[DX intro] [DX] Welcome back. It’s been a while since the
last time I opened my Steam library to highlight some of
the worst games imaginable. Today... it opens again. The last ten years gave us some
truly exceptional experiences, but you don’t need me to tell you that;
you’ve been playing them since 2010. What you want from me... are the worst. The games you’ve never heard of,
the games you can’t buy anymore, and the games that you
wouldn’t even if you could. But we’ll be doing things
a bit differently this time. Good games get awards,
and bad games should too. It’s time to celebrate
every game-breaking bug, all the bad voice acting,
and each terrible mechanic. These are... the Worst Games of the Decade. [DX] Our first category is for games
that even failed... at failing. Games not obscenely bad
enough to end up in a landfill, but still smelling reminiscent
enough of a dumpster that you know something is off immediately. [2013]
Platforms: PC (Windows), Xbox 360 Developer: Realmforge Studios
Publisher: Kalypso Media [DX] Dark is best described as a
stealth game that hates stealth games. It's a game full of so many
contradictory gameplay elements that you wonder what the goal actually was. Was it to create a compelling
vampire experience? Was it to make a good stealth game? Those concepts almost seem
at odds with one another, and Dark realizes this with its
miserable failure to do either. In Dark, you play as a vampire
named Eric, who is in search of his sire. Dark has, perhaps, the most
self-incriminating first level I've ever played, where everything wrong with
it is showcased so prominently that you'll immediately
uninstall and refund. In this level, you travel through a
museum, and you quickly realize that basic stealth concepts, such
as the ability to distract enemies, are locked behind a skill system. The game also, despite having
many long shadows to hide in, has no visibility mechanic. If you can believe it, this isn't the only
stealth game you'll see featured today that forgot to include stealth elements, but this is definitely unique and
quickly becomes so when you realize that, once spotted, you have no manner
of fighting back against enemies... so you die instantly. There's several remedies to an issue
like this, but Dark has none of them. The game has limited saves per area, limiting what you're
able to experiment with. The enemies have a
ridiculous field of view, their movement
patterns are inconsistent, you move slowly, you move bodies slowly, but the two most outstanding
issues are definitely the hive mind mentality of
the AI and the skill system. When spotted by one enemy, every
enemy seems to know exactly where you are, or your general vicinity. What absolutely kills Dark dead
is its beyond atrocious skill system where necessary stealth skills are
sold piecemeal, which makes the game literally unplayable if you
decide to invest skill points into the wrong categories. Spending points in abilities that actually
diversify the gameplay is a mistake because there's only
three categories that matter. It's impossible to actually take
down anyone without making noise or being spotted unless you
have points into those areas, which you need to do
so as soon as possible. To be fair, these other
abilities don't really work, because they come with the same
issue of needing further upgrades to not make any sound, and... they're broken. The teleportation is broken and
never goes where you need it to, the distraction doesn't
actually attract a group of people and you can only do it in
front of the enemy anyways. This is, by far, the only
vampire game I have ever played where I felt weaker than the humans. And I'm not the only
person who felt like this. I joked about the first level being so bad
that you'll want to immediately uninstall, but the vast majority of
players did exactly that. I played a good chunk of this
game, and you get achievements for making it to certain levels. Steam will then tell you
the percentage of players that have gotten that same achievement. Get ready for this. Only 28.6% of players made
it to the end of the first level. Only 20.1% (later 20.2%)
made it to the second, and only 14.8% made it to the third. Equally hilarious: only
17.1% fed on 5 enemies, and only 19.3% have used
vampiric powers 50 times. Once I had had quite enough
of this game, I decided to pursue outside investment in my skills. Upon becoming truly immortal, I
broke the game by loading into the floor, and as it turns out, all the AI
does know exactly where you are when an alarm is triggered. Dark is a game that no one wanted to play, probably because it's non-functioning
until you upgrade your abilities, and even then, you're
still susceptible to failure that is almost entirely
out of your control. [2011]
Platforms: PC (Windows) Developer: Black Lion Studios
Publisher: Viva Media [DX] Shadow Harvest: Phantom Ops is
one of the first examples you'll see today of what happens when complete amateurs
try to create big budget AAA experiences without any sort of understanding as
to how those games are constructed. Simply put, Shadow Harvest is every
brown and yellow third-person shooter that came out in 7th gen,
made with the elegance of a dog trying to use a pair of scissors. In a more technologically advanced
world, where "blah blah politics" and "blah blah dictators", you
play as either Alvarez or Myra. I stress either here, and
that's important for later. Alvarez is for your typical
run-and-gun gameplay, Myra is for stealth... and
also getting undressed because the only reason
the second character is female is to exploit them in... strange
quick-time event sequences... like this. The problem with the both of them is
that their sequences typically require more polished mechanics than the
game is able to provide the player with. Alvarez's gunplay is terrible because
the muzzle flash makes it impossible to see where your gun with already
uncontrollable recoil is firing, and if that wasn't bad enough -
and there weren't already enough post-processing filters
being used in this game - the entire screen blurs as you reload, again, making it impossible to see enemies. This makes all the combat a complete joke, especially when you face off against
snipers that can instantly kill you and you can't even shoot back because
the muzzle flash takes up half the screen. Myra, on the other hand,
has an even harder time because the enemies are all hive
mind, and if you alert one of them, they all know where you are and
you have limited options to fight back. Luckily, the enemies are also very stupid, so cheesing your way through areas isn't
impossible - just tedious and unrewarding. Admittedly, her stealth has
the ability to actually be fun, but that's quickly ruined when the
enemies can inexplicably see you through a one-inch crack at the
bottom of a window several yards away as you hack a computer. Neither of the characters are great, but you'd think they would complement
each other even with shoddy mechanics, but they don't, because they
don't have the capacity to. The trailer for this game and
its description on Steam both lie and say that you can
change characters at any time to approach situations the way you'd like, and while that's technically
true... it has no practical application. While you can physically
switch between them, there's certain situations requiring
that you not get spotted at all, which means that you must use Myra
to sneak into locations with her cloak. And it's in these sequences that Shadow
Harvest quickly wear at your patience, because the game doesn't really
amount to anything but frustration since nothing else is of any
interest or worth playing through. Well... the voice acting might be
with how hilariously terrible it is. [2016]
Platforms: PC (Windows) Developer: Interceptor Entertainment
Publisher: 3D Realms [DX] Bombshell is the luckiest
game you'll see today, seeing as how it got an incredible
prequel in the form of Ion Fury, but Shelly's first released
adventure was very hit or miss. Bombshell is a great
looking and sounding game, which already demonstrates a level of
quality far above many of the games here; and it's important to point that out because
of how the quality of the game's fidelity juxtaposes the quality of its gameplay. Bombshell seems to try as hard as it
possibly can to make its gameplay a chore, despite it being an all
right game at its core - by needlessly dragging on its levels
with what can only be referred to as "vapid annoyances". Bolstered by a wide range of weapons,
upgrade abilities and enemy types, Bombshell just isn't the type of game
you'd expect to frustrate you or bore you, but it manages to do it based
solely off how its maps work. Bombshell's levels are very, very large
environments that Shelly is dropped into and you need to collect
keys in order to open doors to progress further inside of them. These levels have side quests, challenges,
