Worst Games You have ever played (in your opinion)

[Vinyadan]

It's far from being the worst game. Grand Theft Auto III was a revolutionary open-world sandbox for its time but for me personally it was extremely irritating and annoying. Missions were made difficult through timers, it was impossible to use the minimap, had to use the one on google. There was this one really annoying mission. You had to steal three cars. You don't know how they look like, only their names and districts they can usually be found in. You steal them and then you have to get them into a particular garage without damaging them. You can't activate the map in-game (I had to use google) AND it had a time limits. It was a discusting mission and I'm glad the devs learned from their mistakes when they developed Vice City, even though we kept seeing stupid RC plane missions and timers even in future GTA's.

For me the problem with GTA3 was that going from 2D to 3D made everything too realistic. It just wasn't as funny any more. Beating up fallen pedestrians with a baseball bat was also way too violent for me.

I also didn't like how the weapons aimed (hard to describe, but the comparison to Max Payne was inclement), or how the cars drove.

It let you play some funny siege situations if you went on a rampage, however. But the missions were really bad. I tried them a couple of time and then accepted that I was never leaving the first stage.

[N7Paladin]

Dragon Age Inquisition.

It was talked up so much, and I had waited for it for so long. I had gotten easily attached to all of my BioWare characters in previous games (at the time I had been very fond of all my Wardens)...

With the Inquisitor, however, I didn't connect with her, no matter how I played her. I felt no emotional involvement, other than a superficial something over seeing a few NPCs from previous games. The fact I felt zero connection with my Inquisitor took away so much value and entertainment from what I had come to get only from BioWare games (it mostly went downhill from there for BW). It was a sad disappointment. Oh well :/

[Wardog]

I'll add some more comments on a couple of games that others have already been mentioned:

1) Deux Ex Invisible Wars.

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The original Deux Ex was one of my favourite games. I've played through to completion multiple times (plus many incomplete playthroughs), tried every ending, and usually found something new each time. With Invisible Wars, I only played once, and didn't even complete it (I think I got as far as the arcology). The gameplay itself was massively dumbed down, and far less enjoyable. But the real killer IMO was the plot. I just couldn't empathise with anyone (neither the character you were playing, nor the various factions, nor the individual NPCs).

With original DE, you started with what seemed like a straight-forward plot. Terrorists and successionists were attacking everywhere. America was beset by a deadly plague. The NSF had stolen the cure. And you are the cyborg antiterrorism agent who has to be a bad enough dude to save the president. But then, sooner or later (How soon depending on how many emails you hacked and how many guards you spied on), you found out that things weren't what they seemed. (Some) good guys were actually bad guys. (Some) bad guys were actually good guys. Or maybe not. And vice versa. Depending on your perspective.

But with IW, if I remember right, you are almost straight away dumped into the middle of a big, multi-faction conflict, with no reason to think that your starting team are the good guys, with multiple opposing factions asking you to do missions for them, with no compelling reason to side with one over the other - and in most cases you could actually do all the missions, with no consequences other than them complaining that you keep helping their enemies.

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The other game is the original Bioware Neverwinter Nights, which I had a strange love-hate relationship with (it's massively flawed, and not just the OC, but I've probably played it more than many games I actually really like).

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The OC in particular was an extreme example of two things that Bioware likes doing but which I think make for bad gameplay.

The first is irrelivent non-linearity. "Welcome to the hub level. You have four major tasks to complete, one in each of four different zones. You have to do them all, but you can chose the order". Give that you have to do all of them, and the order doesn't make any difference, it doesn't make for interesting or challenging decisions, and doesnt give any benefit for future playthroughs. (A better alternative might be "you have four things that need to be done, but you can only do three of them" so you have to chose which reward/information/alliance you sacrifice).

The second is making all plot-relevant locked door's immune to lockpicking (and most lockpickable door's breakable by a fighter of equivilent level). This means that thief skills are reduced to nothing more than a way to get a little extra loot, rather than (as in Deus Ex) a way to get alternative access to locations and fundamentally change how you play.

