The Worst Games of the Last Console Generation

Year Of Release: 2008
Platform: PS3, Xbox 360

Free Radical has, in their history, been known for creating some pretty incredible games, most notably the Timesplitters series (and before that Goldeneye, when the staffers were still at Rare). As their first foray into the seventh generation, Haze had a lot to live up to. It didn't. Not only is Haze laughably unbalanced – you're introduced to a sense-enhancing drug and then denied use of the mechanic, for starters – this Crysis wannabe is so bland you'll forget its premise within minutes of booting it up. Icing on the cake: the constant screaming barrage of terrible ooh-rah dialogue will make you want to hurl your audio receiver – or maybe just your console – off the nearest bridge.

Year Of Release: 2012
Platform: PS3, Xbox 360

Suda 51 may be one of the most uniquely visioned developers out there, but it was evident fairly early on that Lollipop Chainsaw was not going to be good. At a glance, the game looks like a schlocky, stylized beat-'em-up starring Juliet, a bubblegum California cheer captain. That's not an inaccurate statement. However, despite Suda's best efforts to do an undead homage to Panic High School, Lollipop plays like a half-assed $10 XBLA fighter. Moving from one egregiously linear setup to the next, expect to button-mash your way through endless hordes of zombies while stomaching the one-two punch of an execrable script from the never-not-funnier James Gunn and QT-friendly UI that looks like Lisa Frank vomited all over the game's art team. Oh yeah, and then there's Juliet's titular chainsaw, which is way too slow to effectively mesh with her quick underpowered pop-pom strikes. Surprise: high school still sucks.

Year Of Release: 2011
Platform: PS3, Xbox 360

Duke Nukem Forever, a game that went through countless iterations in a desperate and-always-failing bid to stay in some capacity relevant through over a decade of development, opens with Duke pissing into a urinal. For the meathead Duke this is a pretty typical move, and an infantile way to immediately grab of the attention of the now adult players that would've found the scene entertaining when they were in seventh grade. If you so desire, once you're done with your piss, you can plumb the depths of the bathroom area and scoop a piece of shit – real, actual shit – to carry around, presumably for your own amusement. In an adjacent room, you can then proceed to throw the shit at an NPC waiting duitfully for you to provide him instruction for the battle that will soon ensue. Do so and the shit flies harmlessly through the NPC, who does not respond. Duke Nukem Forever, folks.

Year Of Release: 2011
Platform: PS3, Xbox 360

As the first major IP release for id Software, Rage was highly anticipated. Powered by the company's gorgeous idtech 5 engine, it's a sight to see, too, at least potentially. The problem with Rage is that even for a game that should just ostensibly be about shooting monsters in a sci-fi wild west, it's pretty pointless. The game is technically open-world, which supports its vehicular combat, but there's almost nothing to do outside of mission parameters. You can, if you want, occupt yourself by beefing up your Mad Maxian desert vehicle to compete in races or just kill random baddies in the high space desert wastes. But there's no point, since racing just gives you upgrades and you can play the entire game without once really stopping for major automotive combat. Rage is also absolutely ungodly boring, with combat as straightforward as one can reasonably expect and the "jump-from-here-to-there" map progression giving no sense of motivation. But Rage's biggest issue is also its most obvious: by 2011 Borderlands and Fallout had been out for years.

Year Of Release: 2009
Platform: PS3, Xbox 360

You could discount Damnation a lot for the fact that it looks like a low-rent, overly generic Jonah Hex ripoff with terrible AI, an abundance of stupid, floaty platformer-type elements and animations that make the protagonist look like he's sliding across a slippery desert landscape that appears to have the surface consistency of ice. But the nail in the coffin is that the game looks like it was ported over from the Dreamcast and doesn't play much better.

Year Of Release: 2009
Platform: PS3, Xbox 360

In the '90s almost every movie tie-in under the sun was released as some some sort of cheese-fueled brawler and you'd be hard-pressed to name one that wasn't horrible. Watchmen is a reincarnation of this design breed – a mindless, repetitive, dull slog with bits of character voicework thrown in for property authenticity. (Go download the demo if you're skeptical.) Graciously highlighting any greater detail would be an insult to your intelligence, not to mention a waste of time. Avoid it.

Year Of Release: 2010
Platform: PS3, Xbox 360

What would happen if a Japanese developer tried to make Gears of War? If Quantum Theory is any indication, they'd end up making Gears of War mired an even duller gray artistic palette, only you can throw a girl (as in, you can pick her up and heave her) into battle with the game's ho-hum Locust-alike. It's bad enough that nothing about Quantum Theory stands out in the slightest – for some unearthly reason, though, Tecmo Koei also decide that the game needed platforming sections. Being as A) Japanese Gears and B) derivative as it is, you'd think that your burly hero could just throw the girl to distant spots where she could hit conveniently-placed switches that let you progress beyond obstructed areas, but instead they just decided on enthusiastically uninspired cover shooting until you turn it off in disgust.

