which non-diegetic sounds could be heard behind a character’s speech.
6Fast and Furious: Showdown (Metascore 22)
Presumably released to coincide with the box office debut of the fifth main series film,Fast and Furious: Showdownis a mockery of a series that already receives a fair amount of mockery on its own. A failure as a shooter and an utter abomination as a racing title, Showdown’s driving controls feel like they’re on par with that awful Burger King cart racer on the 360.
Beyond that, the game is downright hideous - as in, it would have looked bad on the original Xbox, let alone the Xbox 360. Muddy and downright difficult to look at, far superior racing titles could probably be found on the Atari 2600.
5Afro Samurai 2: Revenge of Kuma - Volume 1 (Metascore 21)
The video game version of pushing old, rusted bits of metal through a grinder,Afro Samurai 2: Revenge of Kumawas so awful that it holds the dubious honor of being one of the few games to have been canceledafter it came out.
That’s right, this thing performed so poorly and received such negative reviews that the publisher decided to pull it from stores after it was released and refund everyone unfortunate enough to have purchased a copy. Though it tried to use cel-shading to obscure its downright PS1-era textures, this game was a major eyesore that constantly threatened to either crash or degrade into chunky, horrible frame-dropping madness. We aren’t holding our breath for a second volume.
4Infestation: Survivor Stories (Metascore 20)
First debuting on Steam under the nameThe War Z, Infestation: Survivor Storiesgarnered such a negative reputation that it had to be rebranded. Today, the game appears to have spawned a free-to-play battle royale sequel of sorts titledInfestation: The New Z, but it’s hard to tell if this is a legitimate successor or an entirely different game with an eerily similar design.
RELATED:The 8 Best And 7 WORST Quests In Skyrim
Made to cash in on the popularity ofDay Zback when it was still anARMA 2mod,Infestation: Survivor Storiesfelt like the culmination of the developer’s first few sessions with the Unity engine, and it was the first of what would become a torrent of awful zombie survival clones.
3Alone In The Dark Illumination (Metascore 19)
The successor to a series commonly heralded as the true progenitor of the survival horror genre, it’s sad to see whatAlone in the Darkhas become these days. A broken, buggyLeft 4 Deadwannabe on par with most of the other no-budget zombie survival guff found on Steam, it’s an absolute mockery of what was, 20 years ago, the scariest thing in video games.
The most laughable thing aboutAlone in the Dark Illuminationis that it had the gall to be an online co-op third-person shooter despite the fact that server populations were often too low to get a single four-player match together.
2Vroom in the Night Sky (Metascore 17)
Those who frequent worst-ever video games lists will probably be familiar with the infamousSuperman 64. A game that was mostly about flying through rings with the world’s most slippery controls,Vroom in the Night Skyfeels like some sort of awkward spiritual successor to that experience.
Released on the Nintendo Switch in 2017,Vroom in the Night Skymay seem like an inoffensive little title, but the wonky English translations and flat-out boring gameplay had most critics equating it to the entertainment value of filing a tax return. The Switch may have been desperate for new releasees in its early days, but we would have been far better off without this one.
1Ride To Hell Retribution (Metascore 17)
Quite possibly the most infamously awful game of all time (and certainly the worst release of the decade),Ride to Hell Retributionis such an astounding catastrophe that it almost demands a playthrough. They should give it to software engineer undergrads as an example of how not to code.
Set in the American midwest sometime after the Vietnam War, the plot revolves around a biker gang member seeking revenge for his brother’s murder. It may sound engaging, but the voice acting is downright laughable, animations are mostly nonexistent (save for the horribly awkward fully-clothed sex scenes), and the combat is quite literally broken. Unfortunately, it doesn’t even fall into so-bad-it’s-good territory, as most of it is just unplayable.