(Talking of Deus Ex: when I first started playing NWN, the combination of plague, insurgency, and (obvious) conspiracy made me quit and start over with a fighter/rogue called (I think) Dacy Jenton).

Now, the expansion packs and (some) user-created content were much better in terms of plot, characterisation, etc. But they all imo suffered from a major limitation of the engine, namely you only had direct control over one character. And D&D mechanics make for a really boring CRPG when you are only controlling one character. If you were a fighter or similar, most of the time you could just click a target walk up to it, and just sit back and let the rng and autoattacks kill everything for you. Or if you were a wizard, just like everything, then rest. It didn't help that the enemies were generated so that you were usually fighting level-appropriate hordes of weak enemies.

Compare with e.g. Baldurs Gate, which in terms of actual mechanics was even simpler (no feats or special abilities). But because you were controlling multiple characters (and fighting enemies that were usually powerful enough to ruin your day with a couple of (un)lucky dice rolls), you had to worry about positioning and target priority, which meant combat was a lot more involved.

Plus BG did non-linearity much better IMO - you had a fairly straight forward main quest to follow, but with the option of wandering off and doing your own thing. Which meant you could run into much more dangerous enemies than when following the main path, which in turn meant certain types of enemies were actually scary. (E.g. ogres. In BG, the first ogre you encounter is essentially the boss on an optional request, and it can potentially one-shot most of your party members. In NWN, you encounter ogres when you have levelled up enough that the game thinks hordes of orcs are irrelivent, but hordes or ogres might at least provide a speed bump).

[factotum]

Maybe I'm weird, but I never finished the original Deus Ex. I honestly couldn't tell you what put me off playing it, I just came to a point where I fired up something that interested me more and never went back to it. I never finished Deus Ex: Human Revolution either, but that was mainly down to the god-awful boss fights that utterly ignored any way you chose to build your character that didn't involve shoot bang--I understand they fixed those in the later edition, but I haven't got round to playing that.

[warty goblin]

Maybe I'm weird, but I never finished the original Deus Ex. I honestly couldn't tell you what put me off playing it, I just came to a point where I fired up something that interested me more and never went back to it. I never finished Deus Ex: Human Revolution either, but that was mainly down to the god-awful boss fights that utterly ignored any way you chose to build your character that didn't involve shoot bang--I understand they fixed those in the later edition, but I haven't got round to playing that.

I could never get into Deus Ex, I think because it felt like I had a choice between playing a really crappy shooter and an also crappy stealth game. I'm quite happy to choose my playstyle when I decide which game to play in the first place. Doing it through a skill system in game isn't bad, but it also isn't a mindblowing good, particularly when the actual mechanics are so crude in their implementation.

[Yora]

The other game is the original Bioware Neverwinter Nights, which I had a strange love-hate relationship with (it's massively flawed, and not just the OC, but I've probably played it more than many games I actually really like).

NWN was really interesting as a low entry barrier RPG maker software. I was heavily into fan content for many years. But the campaign that shipped with the software was awful. I was a huge Bioware fanboy at the time, but playing all through NWN took me years, and at the end I wondered why I even bothered.
I have not played Andromeda, but to me it's essily BioWare's worst RPG by a wide margin,

[Toric]

I want to talk about something I call Reverse Sequelitis, where you play a sequel, go back to the original, and miss the improvements. These aren't the worst game I've ever played, but they're significantly the worst in their own series.

I love the Mass Effect trilogy. It's the first series I can recall where your decisions matter from game to game and it does a lot to give each game a specific feel. Mass Effect 2 is one of my favorite games of all time. Mass Effect 1 is painful to go back to. Combat is clunky, the characters take themselves too seriously, and I was truly convinced the Conrad Verner sidequest would end with him turning out to be an assassin because he was so unconvincing as a Commander Shepherd fanboy. (He got much better in the sequels.)