and all sorts of things to find, but the reward is hardly ever
worth the effort to get them because you'd typically get
more credits for ability upgrades by just doing the linear
progression path and killing enemies. These aspects of the game
are also copy-and-pasted, so nothing ever really
feels unique when you do it and the amount of walking you
have to do from point A to point B will get tiring quickly. The combat is great, until
the game decides to throw a horde of acid enemies
your way in the first level, which means you have to stay
as far away from them as possible or risk getting damaged when
they spit on you or explode, which happens about... 99% of the time. Bombshell's levels have a
serious issue with visual clarity, so these tiny enemies that
explode and damage you with acid can just blend into the environment and
burst whenever without you noticing them. This is why the game never
reaches the level of "great", because while its individual pieces are
fun and you can have a blast with them when the game isn't being tedious... it is tedious with how long its levels are, the amount of pointless
backtracking you need to do, and its lack of enemy variation in
the context of the scale of its levels. With all this said, Bombshell's
quality does shine through at times when you can chain abilities with the
primary and secondary weapon firing modes to obliterate enemies
in a couple of seconds. [Shelly] That's for Earth. [2011]
Platforms: PC (Windows), PS3, Xbox 360 Developer: Techland
Publisher: Ubisoft [DX] Call of Juarez: The Cartel is the
spiritual sequel to Rogue Warrior that I've always wanted. It's a game that is so dumb that its problems
which got it nominated for this category are almost inconsequential because you
keep playing it out of a morbid curiosity to see what... stupid
thing will happen next. The game starts out with the absurd premise
that the U.S. may go to war with Mexico over the actions of a cartel, and an
interagency task force is assembled to stop this cartel
before things go too far. What then proceeds is one of the most
mind-numbing, yet hilarious journeys ever as all the titular characters show
an abhorrent disregard for the law by committing blatantly illegal acts and only making the situation
worse with their incompetence. These acts include but are not limited to: getting confidential informants killed,
planting evidence, stealing evidence, false accusations of criminal
activity, and my personal favorite: outright domestic terrorism. The degree to which this game does
not care about its story making any sense is admirable, especially
because it is funny at times, like when the characters
infiltrate a strip club and have to convince the security
that they're a group of swingers and they want nothing more
than to get sex counseling advice. A game like this wouldn't be
complete without immature sex jokes, and this game has a lot of them. With that out of the
way... The Cartel sucks. Its gameplay is something you
sit through to get to its cutscenes, and that's only if you find
them worth the time like I do. Otherwise, you're in for an incredibly
monotonous and uninspired shooter that doesn't even really feel complete, with various ham-fisted yet half-baked
mechanics seeing the light of day. You can pick from one of three characters, each with their own side objectives
and special gameplay perk, but none of them are game changing,
so they all essentially play the same. The gunplay is tolerable, but the enemy placement
and interactivity of the world makes it very easy
to win every gunfight, as cars take on the physical
properties of video game gas tanks and immediately explode when fired upon. The only real challenge in this game
comes from properly using its mechanics that clearly needed more polish. The best is when you're driving
the car and your own friends will give you the wrong directions,
causing you to fail the segment. The Cartel is a game that you
can tell was rushed out the door, but it still manages to retain just
enough of whatever the original vision was to not be frustrating to play. Couple that with its absurd story,
and you have a game that is... ...not really worth
playing through... at all... but if you do, you'll at least have
some good laughs along the way. The reason Bombshell is
the worst at being the worst is because it's a game
I genuinely have fun in, even with its problems, because it
displays a degree of sophistication that no other game you'll see today does. Bombshell is also really helped
by the fact that its protagonist isn't a bumbling idiot with the personality
of a machine learning algorithm. It was obvious from Bombshell alone that
Shelly wasn't just Duke Nukem with mascara, and I like to think that Ion
Fury is the full realization of that, even if it was done
by different developers. And... that's it, folks. That's the end of games that don't
make me want to vomit... out of my ass. Our next category begins our
gradual descension into hell. The last ten years made making
games and getting into the industry more accessible than ever. This category is dedicated to the con men and the well-intentioned individuals
that bit off far more than they could chew making baby's first video game. [2018]
Platforms: PC (Windows), PS4, Xbox One Developer & Publisher: Phantom 8 Studios [Marcus] My father always said... ...that it's our dreams that
reveal our deepest nature. If that is true... ...then I'm lost. [DX] The fun thing about Past
Cure is determining whether it is a commendable attempt at a game, or the height of arrogance. Either is valid given the
evidence the game provides, because it is... absolutely AWFUL, although not without
some interesting concepts. Past Cure, otherwise known
as "Fever Dream John Wick", is a game about an army
veteran named Marcus who somehow gained psychic abilities, trying to figure out a grand
conspiracy with him at the center of it. It's not nearly as exciting as it sounds. For one, the game's script was
almost certainly not written in English and the translation
leaves a lot to be desired, as does the voice acting as a whole. The game looks great until you examine... ...literally anything. There was a valiant attempt to mask
the game's budgetary shortcomings but it doesn't do nearly as good
a job as something like Visage. Past Cure looks best when
presenting its abstract concepts, which do look very good, but
they're... hardly in the game. The game instead decides to
showcase its shoddily furnished buildings with... no one in them in
the majority of the game. Now, a common thread you'll
see in the games in this category is a unique misunderstanding of anatomy only seen in games made
by people so inexperienced. Past Cure demonstrates this
repeatedly with characters that... ...almost... look human? And if I had the time, I could sit here and
detail exactly what how they were made, right down to which brushes were
used to texture the skin of the characters. That's the level to which the
seams of this game can be seen, my point being that
this game tries very hard to mask it having been
made by complete amateurs, but it doesn't even have
the competence to do that, so imagine how awful the gameplay
is since it can't be covered up by Unreal Engine 4's
post processing effects. This is a third-person
shooter with stealth, melee, time manipulation, and puzzles. Somehow, the puzzles end up
being the best aspect of the game because the riddles are
genuinely well written, but I really shouldn't say
"somehow" as if it's a surprise; if you butcher this many core
elements of your mechanics, you're bound to end up with garbage. Marcus strafes like he's playing hopscotch,
which makes the movement untenable, leading you to stay in one
cover for an entire gunfight, which is where you discover
how awful the gunplay is. The crosshairs are horrible,
and have a circle at the center which must be lined up before
you fire for the highest accuracy; and it's entirely possible
to die waiting for them to do so. Not that accuracy really matters,
the guns have mostly insane recoil and headshots are
inconsistent kills anyways. The melee works, but you're
rarely ever in a position to use it because the supernatural enemies
kill you instantly if you're in range, and you're typically fighting
five or more people with guns. If you use your powers too much,
the mannequin men appear and kill you, which could be interesting - but
because everything else is so bad, just becomes frustrating because
the powers are almost necessary to have a fair game experience. The stealth is... just crouching. That's it. If you get spotted... The End. And you're going through all this for
a story that doesn't make any sense, because nothing is ever explained. Nothing is explained. But I had to find this out
from a video on YouTube, because I couldn't finish Past Cure! In addition to everything I've