Year Of Release: 2011
Platform: Xbox 360

Just how frightening is Rise of Nightmares? It's a Kinect-based (nay, Kinect-required) horror game in which you do moronic things like "autowalking" (because the game is too stupid to even be able to follow simple motor skill commands, so go ahead and get drunk) and slowly rotating towards enemies, because it's a Kinect game with tank controls. The inane horror imagery is about as effective as House of the Dead 2, and more than five minutes of play will send you into such a state of self-loathing you'll wonder how anyone could ever have thought motion-controlled gaming was anything resembling a good idea.

Year Of Release: 2011
Platform: PS3, Xbox 360

Why do all games that place in any kind of medieval setting automatically have to simultaneously have some sort of supernatural hook to draw players in? It's a question better left for high quality games, as The Cursed Crusade has both all the magical Hell aspects aforementioned and isn't one. Playing this is about as enthralling as reading slowly from an untranslated centuries-old religious text, with excruciatingly long-winded exposition that could probably even make even Tolkien cry (to say nothing of the deadly dull, torpid combat that'll make you wonder if you've ever been less enthralled to stab someone in the trachea). The good news is since the combos move in geologic time and every lengthy level has numerous enemies to kill (especially the Hell stages) it's a good cure for insomnia.

Year Of Release: 2008
Platform: PS3, Xbox 360

Back in 2008 there weren't quite as many pedestrian shooters on the market as there are today, which might have (theoretically) made a game like Legendary a more attention-grabbing propostion at the time. The premise is that Pandora's Box has been opened, unleashing all manner of horrfic beasts of myth upon an unsuspecting world, which would sound ok if the game's selection of monsters was a random hodgepodge with no real narrative raison d'etre, any discernible impact on gameplay notwithinstanding. But even when it was new Legendary was not an attractive game, because, apart from its logistical nonsense and lack of tension, the gunplay lacked physics and your magical powers were like Dishonored's if Corvo was a run-of-the-mill electrician.

Year Of Release: 2013
Platform: PS3, Xbox 360

The original Ken's Rage seemed to offer everything a Fist of the North Star fan could want: an extensive story mode that followed the original manga through its merciless Mad Max-ish world, an upgradable slew of Kentaro's signature fighting and finishing moves (whose combos would end in multitudes of horde enemies exploding in a ridiculous plasmatic burst like a squeeze blood blister), untold hours of content by way of extra playable fan-favorite characters. Ken's Rage felt like a comically soporific, melee-less cousin of Sword of the Beserk, and played more or less accordingly, which makes the fact that Ken's Rage 2 follows almost the exact same path, in both narrative and design (and even extras), that much funnier. Even better: despite retreading ground in a nearly identical fashion, Ken's Rage 2 strips out a lot of the first game's myriad combos and somehow makes the game look even worse than the original. Uh, yeah.

Year Of Release: 2010
Platform: PS3, Xbox 360

Hydrophobia isn't a game, it's a glorified tech demo. Under the auspices of an engine that (in 2010) could do amazing, never-before-seen things with water, you're thrust into a poor man's Uncharted, caught in a fight for survival against a terrorist group who just happened to decide to detonate a bomb on the massive ocean liner-arcology-whatever you just happen to be an engineer aboard. Nonsenical narrative aside – Hydrophobia was supposed to be the first in a series where the character develops power to psychically control water, which the devs left in as an actual tech demo for you to play around in – you'll find it next to impossible to navigate depth in any of the game's myriad flooded, or flooding areas. You're also given what amounts to a stungun for the entirety of the game and, more punishingly, Naughty Dog's Poseidon Adventure homage in Uncharted 3 completely destroyed any chance Hydrophobia's tech had at retaining relevance. Even as a $3 digital download this is a waste of money.

Year Of Release: 2007
Platform: PS3, Xbox 360

There are two major issues with your vampire adversaries in Vampire Rain: firstly, they are generally unbelievably stupid. Second, when they actually decide it's in their best interest to rush over to your (quite possibly allegedly hidden) position, they send out a radar burst that alerts any other enemies in the area to come to their aid, can take a clip without even breaking a sweat and will murder you in one or two hits. In this "open-world" game it was also damn near impossible to take any route other than exactly what the developers intended, thanks to invisible walls and other artificial barriers. Incredibly, even after the game was re-released in a supposedly tweaked port for PS3, none of Vampire Rain's problems seemed to be addressed at all. If you hadn't blacked out the experience you might even say it was worse.