Likewise, Baldur's Gate is a slog compared to Baldur's Gate 2. The companion characters are two-dimensional, one of whom immediately abandons his person quest the moment you leave town in the vanilla version. You can very easily miss the lore you need to fight various monsters (have fun the first time you meet a worg in combat if you aren't an AD&D veteran) and the fight with the unskippable assassin en route to the first inn you're directed to is essentially luck-based.

[factotum]

I love the Mass Effect trilogy. It's the first series I can recall where your decisions matter from game to game and it does a lot to give each game a specific feel. Mass Effect 2 is one of my favorite games of all time. Mass Effect 1 is painful to go back to.

I've said it before--as a *game*, ME2 is definitely light-years ahead of ME1. It's just a shame the main plot is such a disorganised, irrational mess that ignores pretty much every sequel hook the original had.

[Winthur]

the fight with the unskippable assassin en route to the first inn you're directed to is essentially luck-based.

You have up to three disposable party members at that point (five if you simply move past the mage and go into the inn to recruit K&J), are liable to simply run away from his line of sight, town guards actually aggro him because he's disturbing the peace so he often dies without you having to do anything other than run away and Imoen starts with a wand with an instant spell that's excellent for interrupting Mirror Image or any subsequent spellcasts. You make your own luck in this fight.

[danzibr]

Reverse Sequelitis! I approve. I totally agree with the BG example.

I’d like to cite Suikoden II. They’re both incredible games, but II has some nice QoL changes.

[Man_Over_Game]

I want to talk about something I call Reverse Sequelitis, where you play a sequel, go back to the original, and miss the improvements. These aren't the worst game I've ever played, but they're significantly the worst in their own series.

I am experiencing this with Borderlands right now. Going from Borderlands 3 to Borderlands 2 is like going from Borderlands 1 to Fallout 3.

That is, BL3 has such smooth gunplay and mechanics that anything less feels like an RPG that pretends to be a shooter.

[Hunter Noventa]

Reverse Sequelitis! I approve. I totally agree with the BG example.

I’d like to cite Suikoden II. They’re both incredible games, but II has some nice QoL changes.

Just being able to equip multiple runes and having a shared party inventory were game changers. The Disgaea series and some recent Super Robot Wars games are the same, at least as far as QoL changes go.

[Amechra]

One of my personal examples of reverse sequelitis is the original Spyro trilogy. You start the third game with all the upgrades from the second game (something I wish more games would do), so moving from the third game back to the second involves unlearning certain habits.

[Androgeus]

One of my personal examples of reverse sequelitis is the original Spyro trilogy. You start the third game with all the upgrades from the second game (something I wish more games would do), so moving from the third game back to the second involves unlearning certain habits.

As a kid, I started on Spyro 2 and could never get use to Spyro 1.

[Spore]

like going from Borderlands 1 to Fallout 3.

So an improvement? No forced humor, VATS being an actual decent RPG mechanic, and a world that is imho more alive than the poor diablo reskin Borderlands is.

Seriously I do not like the series. My friends think the humor is GOLD, but it's actually just stupid. Not stupid fun, just dumb. Yea, butt stallion, comedy gold.

[factotum]

I have the probably unpopular opinion that Borderlands 1 was a better game than its sequel. It was better designed for single players, for a start, and while there was a fair bit of silly humour in it (see: Dr Zed) it wasn't quite as non-stop as it was in the second game.

[Erloas]

I'm going to say that the worst game I've ever played is probably lost to time in the NES to PS2 era, something that I completely forgot about decades ago.

