2024 was a year filled with good games, especially if you looked beyond the biggest AAA releases and played some of the amazing indie titles and smaller games we got over the last 12 months. But there were some bad ones, too.
Light and dark. Left and right. Pepsi and Coke. One needs the other to exist. The best games are only great if we can compare them to mediocre or awful games. And 2024 had plenty of so-so or downright horrible games, too.
So let’s take a look at some of the worst-reviewed games of 2024.
But before we do that it’s worth repeating: Liking a “bad” game isn’t a bad thing. Numbered scores come with all sorts of asterisks and caveats, which is part of the reason we don’t use them here. And Metacritic’s aggregate isn’t perfect by any stretch. If you see a game on this list that you happen to love, it just means you have a different taste than a bunch of other critics or players. That’s fine! Enjoy what you like and don’t be an asshole about it and everything will be fine.
Now, as we’ve done before, here are the 10 worst-rated games on Metacritic with at least seven reviews.
This appears to be another attempt at a small studio making a CoD zombies-like wave-based shooter. But critics didn’t appreciate the game’s lackluster combat and bad matchmaking. Oddly, the game’s Steam reviews are mostly positive, so perhaps the devs have improved things since its launch.
This game is described as a 1v1 samurai fighting game and according to reviews, that’s all it really offers. Many reviews complain about a lack of content as well as bad camera work. One reviewer even suggested it felt like an early access game sold as a full product. Ouch.
I’ll just quote my own review of this crappy game:
Funko Fusion could have been something fun! A wacky adventure mixing together different franchises and worlds. Instead, its a boring, annoying, barely functional third-person action game starring ugly Funko Pops solving bad puzzles and fighting the same 10 enemies over and over again with guns and laser pistols. Don’t play Funko Fusion. Save your money, buy some pizza, and watch one of the movies included in this collection instead. It will be much more enjoyable and you won’t have to restart the movie five times to reach the end.
It’s wild that in 2024 one of the best games we played was the Silent Hill 2 remake. Meanwhile, in the same 12 months, Konami also released Silent Hill: The Short Message, a first-person horror game that wasn’t very good and which most people likely forgot about within weeks of playing it. At least it was free and short.
The original Test Drive Unlimited was awesome and was in many ways the predecessor to Forza Horizon’s big open worlds. Solar Crown, on the other hand, is a buggy disaster that players don’t enjoy and which wasn’t even playable for a few days at launch due to server problems. It also had three different release dates based on how much you paid. Bleh.
TMNT Mutant Mayhem is a fantastic movie with one of my favorite fight scenes from recent memory. Wrath of the Mutants, on the other hand, is just a quick and barebones port of the 2017 arcade game that has a title that sort-of-sounds like the popular movie. So yeah, this is just a bland cash grab. There are much better TMNT games to play instead of this. Another high-quality title from publisher Game Mill.
This horror game was made by one person, so credit to them: They shipped a mostly working game. That’s not easy. But Pneumata isn’t very good, with poor level design, bad enemy AI, and not many scares.
This is a very pretty-looking game that lets you drive around Barcelona as a taxi driver. Sadly, it’s not much fun to drive, offers little depth, and there are much better transportation sims out there. Also, as a Crazy Taxi fan, this game lacks Offspring music and big jumps. Boo.
The good: Looney Tunes characters are still funny and charming in Wacky World of Sports. The bad: Everything else. This co-op sports game plays poorly, has only four sports to choose from, and looks like it fell out of 2015. Avoid and watch some clips of Bugs and Daffy on YouTube instead. Oh hey, look, this game was also published by Game Mill. Hmmm.
If you Google Jujutsu Kaisen: Cursed Clash, you’ll find a lot of people calling it the worst anime game released in years and bragging about how they refunded it quickly. Others are warning people to not buy it. I’ll quote one negative Steam review: “Roblox JJK games are more worthy of your time.”
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