already mentioned about this COMPLETE JOKE of a game, it also has bugs. Like... this one! Or the one that prevents you from
progressing because a specific enemy will not move when he needs to. [2018]
Platforms: PC (Windows) Developer & Publisher:
Royal Rudius Entertainment [Boston Joe] Here. Take this. [Mitchell] A wrench. Why a wrench? [Boston Joe] Because
I only got one crowbar, and I have no
intention to give it away. [Mitchell] Well, I got bad
memories with crowbars anyways. Mitchell, by the way. [Boston Joe] Joe. But
everyone calls me Boston Joe. [Mitchell] All right, Joe. Let's save
your friends from spiders with vaginas. [DX] Hunt Down the Freeman is... a game (???) taking place in the Half-Life
universe about an HECU named Mitchell Shephard seeking
revenge on Gordon Freeman. Not a terrible concept by any means, but it's a game that quickly
balloons out of control and mutates into a poor
man's Metal Gear Solid V. It really says a lot about
Hunt Down The Freeman that even I can draw this comparison, considering I haven't played
MGS V: The Phantom Pain. It's an experience that is
more a collection of cinematics than it is a full game, but
for all the wrong reasons. I'm a big advocate for games
that are more story-driven, but the reason I make this remark is
because the gameplay portions of this game are so outrageously unplayable
that you likely see more cutscenes than you do gameplay. Not that you want to see the cutscenes,
mind you, because they're dogshit, but my point is that there's something
seriously wrong with your game when you spend a decent
chunk of it flying through levels with commands that make you invisible to AI because the game is so poorly designed. The main problem with Freeman
is how directionless it is. In sharp contrast to Valve's own titles,
Hunt Down The Freeman is designed more like an open world
game than it is a linear shooter. Levels are enormous, and where
you're actually supposed to go is usually a mystery, as if
it's left up to interpretation. Because it's riddled with bugs, you're
also constantly second-guessing yourself on how to proceed. The amount of times I asked
myself whether I wasn't understanding what the game wanted me to
do, or if I just needed to noclip, was countless. Things just happen in this game, levels end with no real reason
to, furthering the confusion. With the amount of cutscenes this game has, you'd think there'd be the ability to
infer what you're supposed to be doing, but not really - the cutscenes are almost
entirely independent of the gameplay. You could just watch the cutscenes and
fully understand what's happening in them without the context of
them being part of a game. To be fair, this isn't just on
the horrendous level design; it's also how enemies spawn. The Combine appear to behave like
idiots, but it's really just how they spawn into any given encounter that
makes them appear braindead, which is especially egregious given
that part of this game takes place during the Seven Hour War, and you
can just run past any Synths you see. It's genuinely hard to criticize this
game because it's barely a game. They created all these assets, but
just putting a player and several enemies into a confined space... does NOT. does NOT. MAKE. does NOT. MAKE. GAMEPLAY. There's nothing
comprehensive about this game; what little it attempts falls flat on its
face likely due to a misunderstanding of Half-Life's design ideology
and overall inexperience. In essence, it's baby's first video
game, but with high production value - something that's obvious in its
story in addition to its gameplay. Hunt Down The Freeman's
story is a 14-year-old's fan fiction realized in video game form. Its story, the characters,
their designs, their dialogue, all exuded from the lens of a child, or
someone equally as impressionable. Mitchell is a cringelord and the
personification of teenage angst. [Sasha] I always saw you
as a hero after that day. [Mitchell] Hero? Heh. You're
talking to a villain, my dear. The hero inside of me died, many,
many years ago when I was young. [Sasha] Isn't every villain
a hero in their own story? [Mitchell] Not in this one. [DX] This is only made more
absurd by all the ridiculous tone shifts in the narrative, like the
introduction of Colonel Cue. There's also the unintentionally
hilarious, like when Mitchell's self-fulfilling prophecy of everyone
dying around him becomes apparent. [Capt. Roosevelt] That's not a curse. You made a deal with the devil. Here... you have it. [DX] There's also the infamous ending. [Adam] I can explain. - [Mitchell] You lied to me.
- [Adam] No, that wasn't the deal. He... he told-- [groans in pain] Mitch, please.
- [Mitchell] Betrayed me. You used me. You fucked up my face. [Adam groans] [Mitchell] And now... [Adam] Mitch, please... I... I can explain... [Mitchell] You have my permission to die. [DX] At the end of the day, Hunt Down
The Freeman is a great example to look at if you're working on a mod - not just
because of what I've already mentioned, but because the performance
of this game... is appalling. At one point, I had to just stop
everything and look down at the floor to get a stable framerate because
I was afraid the game would blue screen my computer
with how badly it was lagging. [2013-2014]
Platforms: PC (Windows/macOS), Mobile (iOS/Android), PS3 Developer & Publisher: Semaphore [DX] Unearthed: Trail of Ibn Battuta is
the quintessential amateur video game, to the point where you
almost think it's a parody instead of a full game that you're
meant to play and enjoy à la Duty Calls. In Unearthed, you play
as discount Nathan Drake as you and your sister who
enjoys pleasuring invisible penises try to find a long lost treasure. Unearthed is like a game on fast forward; you arrive at a temple, do
the simplest puzzle ever, do some obstacles, do more puzzles,
fight someone and shoot people, all in the span of fifteen minutes. I think the cutscenes are actually
longer than the gameply segments, which says a lot because of how many
systems they try to cram into this game. There's third-person shooting,
melee, puzzles, running segments, and... two driving segments. Of course, none of these
are done particularly well because they're just too simple to have
any complexity to engage the player with, and they're too cheap to wow the player
with anything they haven't seen before. To be fair, I was certainly
wowed when this game crashed three times for no reason,
resetting my graphics settings. I was also wowed when I
beat the game and realized that Troy Baker had done voice work for it. But, most importantly,
I was truly in awe when, after sitting through the credits and
being dumped back into the main menu, I saw that this game... had
a zombies mode. Seriously. This game has a mode where
you can choose any character, go to any map... and just shoot zombies. Why? Why not. [2018]
Platforms: PC (Windows), PS4, Xbox One Developer & Publisher:
Storyline Team [DX] Crying Is Not Enough is what
happens when you think you can make a better Silent Hill game than any
of the ones Konami put out after 4, but then you realize you have no
talent, and you also have no brain. Crying Is Not Enough is a Silent
Hill/Resident Evil-inspired game without any - and I mean -
ANY of the understanding those games have of
their respective design. I remember none of the
characters' names, nor do I care to, so I'll just say that
Husband is trying to find Wife but Wife has Mother who is
entangled in... "Strange Events." The reason I'm so apathetic
about this one in particular is because of how
BLATANTLY horrendous it is. The game is so reflective you'll
think you have an RTX card, characters look like
freshly dug up corpses, and the voice acting is some
of the worst I've ever heard. Gameplay wise, Crying is
somehow even worse than you'd think based on everything you've seen so far. It's a game that clearly wants to
mimic the linearity and backtracking associated with the linearity
of games like Resident Evil, but without any obstacles preventing
them from triggering events they shouldn't that ultimately establish that linearity. Case in point: in this game, I activated
a boss fight that I wasn't able to beat until much later, just because
I wandered into the space since the game is so damn directionless. Imagine if you could just walk into the
Umbrella Labs beneath the Spencer Mansion in Resident Evil 1, and
trigger the Tyrant fight, and all you have to
fight him is your Beretta. That's the level of
incompetence seen in Crying. Enemies would be easy to kill if not
for the spastic aim of the character; the gun goes flying when
he fires a single round, making it very difficult to conserve ammo. The game is so dark that
certain paths to important routes can be obscured, making an
already confusing map layout nearly impossible to navigate, navigation is where the bulk of your time