Year Of Release: 2012
Platform: PS3, Xbox 360

Oh, Aliens. Picking on you is like shooting fish in a barrel. From the idiotic xenomorph AI, which rushes headlong into your hails of gunfire, to the embarrassingly abundant technical glitches to the abhorrently low-grade visual polish, its excruciatingly long development cycle is evident in every identical poorly lit corridor. To make matters worse, the game's presence at industry events perpetuated a lie – the finished product looked absolutely nothing like what the pre-release trailers would have had you believing (screen tear!). The result (and reception) was so disastrous that Sega completely pulled the plug on the then-much-vaunted Wii U version. Alien Resurrection on the PS One was better.

Year Of Release: 2006
Platform: PS3, Xbox 360

Since Sonic Adventure was rushed out the door with one of the worst 3D cameras to date (at the time of the Dreamcast's launch) Sega has pretty reliably been willing to make baffingly stupid decisions with what was once their flagship franchise. Sonic's 2006 outing essentially felt like an expanded retread of that launch title disaster, and for the holiday season here it was even more painfully obvious that the developers had just gone ahead and released a not-even-close-to-finished game. Cutting corners is too kind a description – Sonic's camera is as viciously, seizurely brain dead as it was back in 1999 (if not moreso), with enough bugs toe bugs to fill an entymology fetishist's office.

Year Of Release: 2013
Platform: PS3, Xbox 360

Ride to Hell recently received the colloquially dubious honor of new contender for worst game of the generation. A rush job like this, brimming with glaring errors like, say, your motorcycle falling through seams in the game into an abyss below, or entire levels of textures just popping out of existence. Want proof? This withering video is here for you. There are no words – although calling something so blatantly unfinished the worst is just a little too easy.

Year Of Release: 2009
Platform: PS3, Xbox 360

As Al Lowe originally envisioned Leisure Suit Larry, it was a risqué sex comedy in the format of a then-contemporary point and click adventure game. Since the series proper ended and Sierra shuttered, the franchise has fallen into obscurity as the property has shifted hands and has attempted the reboot process by recasting Larry with the original lounge lizard's nephew. This hasn't been successful before, but at least Larry Loveage's 2004 debut felt like a point-and-click. Box Office Bust doesn't even come close, swapping out any resemblance of an adventure game for an open-world action-platformer that's aggressively idiotic enought to be aware of (and comment on) its shortcomings and still make you slog through them. On top of that, you're basically forced into hours of tedious, tepid gameplay out of some perverse desire the developers have for you to exist in some meaningless sexless purgatory with no end and few women in sight. Whatever you may think of the series' legacy (or its sleazy MO) this might as well be Larry Lovage Does Abstinence.

Year Of Release: 2007
Platform: PS3

For whatever reason, when the PS3 was still new, Sony made the dual nonsensical claims that both the Dualshock couldn't support force-feedback and that it was more important to have motion sensors in the controller iself. Thankfully the idea never caught on much, but sadly Sony didn't abandon their Sixaxis mantra before they had a chance to release Lair, which made players use those motion controls to steer a flying dragon that could lay waste to whatever was around it. A cool idea idea, but in execution it was a nightmare – the sixaxis only let you steer your dragon in wide, slow arcs, even though you were constantly being forced to get into small areas. Even more irritating is that, for a game where you'd think targeting would be essential, there was no way to manually focus on any given enemy, making it next to impossible to use most of your targeting abilities, like belching fire because you're controlling a f#$%*ing dragon. You like Game of Thrones? Khaleesi's are sure to eventually do some burning and pillaging of their own. Waiting for Season 4 to start (or for Martin to finish the next book) is more fun than playing Lair.

Year Of Release: 2009
Platform: PS3, Xbox 360

Rogue Warrior tells the story of a bold man: real-life mercenary Dick Marcinko, who allegedy prevented war with North Korea in the 1980s. There's no telling whether or not the dumb and somewhat preposterous story has even a hint of truth to it – you can read Marcinko's book of the same name of that – but here you do get the added bonus of Mickey Rourke's dulcet tones filling in for Marcinko's (his one-liners automatically make the game far more entertaining that it has any right to be). Not so fast there, slick – you also get a game so bad that you could sprint up to enemies and "stealth" kill them within inches of each other and never be caught. Non-negotiable. Part of a package deal. Not even Rourke rapping as Marcinko over the credits could save this one from hilarious ruin. You'll wish North Korea had won.