So I would go with games I expected to like but couldn't. Which are all RPGs, I think mostly because I generally like the genre and these were supposed to be good games and I just found them painful. Morrowind, Fallout 3, Dragon Age: Origin, and WoW.
The big part with WoW is that I loved MMOs up until that point and pretty much every design decision they made took the genre in directions I didn't like, getting rid of things I like about them. And of course with it's success virtually every MMO afterwards followed those same designs, killing the entire genre for me.
Morrowind may have been because I got to it fairly late so maybe it just didn't age well, but nothing about it pulled me in and a lot of the NPC reactions just pushed me out of the world.
DA:O had some good points, but I found the combat very painful. I've heard I picked one of the worst classes combined with one of the least interesting backgrounds, but I have quite a few painful fights that just sucked all the joy out of playing and hit one fight that I had to do solo that my character simply was unable to do. So the game died there.
And Fallout 3... I wanted a Fallout game and Fallout 3 simply isn't one. A pipboy and vaults doesn't make Fallout. The world design didn't feel right and the story wasn't compelling. And probably most importantly, I found the combat painful. It didn't feel like "my character is low skill" it felt like "someone isn't very good at creating a FPS." And VATS didn't feel like some new and interesting mechanic, it felt like a bandaid over poor controls.

Real time combat with pause is just bad, that doesn't seem to have changed in decades, yet they've been trying it for decades.

[Lvl 2 Expert]

I have a kind of weird case of sequelitis too. As a kid I played some Duke Nukem 2. I never got very far, but it still left an impression. It wasn't until much later that I got access to both part 1 and the acclaimed part 3D, at which point both of those felt off. Part 1 was a downgrade from my nostalgia trip, and part 3D was so far ahead of my nostalgia trip that it felt like just another (by that time) old game.

(Neither deserves any worst game ever awards though.)

[Rynjin]

I have the probably unpopular opinion that Borderlands 1 was a better game than its sequel. It was better designed for single players, for a start, and while there was a fair bit of silly humour in it (see: Dr Zed) it wasn't quite as non-stop as it was in the second game.

BL1 is an absolutely superior game to BL2. More unique character (mechanically and thematically), a more low-key satire element, better gun manufacturers, better DLC (General Knoxx's Armory is one of the best video game DLCs of all time IMO, up there with stuff like The Shivering Isles for Oblivion), an all around superior experience, especially endgame.

[danzibr]

Another reverse sequelitis game comes to mind.

My first game in the Smash Bros. series was Melee. Going back to the original after that... *shudders*

[Quizatzhaderac]

Final Fantasy Type-0. There were a lot of pieces to like, but there were some things that sucked the fun out.

Some of the combat controls were clunky and poorly explained. (For example I would need to pause and check how online each time I wanted to revive a character).

There were fourteen playable characters, twelve of which were introduced at once. The game did a decent job of giving them different personalities and fighting styles, but it never set aside time to introduce them so I didn't really think of them as individuals for most of the game.

There was also a pattern of free time, go to specific place for mission, rinse, repeat for most of the game. I found this to be too regular as it leaves out events putting you in unexpected circumstance and having to think about where you go. (the plot definitely included unexpected political circumstances, but not too much too much that interferes with being home by dinnertime).

[halfeye]

Command and Conquer: Renegade. I bought it cheap (as I mainly do) and didn't like it one bit.

[Rockphed]

Command and Conquer: Renegade. I bought it cheap (as I mainly do) and didn't like it one bit.

To be fair, it was would have been a completely mediocre FPS when C&C came out. It just failed to catch the special whim that was C&C nostalgia.

[halfeye]

To be fair, it was would have been a completely mediocre FPS when C&C came out. It just failed to catch the special whim that was C&C nostalgia.

I would have been happy with an FPS, but as I understood it the thing was a Jeep sim that controlled like a very awkward tank. No control of the thing at all in the first five minutes, which was as much as I could stand.

[Spore]

Command and Conquer: Renegade. I bought it cheap (as I mainly do) and didn't like it one bit.

Its single player is sorely lacking but back in the day it was great for online play. Imagine the original UT team death match, but with tanks and bases. Plus I was a massive C&C fan back in the day, so playing a FPS C&C WITH bases was massively awesome.