is spent because of how open the map is and how items are conveniently
placed at opposite ends of where they need to be used. The main problem with this is
that because the world is so open and grants so much freedom to the player, the contextual room sequencing
that is meant to provide the player with an order of events is totally broken, and you have no clue what items you're
supposed to use to trigger what events. You better get used to running, because
you're going to be doing a whole lot of it, but don't forget to mute the game
if you're playing it near anyone because the running sounds
like something you'd hear... in an adult SFM animation. [DX] There has never been a
game more emblematic of Steam's complete
apathy towards quality control than Hunt Down The Freeman. Only on Steam could a game so... GOD GODDAMN GODDAMN ATROCIOUS have seen the light of day; and only Valve would allow
someone to so brazenly desecrate their own intellectual property
the way this game does, and continue to keep lying about it
two years after the game released even when said lie
violates their own policy. There are incredible indie games out there; Hunt Down The Freeman
is not only not one of them, it is undoubtedly the worst of them. [DX] Developing a licensed game is
the equivalent of starting a marathon by shooting yourself in the knee. You have no time, no money, and no passion. It's time to talk about some
licensed games that failed to clear the lowest bar imaginable. [2013]
Platforms: PC (Windows), PS3, Xbox 360, Wii U Developer: Terminal Reality
Publisher: Activision [DX] The Walking Dead:
Survival Instinct is... just pathetic. There will be games after this
that are equally or more unfinished, but this game really
should have been canceled. Featuring an embarrassing
lack of polish that is only seen when a publisher tries to
rush a game out the door, ou'd think that alone would be the
reason this game is so shit, but it isn't. Terminal Reality, not to be outdone
by the incompetence of Activision, also puts on a masterclass
of how to design a game to be as boring and
painful to play as possible so no one actually completes it. In Survival Instinct,
you play as Daryl Dixon, with the game serving as a prequel to
the first season of The Walking Dead; and the immediate outstanding
issue with this is that the game barely has any writing. It barely has cutscenes. Norman Reedus and Michael
Rooker, who reprise their roles as Daryl and Merle respectively,
are given nothing to do; and you can't even play as Merle,
which will never cease to amaze me. So from the very beginning, you're
basically whoever doing whatever because the game forgot to have a story, and all its side characters are about
as interesting as a bucket of cold piss. What remains is one of the most
broken and infuriating experiences ever. The first time I booted this game up, it
gave me a clear warning to stay away by only rendering a small part of the
screen where you could see through walls. Nevertheless, I persisted. In Survival Instinct, you're trying
to make your way to an army base and you stop several times along the
way in small towns to gather supplies and recruit other survivors. Every single mechanic in this
game is complete GARBAGE, so none of this is fun. For starters, the methods you're
given to defend yourself are all made so you're at an inherent and
illogical disadvantage to the Walkers. You can stab the Walkers in the
head to insta-kill them from the back, but not the front...? You can only do that if you get
into these awful scripted sequences that were designed solely for controllers, where you have to line up the cursor to
their heads as the entire screen shakes. In the same vein, you can hit
walkers with various blunt objects, but you can't just target
the head to destroy it. Sometimes you hit them in the chest,
and they drop dead which makes no sense. It should be mentioned
that, as terrible as this all is, it's significantly worse on PC
because the mouse is bugged. Even if you turn off Aim Assist,
which comes on by default, the mouse still snaps to random objects. And I really mean RANDOM objects. Objects with no importance will
have a certain magnetic pull to them, and when you couple that with the
game's irremovable mouse acceleration, you end up with a jankfest where
you literally cannot control your actions, making it impossible to do anything. If you can stomach all
this and continue to play, you'll realize the survivor
system is just TERRIBLE because you go through all this
trouble to get them in your party and then you send them to get supplies, and they come back an inch from death
with a single ration or very little fuel. It's unbelievable how bad this
game is, but it doesn't end there. There's segments where
you have to use your gun, so ammo conservation is out the window, there's routes you can take in your
car which have predetermined stops, making fuel conservation impossible, and all of this because this is a linear
game which has its survival mechanics fisted into it like you would stuff
a turkey's ass on Thanksgiving. But my favorite is this bug I found. This game is so lazy that I
actually got caught in a loop where the zombies kept
spawning behind me as soon as I looked away
from their spawn point. [2013]
Platforms: PC (Windows), PS3, Xbox 360 Developer: Gearbox Software
Publisher: Sega [DX] I have a long history
with Aliens: Colonial Marines. I've called it the worst first
person shooter ever released, and it looks like it's time for me
to explain why I think that again. I'll preface this by saying that I
think it's the worst first-person shooter from a major studio; I've played several independent
shooters that are far worse, but that's either because they
were made by complete amateurs or in the case of
something like Psychotoxic... the game clearly isn't complete. Colonial Marines is another game
that should have been outright canceled, and I'm sure at some point it probably was, with it taking around six years
to finally see store shelves. The final product is not only a disgrace to
its licensed property and source material, but also one of the worst
showcases of mechanics ever. It's really no wonder Sega had
to lie about this game to sell it. Colonial Marines certainly
isn't a complex game, but it did take me a while to figure
out why I hated the game so much from a mechanical perspective
the first time I played it. The tutorial mission is plagued
with random occurrences that you don't identify as gameplay
staples until you're well into at least the third mission. For example, one of the infamously
horrible things about this game is how you seem to have a higher priority
to the Xenomorphs than your squad mates; and they will, to their own
detriment, target you specifically, oftentimes dogpiling you until you're dead. Xenomorphs will stagger
you and sometimes pull you into ridiculous scripted sequences. The sound it makes
when they rip off your armor is the worst sound effect
in the history of gaming. And it plays CONSTANTLY. I don't know why someone
associated that sound with armor, but to me it sounds like
you're being lit on fire. This is a noise you're hearing constantly,
because even if the Xenos don't melee you, their blood will also deplete your armor. Every single gunfight in this game leaves
you with considerably less armor and health than you had going into it,
even if you land every shot because there's no way
to reliably avoid damage. Of course, you're not going
to be hitting every single shot because this game's gunplay is broken. With every weapon,
your aim shifts around, leading you to miss shots
you should be landing. You can be standing perfectly
still and the weapon still sways, which means you lose
accuracy no matter what. This is an intentional mechanic, and
this was explained to me by TemplarGFX, the creator of the ACM Overhaul mod,
in my original Colonial Marines video. Quote: [DX] I originally thought the hit
detection was just not working, but he cleared that up as well. Quote: [DX] I couldn't have
said it any better myself. When you make a first-person shooter
and the shooting aspect of the game doesn't work, your game is garbage. I have never encountered this level of
incompetence with any other major release because almost everything
terrible about this game is intentional. Another good example
of this is the Boiler Xenos you encounter midway through the game. This is supposed to be a stealth section,
and making sound attracts the Boilers which explode and kill you. I remarked how busted this segment
seemed when I first covered this game. TemplarGFX, once again,
had a good explanation. Quote: [DX] Aliens: Colonial
Marines is so atrocious that when recording capture for this game, I had to quit playing it. It was so bad that if I
played a single second more, I would have lost my mind. Likewise, if I have to keep
talking about this game, I will also lose my mind.