Year of release: 2010
Platform: Xbox 360

Ever wanted to be disturbed by a game? Not in the traditional horror sense – really, truly, deeply disturbed, like you've just been violated while participating in an interactive collection of Hieronymous Bosch paintings as directed by Lars Van Trier. You're in luck: Zeno Clash captures similar feelings, with flying colors. It's a nightmarish game where you're essentially made to mindlessly beat the crap out of your own hideous blood relatives in a possibly incestuous society (don't ask) within a godawfully ugly world of unnatural mutated freaks that could've crawled out of the most unsettled corners of, say, Lewis Carroll's addled mind. While some might be able to stand the extreme grotesquery of the game's aesthetics, Zeno Clash is also just terribly, mind-numbingly bad, making you slog through endless hours of first-person melee brawls against increasingly cheap, overpowered thugs you'll want to put down quickly just so you don't have to actually look at them. The weapons are similarly useless after the enemies start to get more powerful, too, and it's all accompanied by a creepy, utterly senseless trip-narrative that will just make you wish you'd been punched in the gut for eight straight hours than have played this. Seriously, just run.

Year Of Release: 2013
Platform: PS3, Xbox 360

Star Trek, inexplicably a shooter with Uncharted-lite exploration and co-op elements, was built from the ground up, looked promising at first, with an interesting team dynamic between Kirk and Spock, asymmetrical co-op gameplay where each player is seeing things with a different perspective and unique abilities befitting each character. It was a weird thing to do with the license, but there was potential. Then somewhere along the way things went south really quickly, though you won't be able to tell at first. Then, a few levels in, your AI partner will stop – if he ever really started – being able to hit enemies with any degree of accuracy. Then he'll stop shooting at enemies at all. Or the enemies (an asinine Gorn that resembles the "smart" super dinosaurs of Dino Crisis 3) will stop noticing when Kirk or Spock runs directly in front of them during a stealth sequence. Or your dim-witted buddy will, no exaggeration, get too lost to find you if you decide to sprint ahead more than 10 meters (and/or exit a room). It's like someone pulled at a loose thread at the beginning of the game and the resultant unraveling catastrophe becomes more overtly obvious until, after getting thoroughly lost among the same-y looking bulkheads of one forgettable location or another, you accidentally backtrack, retriggering a scripted scene initially showing you some enemies you killed what felt like hours ago. Yes, you can actually do that.

Year Of Release: 2010
Platform: PS3, Xbox 360

While it's hard to argue the stupidity that seeped in to even to Dead Space's core entries with the last installment, Dead Space Ignition is its own special kind of insipid. Ostensibly a narrative prequel (after a very thinly-stretched fashion) detailing what happened to the Sprawl, Dead Space 2's primary setting, Ignition is essentially a motion comic with a little bit of "gameplay" thrown in so that fans wouldn't just call it a motion comic. Calling this a game is a joke – it's a few hacking minigames sandwiched in between a lot of design dissonant scenes of screaming, panicking civilians getting torn apart by undead-ish alien horrors. Even with its utterly worthless contribution to the Dead Space lore up until this point, Ignition was really just EA smearing a pandering, fatuous Dead Space 2 commercial in your face for half an hour. All that's missing is the soft drink product placement.

Year Of Release: 2012
Platform: PS3, Xbox 360

To understand the inconceivable depths of incompetence you will encounter in Amy, it's important to understand both that the eponymous little girl is for some reason immune to a plague that's infected mankind, and that the game's heroine (and Amy's protector) Lana is immune through osmosis or something when she's in close proximity to her young charge. Now an example: late in the game you're forced to escort Amy through a ravaged city crawling with infected monsters that will instantly kill you – the stealth is suddenly mandatory – if you're spotted. Luckily you can pass yourself off as one of them, but only if you tell Amy to hide and then walk the requisite ten feet away needed to contract the virus. After an excruciating minute-long wait (not a short time when you are forced for fear of mortality literally wait for the virus to spread) you can then shamble very slowly past any patrolling baddies; anything faster and they'll somehow know you're not really one of them. This gives you about two minutes to very slowly push aside a barrier – one of many – before running back to Amy's side to "heal" before abandoning her to pick up the virus again and start the process all over. Take any longer and you'll die. Make any mistake or attract any attention and you'll die. Try to sneak past the monsters without what's blatantly the worst disguise ever conceived and, you guessed it, you'll die. Guess what happens when you die? You do the whole segment over. But if you've actually played a game as ignominiously abusive as Amy is up to this late point, you probably have a death wish already.