As I recall the vastly superior Battlefield 1942 crushed it under its heels with the better graphics, the bigger maps, the better vehicles and more rewarding gunplay (even energy weapons felt like a supersoaker with green water).

[Floogal]

For me personally, Earthworm Jim 3D always jumps to mind first.

I really enjoyed the two Sega Genesis games, as well as the tv series, so I was quite looking forward to this one. Having just 100%'d Banjo Kazooie, and learned from the manual this game was a similar 3D platformer collectathon clone, I was excited.

Of course, a different developer had made the game, and it stunk. The only good things were an entertaining manual, decent (if sparse) voice acting (even got Dan Castellaneta to voice the titular hero, as in the tv series), and a creative premise: Jim is a coma after a cow lands on him, so you're playing as his Superego, running around his brains collecting his lost marbles.

But the game was so unfun to play. The worst 3d camera I've ever dealt with, repetitive level design. Like Mario 64 / Banjo Kazooie, the game only saves your marble (coins, notes) high score, but you need 95% collection rate, barely anything saves, and they're scattered behind every mission completion gate, so if you died you literally have to do almost the entire level all over again. And the Golden Udders (stars, jiggies), you needed to get every single one to challenge the final boss.

But what truely brought this game down for me was the boss "battles". No traditional dodging & shooting, every fight was the same "pork boarding" minigame. Each character on a vehicle, moving around an arena trying to collect all 100 marbles. Which means shooting missiles to make your opponent drop some off their collected ones, but Earthworm Jim also takes damage, while the bosses are invulnerable & have other tricks to mess with you. And the camera is wobbly and awful. The final boss is the worst, its gimmick makes it so easy to lose minutes of progress from a tiny slip-up.

I finished this game out of pure spite and rage. It is, to date, the only game I have ever sold or gotten rid of.

[Man_Over_Game]

So an improvement? No forced humor, VATS being an actual decent RPG mechanic, and a world that is imho more alive than the poor diablo reskin Borderlands is.

Seriously I do not like the series. My friends think the humor is GOLD, but it's actually just stupid. Not stupid fun, just dumb. Yea, butt stallion, comedy gold.

I was referring more to the mechanical aspects.

What I remember playing Fallout 3 was mostly about finding the most efficient ways to utilize the RPG mechanics. VATS tracked distance terribly, but had a much better damage-to-bullet ratio than FPS firing. So if you had a Sniper Rifle, you were better off crouching and taking your Sneak Attack manually, but all of your actual combat damage was best done by using VATS and then running in circles until it recharged. Since ammo, damage, and weapon durability were so poor, I didn't have much choice other than to only fight using the VATS system.

It felt like a weird JRPG where I repeatedly used my Alpha Strike combo, to run away and abuse the fact that enemy life was persistent. Get back into combat, Alpha Strike, run away, repeat. If I ever had to actually play the game as a FPS, I was losing. As a result, trying to rely on any skill I had playing FPSrs was more of a hindrance, as most of my success revolved around abusing the game's RPG mechanics.

Ignoring humor, lore, or anything non-mechanical, Borderlands still felt like a FPS. Even Fallout 4 felt very RPG-heavy, although it's a vast improvement over its predecessors.

[Actana]

I once played Ride to Hell: Retribution from start to finish in one sitting. It was pretty bad.

[Wyldephang]

I have the unfortunate privilege of being able to say that I was among the few who purchased Superman 64 on launch week. I was at a Toys 'R Us, saw it on the shelf, and, despite not knowing anything about it, figured that it was a safe buy. Boy, was I wrong.

[Lvl 2 Expert]

I have the unfortunate privilege of being able to say that I was among the few who purchased Superman 64 on launch week. I was at a Toys 'R Us, saw it on the shelf, and, despite not knowing anything about it, figured that it was a safe buy. Boy, was I wrong.

I just started on Just Cause 3. There are challenges where you have to fly your wingsuit through rings, and I couldn't help but think "Well, I do feel a little like Superman right now."

And I have never even played that game.