So let's just move on. [2014]
Platforms: PC (Windows), PS3, Xbox 360 Developer: Teyon
Publisher: Reef Entertainment [confused screaming] [DX] Rambo: The Video Game
is a more traditionally bad game. It doesn't have many bugs,
there's no horrendous mechanics, it's just a game that is
not in the right genre - and probably a property that shouldn't have
been adapted in this medium to begin with. Rambo is a rail shooter that
adapts the first three Rambo films - quite terribly adapts
them, for various reasons. The game clearly had very little money, so
it rips its audio straight from the films; but because of that lack of money,
it doesn't have the scope necessary to properly bring its worlds to life. What this leads to is a butchering
of the stories, First Blood specifically, where it will cut off sequences or
not give the proper context for them, which just makes every scene hilarious. In this scene here, Rambo is
supposed to have a PTSD flashback of being tortured in Vietnam,
but they didn't animate that so he just starts screaming like a
pterodactyl for no apparent reason. [angry_scream_619.wav] [DX] Even the scenes that are
visually adapted 1:1 are terrible because the audio mixing is
horrible and you can't hear anything. [DX] Every character in the game
looks like a gelatin version of their real life counterparts. Rambo himself looks like he's
a half-man, half-penguin hybrid smeared in baby oil. Jokes aside, this game is a total
bastardization of every film it adapts, which says a lot because two
out of the three films it's adapting are mindless action and
it can't even get that right. The gameplay is no better -
in fact, it's considerably worse. You move from area to area shooting people,
which, of course, isn't inherently bad, but it's this weird combination
of mechanics the game has with its total inconsistency that
drives me up a wall every time I play it. For starters, enemies
have bulletproof hats, meaning that headshots
don't always kill the enemy. You can shoot someone's
hat, move onto the next target, but the first idiot isn't dead
so he continues to shoot you. Reloading in this game is putrid, with this awful mini-game that
determines how much ammo you get. Admittedly, I despise active
reload just as a concept, but in this game in particular, it
feels like an annoying gimmick that serves no tactical
challenge to the player, and it's pretty bad for one other reason. Rambo regains health in what
is referred to as "Wrath Mode." Rambo starts screaming,
which slows the game down, and for every enemy
killed, Rambo regains health. It is entirely possible
to activate Wrath Mode and get into the reload
mini-game at the same time. The reload is then
slowed down as well, and because Wrath Mode
depletes the second you toggle it off, you have just wasted it entirely
because you had to reload. The mistake they made with
Wrath Mode was tying slow motion and health regeneration together. Wrath Mode can't be a recharging
bar like the one in F.E.A.R., because the player could
then just infinitely spam regen while trying to use slow motion. The existence of this sort of design
oversight doesn't really surprise me, it's just par for the course with
such an amateurishly made game. This is further proven in the level where
Rambo has to fight off the National Guard, but he can't kill any of them. You have to shoot them
in the legs to disarm them, but you can accidentally kill them
anyways as they fall with a stray bullet. The idea of having a shooting
segment where you can't kill the people trying to kill you is laughable, and
another indicator that maybe this film shouldn't have been adapted. The game is also chock full of quick
time events that are very rudimentary, but if just their mere presence
is enough to set you off, there's a perk that
makes you never fail them. Rambo: The Video Game
is a slog to play through. It doesn't do anything well, it just
does things to differing degrees of bad. The only entertainment you'll get
out of it is seeing how they recreate scenes from the movie
with such a low budget. [DX] This is the last time I
will ever talk about this game, because I can't come up with
any more clever ways of saying that Aliens: Colonial Marines... DOES DOES NOT DOES NOT WORK. My hatred of this game stems
from the fact that it just doesn't... function properly. And quite honestly, I feel
like I'm in Bizarro World when people tell me
that it's "not that bad" or that it's not even in contention
for the worst first-person shooter. As someone who has actually played
the games that people say are worse, I can tell you that they
are not nearly as broken. In fact, Colonial Marines makes
them all look competent by comparison. It's just a shame that this is a
licensed game, because if it wasn't, you'd be seeing it in
our next category instead. [2016] Platforms: PC (Windows), PS4
Developer & Publisher: Capcom [DX] Umbrella Corps is a game so miserable
that you couldn't find a multiplayer lobby to play in on its release day. It's a game I bought for $1
during a sale, and I think I overpaid. Capcom's smartest move with this game
was scrubbing it of the Resident Evil name. It fails as a third-person shooter,
it fails as a first-person shooter, and it fails as a competitive shooter. I say it tries to be all
those things with confidence because of how hilariously
jarring the gameplay is. You're tasked with obtaining virus samples,
defending points and recovering briefcases. If this game functioned properly
or was developed competently, none of these objectives would
be inherently difficult to complete. But it doesn't, and it wasn't, so their difficulty is determined
the amount of patience you have, your ability to exploit the AI, and which
map from the Resident Evil universe the mission takes a shit on the face of. You've likely already noticed
that the character takes up a decent portion of the screen, and, of course, there's no FOV options. When you aim rifles, you go into
first-person and the low FOV persists, becoming a problem because of how
hard it is to see enemies around you. For pistols, you don't
even go into first person; you zoom in on the character's
hand, but you can still see their head, because what this game needed
was even less visible screen space. The gunplay is very important
because of how the AI behaves. They're either totally braindead
and you can run right past them, sometimes never even seeing
a single enemy in the mission - or they obliterate you. This likely isn't helped by the
horrendous zombie shield mechanic that makes you stop moving
so they can swarm you, or the terrible placement
of objectives in Domination where they can flank you from all sides. The inconsistency with
the AI leads you to attempt various pseudo-speedrunning methods so you
don't even come into contact with them so they don't have the chance to kill you - because if they do, you
fail the entire mission. And since the missions are
structured in tiers, if you fail one tier, you fail the entire thing and
have to start from the first one. But I saved the best for last. These missions all take place
in various Resident Evil locations, except they seem to have forgotten that
Umbrella Corps is a competitive shooter because they literally copy-and-pasted
the maps from the old games with zero regard for how they would
