The Worst Games of 2024
While the past year offered some of the most high-profile disappointments in recent times, there were surprisingly few truly terrible games. We have nevertheless managed to dig up a few from the compost heap.
While 2023 was a roller coaster with major ups and downs, 2024 has been a bit more consistent. We simply can't find completely terrible games like Kong: Skull Island or The Lord of the Rings: Gollum this year, and even a notoriously bad publisher like Gamemill Entertainment has actually managed to release relatively decent games for the most part - the world must be ending!
That said, the list of this year's worst games contains, as always, a good mix of objectively bad games - with terrible graphics, poor controls, and many bugs - and games that are technically entertaining but disappoint so much that they must be considered complete failures.
Kong: Skull Island was last year's decidedly worst game, and without doubt a serious candidate for the worst game of the decade. This year, the famous gorilla finds its way onto the list again, but the developers at 7Levels are satisfied that their game still tops last year's Kong game.
You play as a gray-haired but physically capable man trying to find his daughter in a dilapidated city destroyed by giant apes and monsters. As a setup, it's not bad, but unfortunately, the graphics are so flat, the controls so stiff, and the battles so uninspired that the biggest threat ends up being your own boredom. Kong deserves better.
Ever since Amnesia: The Dark Descent scared the wits out of us in 2010, we've seen a steady stream of atmospheric first-person horror games. Unfortunately, the scariest thing about many of these titles is their pronounced lack of quality, and sadly, this also applies to the rather unremarkable Pneumata.
Visually, it's scary enough, with fleshy monsters and plenty of darkness only illuminated by limited light sources. But everything under the game's surface is almost insultingly bad. From the thin story that hints at and promises much only to deliver a disappointing and meaningless ending, to the gameplay that suffers from poor design and extremely stupid AI. Deadbolt Interactive clearly had no real ambitions with Pneumata, and unfortunately, this shows in all parameters.
Ubisoft's pirate game started as an evolution of the sailing portion of Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, but development went off course several times and had to be restarted. After 11 years, Ubisoft Singapore's multiplayer game was finally released earlier this year, but the result was unfortunately very disappointing.
Skull & Bones has absolutely no meaningful activities on land, and what happens at sea isn't nearly enough to justify the game's high price tag. In fact, the experience is in many ways worse than Black Flag, as you can't, for example, board other ships and fight hand-to-hand.
Ubisoft's 2024 has been quite a nightmare, and much of the blame can be attributed to Skull & Bones.
The 2.5D platformer Ario is just one letter short of sharing its name with the best platform series on the market. Unfortunately, the game itself lacks so much more.
You can count on one hand how much good Ario does, and that hand doesn't even need to have all its fingers intact. The level design is cramped, the simplest interactions require pinpoint precision, and our protagonist has exactly zero momentum, making the game far too rigid.
Graphically, Ario is no gem either, and the most positive thing about the experience is that it's over in just over an hour.
With Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, Rocksteady delivers one of this year's most visually stunning games, and while the story doesn't reach the same heights as the critically acclaimed Arkham series, there are still several entertaining sequences along the way. So what went wrong?
In some ways, it's an identity crisis. The game tries to be both a multiplayer and single-player experience, and the two parts of the game constantly end up working against each other. Other times, the design is simply poor. The enemies' appearance and behavior lack variation, for example, and the game's missions are extremely monotonous. Suicide Squad can certainly entertain, but compared to Batman: Arkham Knight, it's a drop in quality.
With the fun role-playing games The Stick of Truth and The Fractured but Whole, South Park finally got a couple of game releases that captured the series' adult yet infantile humor. Unfortunately, this year's South Park: Snow Day is more reminiscent of the series' unsuccessful Nintendo 64 games with its weak action gameplay and amputated humor.
We appreciate that the game actually has a single-player campaign with cutscenes and - a few - funny lines, and a rogue-lite card system that provides new abilities adds some much-needed variation. But it doesn't change the fact that South Park: Snow Day is a sloppy and monotonous affair that doesn't get enough out of its license.
When we think of the small but popular niche of driving-based job simulators (whose undisputed king is undoubtedly Euro Truck Simulator), we usually think of gray and generic environments. This is not the case in Taxi Life: A City Driving Simulator, which lets you play as a taxi driver in Spain's second-largest city, Barcelona.
Unfortunately, neither the Sagrada Familia nor the world's Gaudi architecture can save what is a technically choppy and relatively flat simulator. While tourists rarely stand out for their intelligence, here their AI is too dumb, and neither they nor the other road users show signs of intelligence. The result is an unsatisfying driving experience that isn't compensated for by the other management aspects.
Finally, the game (despite its title) simply lacks life. There are no conversations with passengers or fun experiences in the taxi that break up the monotony. It's all clinical, genderless, and completely boring.
In a year where one game developer after another laid off countless employees, Concord became the ultimate symbol of everything wrong with large parts of the gaming industry. While one could almost say the shooter genre was saturated, Sony Interactive's management insisted on spending hundreds of millions of dollars on Fireaxis Games' Concord - only to pull the plug on the project after barely two weeks, shut down the game's servers, and refund all customers.
The game's lack of success can ultimately be attributed to the developers, who according to several media outlets had an unhealthy corporate culture where there was no room for criticism and skepticism. The result was a game that, despite long development time and an almost unlimited budget, was devoid of both charm and quality, as if it had been focused together into a formless, gray mass.
Hopefully, Concord will be a lesson for the industry's money men to focus more on quality and offline content in the future, but we have our doubts.
