While 2023 has been a roller coaster with huge ups and downs, 2024 has been a bit smoother. We just won’t find any truly awful games like Kong: Skull Island or The Lord of the Rings: Gollum this year, and even a notoriously poor publisher like Gamemill Entertainment has actually managed to release some relatively decent games for the most part – the world is over!
That said, as always, the worst games of the year list contains a good mix of objectively bad games – with lousy graphics, poor controls and lots of bugs – and games that are technically entertaining but disappoint so much that they have to be considered complete failures.
Kong : Survivor Instinct – 7Niveaux
Kong: Skull Island was by far the worst game of last year and undoubtedly a strong contender for the title of worst game of the decade. This year, the famous gorilla makes the list again, but developers 7Levels are happy that their game still surpasses last year’s Kong game.
You play as a gray-faced but physically capable man who is trying to find his daughter in a dilapidated city destroyed by giant apes and monsters. As a setup, it’s not bad, but unfortunately the graphics are so flat, the controls so stiff, and the combat so uninspired that the biggest threat ends up being your own boredom. Kong deserves better.
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Pneumata – Deadbolt Interactive
Since Amnesia: The Dark Descent scared us in 2010, we’ve seen a steady stream of atmospheric first-person horror games. Unfortunately, the scariest thing about many of these titles is their distinct lack of quality, and that’s unfortunately also the case with the rather bland Pneumata.
Visually, the game is quite scary, with fleshy monsters and lots of darkness that is only illuminated by limited light sources. But everything beneath the surface of the game is almost insultingly poor. From the thin story that hints and promises a lot only to deliver a disappointing and bland ending, to the gameplay that suffers from poor design and extremely stupid AI. Deadbolt Interactive clearly had no real ambitions with Pneumata, and this unfortunately shows on all parameters.
Skull & Bones – Ubisoft Singapour
Ubisoft’s pirate game began life as an evolution of the navigation portion of Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, but development slipped several times and had to be restarted. After 11 years, Ubisoft Singapore’s multiplayer game was finally released earlier this year, but unfortunately the result was extremely disappointing.
Skull & Bones doesn’t offer any interesting activities on land, and what happens at sea doesn’t come close to justifying the game’s high price. In fact, in many ways the experience is worse than Black Flag, because you don’t can’t board other ships and fight man to man, for example.
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Ubisoft’s 2024 has been a bit of a nightmare, and much of the blame can be placed on Skull & Bones.
Arius – Vata Games
The 2.5D Ario platform is just one letter missing from sharing its name with the best platform series on the market. Unfortunately, there’s a lot more missing from the game itself.
You can count everything good Ario does on one hand, and that hand doesn’t even have to have all his fingers intact. The level design is cramped, the simplest interactions require millimeter precision, and our protagonist has precisely zero momentum, which makes the game far too rigid.
Graphically, Ario is not a gem either, and the most positive thing about the experience is that it ends after about an hour.
Suicide Squad : Kill the Justice League – Rocksteady
Rocksteady delivers with Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League one of the most beautiful games of the year, and although the story does not reach the same heights as their famous Arkham series, there are still several sequences entertaining along the way. What went wrong?
In a way, it’s an identity crisis. The game tries to be both a multiplayer and a single-player experience, and the two legs of the game constantly find themselves straddling each other. Other times the design is just plain bad. For example, the appearance and behavior of enemies lack variety and the game’s missions are extremely monotonous. Suicide Squad can certainly entertain, but compared to Batman: Arkham Knight, it’s a step down in quality.
South Park : Snow Day – Question
With the fun role-playing games The Stick of Truth and The Fractured but Whole, South Park finally had two games that captured both the adult and childish humor of the series. Unfortunately, this year’s South Park: Snow Day game reminds us more of the series’ unsuccessful Nintendo 64 game, with its lackluster action gameplay and bombastic humor.
We like that the game has a single-player campaign with some fun scenes and lines, and that a rogue card system that grants new abilities provides some much-needed variety. But that doesn’t change the fact that South Park: Snow Day is a sloppy, monotonous affair that fails to make enough of its license.
Taxi Life: A city driving simulator – Simteract
When we think of the small but popular niche of driving-based work simulators (of which the undisputed king is arguably Euro Truck Simulator), we tend to think of gray and generic environments. That’s not the case in Taxi Life: A City Driving Simulator, which lets you play the role of a taxi driver in Spain’s second city, Barcelona.
Unfortunately, neither the Sagrada Familia nor the Gaudi architecture of the world can save what is a technically choppy and relatively flat simulator. Now, tourists rarely excel in intelligence, but here their AI is too stupid, and neither they nor other road users show any signs of intelligence. The result is an unsatisfactory driving experience that is not compensated for by other aspects of management.
Finally, the game (despite its title) simply lacks life. There are no conversations with passengers or fun experiences in the taxi to break the monotony. It’s all clinical, sexless and utterly boring.
Concord – Fireaxis Studios
In a year where game developers have laid off countless employees one after another, Concord has become the ultimate symbol of everything that is wrong with much of the gaming industry. “You could almost say that the shooter genre here is saturated, Sony Interactive management insisted on spending hundreds of millions of dollars on Fireaxis Games’ Concord – only to pull the plug on the project after just two weeks, shutting down the game servers and refund all customers.
However, the game’s lack of success can ultimately be attributed to the developers who, according to several media outlets, had an unhealthy corporate culture where there was no room for criticism and skepticism. The result was a game that, despite a long development time and an almost unlimited budget, was devoid of both charm and quality, as if it had been lumped together into a gray, shapeless mass.
Hopefully Concord will serve as a lesson to the industry’s money men to focus more on quality and offline content in the future, but we doubt it.