play in an entirely different genre. What's more, for some missions,
they decided the original game should inspire the mechanics, so when you get to the Raccoon
City Police Department levels... they limit your ammo. Umbrella Corps seriously
borders on unplayable. It's a game where you do the same
three things on the same map six times and they only bothered to record four
lines for the character you're playing, so you'll start losing your mind as
you repeat the same horrible experience over and over. [2011]
Platforms: PS3, Xbox 360 Developer: feelplus
Publisher: Square Enix [DX] Mindjack is a boring game. Not just boring in the sense that
it's bad and offers no excitement because of how terrible it is, but boring because it's been
outdone in terms of its terribleness as the years have passed by. At the very least, Mindjack functions, which is a lot more than can be said for
some of the games you'll see after this. That doesn't make it good, it just means
that there's really nothing notable about it beyond its hilarious and
sad attempts to mimic the Western third-person
shooters of its time. Mindjack is a third-person
cover shooter where you can hack into the minds of your enemies - an
interesting premise executed poorly because this is the entire game. You're guided through a very thin story
by countless shooting segments in corridors that all play the exact same. Hacking into other enemies
isn't even really necessary, as you have the ability to use
downed enemies as mind slaves that turn on their allies. You can acquire these
mind slaves incredibly easily because of how dumb the AI is, almost letting themselves be
killed so they can join your cause. The AI also... sinks
into the floor when it dies. It's certainly not the most
offensive gameplay I've ever seen, but it begins to erode at your
patience after you finish the... THIRD consecutive corridor and you realize that you're not
going to be doing anything else for the rest of the game,
save for the boss battles. More on those later. I can't understate just
how bad the AI truly is; sometimes they're blind and you
can pull off ridiculous flanks on them, and other times they
just don't move at all. Your teammate's AI is equally suicidal,
as they run into rooms with no cover and get themselves
downed on a consistent basis, and you have no ability to control them. Hacking into other characters
is amusing, but, like I said, entirely unnecessary and
sometimes even pointless because certain
characters, like the robots, can't fit through the tiny
corridors and actually do anything. In this game, you're in an airport
for what feels like two hours. Then, you head underground and do
the same thing seventeen more times until you get above ground and
do the same thing ten more times, then you fight a boss. Mindjack has the worst boss battles ever, mainly because you don't
have to fight the bosses - not all of them anyways. In this fight, you can
just run around the area, and the boss will be
defeated... by a timer. I ran into the middle of the fight,
getting shot from every single direction, and then the boss fight just... ended. In sharp contrast, there's another boss fight after this
that drags on for about thirty minutes because the pussy enemies keep
running from you and are nigh invincible. Mindjack BLOWS. It's very obviously a cheap cash-in, one of countless attempts to ride
on the coattails of Gears of War, and it's definitely the worst one. But... we did get this gem out of it. [2018]
Platforms: PC (Windows), PS4 Developer: Human Head Studios
Publisher: Square Enix [inaudible raging] [DX] The Quiet Man is the most
puzzling game you'll see today. The fact that this game made it beyond
a single pitch is absolutely baffling, leading me to believe
that the game that we got is much different than whatever
was greenlit into production. There has never been a game
more ungrateful of all the work that goes into developing
a game than this one. It could even be argued that
there was significant meddling during its development cycle that got us
such a complete disaster and abomination. The Quiet Man is a game
where you can't hear anything. All of its gameplay and its entire
story play out with nothing being audible except very muted sound effects. There are no subtitles for spoken dialogue, and there are no subtitles
when the characters sign. This is because the main
character, Dane, is deaf. If I was deaf, I would
likely be even more enraged than I am just thinking about this game, because of how poorly it portrays
what it's really like to be deaf. And not from a story perspective,
Dane tends to behave mostly like a deaf person would; he can clearly read
lips and obviously sign, but the game's presentation of
being deaf is what's so abhorrent. The Quiet Man is literally
just a game without sound. There is no attempt to educate
its audience on what it's like to live without one of your senses, it just presents itself and expects
the player to make sense of its lunacy without the context of how a deaf
person actually perceives the world. Instead, it's more like you're just
robbed of your ability to hear randomly and have to navigate life without any of
the preparation a deaf person has had. It's difficult to put into
words how infuriating it is to sit through a game for
three hours with cutscenes playing without the ability to understand
ANY of what's going on. All I could think in the
back of my head was, "I can't believe someone
actually made a game like this." The intent was obviously to try to
put the player into the shoes of Dane, but it doesn't work because Dane
knows what's happening and we don't. The gameplay is just
a vehicle for the story, and while that sounds reductive
and potentially even insulting towards game narratives as a whole, trust me... it isn't. It's a beat 'em up with zero variety. You enter a room, you fight people,
you leave the room, and repeat until another insane cutscene plays. Making any sense of this
game's story is almost impossible, especially when it presents you with
a twist at the end after the credits roll. This game received exactly one
patch, and only after it was clear what a creative failure it was. The Quiet Man: Answered
adds sound and subtitles, and this is where the
shit really hits the fan because once you can comprehend
the story... you realize it's atrocious. Dane, the main character, was
abused as a child by his father, Robert, after Lorraine, his mother
was accidentally shot and killed. As an adult, he meets a woman named Lala
who looks nearly identical to Lorraine, and while he clearly has feelings for Lala, she's in a relationship
with his best friend, Taye, who was also there with Dane
when his mother was killed. Robert is trying to get revenge
on the person who killed Lorraine, a gangbanger named Isaac. So Robert and Lala come up
with a plan to stage a kidnapping to goad Dane into killing Isaac and
getting revenge for him killing Lorraine; but, as it turns out, the person
who really killed Lorraine was Taye. And the only way Dane can beat
Taye is by becoming his alter ego, the Quiet Man. What? [2010]
Platforms: PC (Windows), PS3, Xbox 360 Developer: IO Interactive
Publisher: Square Enix [random male #1] ...genius with
a knife. You know what I mean. [???] [random male #1] Careful, mate!
[random male #2] Goddamn. It's close. [DX] Have you ever played a game
so bad where, during the first mission, you immediately wanted to stop
playing and forget the game existed? Say hello to Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days. Built on the back of the
success of the first game, which was also by no means
good, but at least interesting, Dog Days takes everything Kane & Lynch:
Dead Men did with its lukewarm mediocrity and turns it into barely
comprehensible sewage. Dog Days is a hard game to talk
about without developing an urge to jump from your nearest
window, so I'll keep this short. Kane & Lynch 2 is a third-person
cover shooter where cover doesn't work, and neither does shooting. If you're playing it at the pace
of a directionally challenged slug, it can still be finished within... FOUR FOUR HOURS because it virtually has no story. It's a game that looks exactly
like whatever its tiny budget was, but the game tries to cover this up
with even worse-looking visual effects that only compound how
cheap the game looks. When you get into the
first gameplay segment, you realize the camera is your
first enemy because it bobbles as if someone is actually
holding it behind the characters, a move which I'm sure got many
people to return the game immediately. You can turn this off, but I'm not sure who
this feature appeals to in the first place, and it's on by default. Once you get to some real enemies, you
realize just how horrible the gunplay is with sets of enormous crosshairs
designating where your bullets actually go as if the gun had fifteen different
barrels it could shoot from. But don't worry; for every round that
hits an enemy, you get a hitmarker. It's baffling how the gunplay
is also bad in Dead Men and they made it worse here. Sometimes headshots don't do anything,
and entire sprays in range barely land. And that's... the whole game. You enter a level, you shoot some people, there's a lot of incoherent screaming
with atrocious audio mixing like this: [almost inaudible garbage] [Shang-Si] Therefore... I make this offer. Mr. Lynch... [INAUDIBLE GUNSHOT LOL] [DX] And then the game is over. The game just... ends. I've had people legitimately tell me
that every design decision in this game is deliberate, so this game is right where it belongs
because it's apparently deliberately shit. [2013]
Platforms: PC (Windows), PS3, Xbox 360 Developer: Eutechnyx
Publisher: Deep Silver [DX] Ride To Hell: Retribution is the
most unfinished game ever shipped. Announced in 2008, canceled in 2009, resurrected that same year
and then slated for 2011, Ride To Hell was finally released in 2013. There has never been a game with
a name that more accurately reflects its development cycle than this one. Ride To Hell is what happens when you
run out of money while making a game, then try to finish it by duct taping
together what assets you already created and doing the rest on the budget
of a children's birthday party. It's almost not fair to
have this game on here because of how obviously incomplete it is, which results in many
of the game's problems, but Ride To Hell can eat my
whole ass anyways because it is god goddamn goddamn terrible. In this game, you play as Jake
Conway, a veteran returning from Vietnam; and upon his return, his brother
is killed by a rival biker gang. Jake is also shot in this
encounter, but he survives because of experiments
done on him in Vietnam. That isn't a joke. Ride to Hell is a cartoon. Its entire story is a kid's idea of
what a tough guy behaves like where they kill all the bad
guys and get all the girls, which is ironic because all the characters
look like deformed action figures and are animated to have the
same amount of articulation as a toy. Ride To Hell sees you fighting, driving,
and shooting your way through its story as you try to get revenge for your brother. All - and I really mean ALL -
of its mechanics are broken. Melee fighting is a joke because you
can spam the move to break people's blocks which looks like you're winding
a special gear in Jake's posterior that propels him to his enemies
every time he lifts his leg. ["The foot is mightier than the fist!"
-DX 2015] Driving is not really driving as
much as it is third-person bullet hell. You can only go forward, and
if you get stuck, you start over - the problem being that you can
get stuck on potentially anything, including the road itself. You can also get stuck in slow motion loops
where the game doesn't re-enter real time even if you shoot the people you need to. What's really funny is that
the in-game timer doesn't stop when you're in these loops, so
you immediately fail the mission. Your bike can also spontaneously
explode at any given moment. The shooting is easily the
biggest problem with the gameplay. Ride To Hell has mouse
acceleration issues on par with The Walking
Dead: Survival Instinct. You can't fix them, so
you just have to deal with it, and it cripples every fight
you're in since you can't just aim at the person you're trying to shoot at as
much as you can maneuver your entire body to make sure theirs is in your crosshairs. Luckily, enemies will line up for you, and there's slow motion
for every headshot kill, so it's not as bad as it could be, but
still entirely unacceptable and garbage. Something I really want to focus
on with this game is the voice acting. This game has the worst
voice acting I've ever heard. [Anvil] You know how to move, tiny? You ever slice an ear off a baby cow? They scream and scream. It's funny. [inarticulate screaming] - [Johnny] You're mine!
- [Suzi] Thank you, thank you. Come on. We need to stop him. Please, stop him!
- [Jake] Get on. [Gemma] You're the devil! [gibberish I don't care to caption] [Jake?] Enough of this shit. [DX] Now, very astute viewers may
notice that the footage of Ride To Hell shown here may look different
than the game they remember. That's because it does. After a lot of tinkering with .ini files, I managed to drastically
change what the game looks like. With no more obnoxious bloom,
no more overly saturated colors, and after stripping the game's
horrible implementation of depth of field, it looks a whole hell of a lot
better and actually looks like it might have come out
in 2013 instead of 2008. I even changed the way
the bike handling works by altering the gravity
settings of physics. It's still not great, but it
handles much smoother and drifting is much more easy now. Because of these findings, it's
difficult to have sympathy for the game, even considering the hellacious
circumstances it was made under. Ride To Hell was never going to be good, but the omission of several basic features
and the game's revolting presentation paint a picture of total incompetence
even beyond the obvious lack of resources the game had. [2019] Platforms: PC (Windows), PS4
Developer: Ilinx / Publisher: Square Enix [DX] If I could ever beat the fuck
out of a game, it would be Left Alive. It's rare that a game is this
offensive with how bad it is, but Left Alive does EVERYTHING in
its power to be as awful as possible. If you've ever wanted to play a stealth
game that doesn't know it's a stealth game, this is the game for you. In Left Alive, you play as
three different characters, each trying to make their
way out of a war zone. It's a survival-action
game - or so it calls itself - so you're limited on resources and have
to search around the map to find them, and you can also be rewarded them by
doing side objectives on each mission. Left Alive's problem is that every
enemy is playing an action game and you're the only one
playing a stealth game. Except... there's no stealth mechanics. AT ALL. The only thing that comes close are
cans you can throw at enemies to distract, but these cans are essential
to creating throwables, and they don't distract the enemies
enough for you to sneak past them, so they're useless. If you come across an enemy with
their back turned, you can't execute them. There are no executions. You have to melee them (if
you have a melee weapon), and that takes time and makes noise, and lowers the durability of the weapon. [Game] Caution - close
quarters weapon damaged. [DX] The enemies don't
even have discernible patterns. Most are permanently stationary, and as
mentioned, don't even move when distracted. What Left Alive really is
is a third-person shooter where you have extremely limited resources, while the enemies have unlimited resources. The real challenge of the game is surviving
long enough to gather enough resources to take gunfights with enemies
that you couldn't possibly sneak past to progress further in the level. Except, oops, the gunplay is shit
and the cover system is broken! Enemies take an inordinate
amount of shots to go down, and you'll inevitably miss some of those
because of how they flinch when shot. There's also no headshot
multiplier... until you beat the game. You have to BEAT THE GAME
TO UNLOCK HEADSHOTS! So that's ammo conservation and
consistency in fights out the window, but wait until you see how cover works. It doesn't. You can leave cover, you can
climb over it, and you can jump over it. But I'm not sure why those
last two aren't the same thing and aren't activated by one
key, but they don't work anyways. You can press it and NOTHING will happen, like here where I lose my mind
because I got stuck in cover while trying to do stealth. All of this goes to why this
game is so poorly designed. There's a thousand different
things this game tries to teach you because it has a thousand different
mechanics, except the ones that matter. It has a weight system, it has
weapon durability, it has stamina, bleeding, crafting, looting,
and inventory management. There's so many menus
you have to go through to select the action you want to take that by the time you do,
the enemy may be gone or may have already spotted you
after you started the confrontation and killed you. The loading screen has 61
different tips to read! And for WHAT? Even if you do the horrible
stealth, the enemies are omniscient and know where you are anyways
with the slightest sign of provocation. It's like they spent all their time
developing mechanics for another game and didn't tie those secondary
mechanics into the core game, making it as infuriating
and terrible as it is. The best example of this is what
happens when you're near an enemy. The game has a laughable
stealth indicator at the top, which I think they
realized didn't do anything, so they just tell you when
an enemy is near you. [Game] Caution - the
enemy is approaching. [Game] Caution - the
enemy is approaching. (x2) [Game] Caution - the
enemy is approaching. (x3) [Game] Caution - the enemy is
approaching. (x8934278958948) [DX] Left Alive is UNQUESTIONABLY
the worst game of 2019, despite looking like a game from 2009. But your PC will think it's a game from
2029 because the optimization is awful. On a GTX 1070, I got 45
frames (per second) on LOW. Like I said, this game tries as hard
as it can to be as bad as possible. [2015]
Platforms: PC (Windows) Developer: Reality Pump Studios
Publisher: TopWare Interactive [Santorio?] Take a walk by
the docks and see for yourself. He's the guy pissing all over his sailors. [Christopher] He is-- you mean
he's actually pissing on his own men? [Santorio?] Aye. Says the
golden rum toughens their hides. [DX] Raven's Cry was
released in January of 2015 and was immediately
the worst game of the year. It came out unfinished, containing
more bugs than the Amazon Rainforest, including an infamous one where the
characters' voices would be distorted because of the load the
game put on the CPU. [uncaptionable garbage] [DX] Fast forward ten months, and the
game was re-released under a new name: "Vendetta: The Curse of Raven's Cry" featuring numerous bug fixes,
balancing changes, re-recorded dialogue, and a lot of additional gameplay. Although I commend the effort from
Reality Pump to fix their own game, something that is always
welcome and encouraged, Vendetta is... still horrendous. I've thrown around the word
"unplayable" quite a bit here, and Vendetta is yet another
game that falls into that category. In Vendetta, you play as Christopher Raven, who is hired by a Spaniard official
to murder one of his fellow officers. Instead of getting paid for the
assassination however, he's double crossed, and the rest of the game plays out with you
trying to find a new ship and a new crew. What is a somewhat interesting
start to the game is quickly squandered squandered when you get to gameplay
and realize just how hard it is to do ...anything. Vendetta is a game where it's
insanely difficult to acquire resources, which could be a reflection of how
hard it must have been to buy a ship and hire a crew in the 17th century, but even considering that, the
game's difficulty is more derived from deliberate underpowering
of the main character and a seemingly endless
number of broken mechanics. This is all demonstrated perfectly
when you get to the first hub. The ship you obtained prior
to arriving is not very good, and if you'd like to do repairs
or upgrades, that's impossible because of how much that costs
and how little money you have. You have the option to buy another
ship, but that's, again, impossible because the ship costs ten
times more than what you have, even if you got the most amount of
money possible in the game's tutorial. You can do side missions for money,
but one includes going to a remote island to settle a debt for one of your
crewmen, which cannot be done because it involves ship combat, and like I said, your ship is
horrible, so you will always lose. Another side mission involves
you saving a woman of the night, but good luck saving her when
you're fighting off two people. Vendetta's combat just... doesn't work. I can't describe it any other way. It often feels like you're waving
around a magic wand instead of a sword that doesn't do anything, while
enemies have lightsabers that maul you. You can miss swings that should
hit, like the enemies are ethereal, and blocking is totally unresponsive. There's a set of options
you have while fighting, like drawing your gun
or kicking the enemy, but they're incredibly hard
to pull off spontaneously, and if you miss your shot,
which is entirely possible because of how wonky the aiming is, it takes anywhere from five
to seven seconds to reload. Vendetta is an open-world game
that forces you into its linear story path because it's not possible to do
anything else with how weak you are. Even if you manage to overcome
the game's outstanding lack of polish, it has the AUDACITY to
lock weapons behind levels so you can't use them
to further gain influence by completing other side missions. And that's no easy feat, by the way; if the
broken mechanics don't deter you enough, the game's horrible optimization will. The performance gets so bad at
times that you have to start measuring it in seconds per frame. The final straw for me
was the ship battles. In addition to the terrible performance
during them, and how awful your ship is in comparison to the other ships
you can randomly get paired against on your way to a destination, they play atrociously. There's a billion different controls
the game never articulates to you that are essential to navigation,
like how to ride with the wind, the cannons have delay, which makes firing
them accurately practically impossible, and the tips that the game gives
you, like ramming smaller ships, seems to be a flat-out lie with
your chances of a successful board being lower than the percentage
of completion this game shipped at. It's also worth noting that they spent
around nine months reworking the game, and didn't change any of
the hilariously bad cutscenes. All of the characters still
have the same broken eyelines and zero facial expressions. In one of these, you can even see a
Fraps framerate counter at the bottom. The dialogue is also just laughable,
and the tone shifts dramatically in conversation for no apparent reason. [Marcus] Pete always seems
fit to take the best among us. Peterson was a good man.
Now, this Tirado bastard... [Christopher] To hell
with Tirado! Did you see? [Marcus] See what? [Christopher] That sword. Your man Peterson was killed
the same way my father was. The bastards who killed
my family... they're back! [DX] Vendetta is garbage, and if you
need any further convincing of this, take a look at this bug I found
where leaving the tavern in the tutorial freezes every character on the screen. [DX] Today you've seen broken
games, you've seen unfinished games, but The Quiet Man is neither. To me, the worst game
can only be one that is bad despite all optimal conditions. Ride To Hell had its funding pulled, Hunt
Down The Freeman was made by amateurs, and Colonial Marines had
its development outsourced. In essence, many of the games you saw
today never had the chance to be good. But NOT The Quiet Man. This is a game that is bad by design. It's a game that could
have a menu, but doesn't. It's a game that could
have had subtitles, but didn't. It's a game that could have
included the hard work that its actors and its composer put their time into, but instead decides to mute everything,
which also ruined the player's experience. All because of this guy. This is Kensei Fujinaga. The Quiet Man was his brainchild,
he is the game's producer. He released a series of notes that
explain why this game is the way it is, and I'd like to read some of them to you. [DX] If none of that made any
sense in the context of this game, that's because it doesn't. Fujinaga made a game that doesn't
even reflect what he is talking about. Words are not sound. The Quiet Man has words - plenty of them. It uses them as a medium of
communication like you or I do; its presentation is what's void of words,
but only because it's void of sound. Dane can speak like the
rest of us, but we can't hear it. Fujinaga, in his lunacy, made a game
that misses the point of his own ideology. Dane doesn't have to be
deaf for his story to work; in fact, him being deaf is what's so
thematically jarring about this story. But it doesn't end there; After they were forced to release
the version of this game with sound, Fujinaga released another note. And... holy shit... I have never read something that
makes as little sense as this does. [DX] There you have it. The Quiet Man is the
worst game of the decade because it was made by someone
who does not understand their own idea. This level of gross incompetence
is typically only seen once a decade, and I'm happy to say that The Quiet
Man joins excellent company like... Bubsy 3D as one of the
WORST GAMES OF ALL TIME. And with that, we've reached our end. Thank you to everyone
who patiently waited for this... "short film" (???)
[more like a full-length movie] and I hope you enjoyed it. These were... the Worst Games of the Decade. [DX] Hey there guys, I
hope you enjoyed the video. I'd like to give a special thanks now
to everyone who became a Patron during the making of this video. Thank you to: [patron names on screen] Thank you for supporting the content,
and thank you for supporting the vision. Peace out, guys. Take care.
Couldn’t deal with the narrator for that long.