With just about a month and a half to go until the decade is officially through, it’s time to reflect on all the great and terrible gaming moments we’ve experienced over the last ten years… and trust us, there’s been quite a lot of terrible.
From the hilariously bad eighth-gen console launch lineup to the atrocity that was most of the Wii U’s library, it’s fair to say that there’s been more bad than good over the last decade, and we’ve narrowed down Metacritic‘s lowest-scored games since 2010. We’ve skipped over most of the shovelware, but these games still deserve a place in the bargain bin.
10 Postal III (Metascore 24)
Though it was released in 2011, Postal III looks like it released during the early era of 3D graphics. The third installment of this crass, irreverent series, has aged about as well as you could imagine, and the gruesomely dark humor is about as one-note as it gets.
Tasked with surviving a week in the life of “Postal Guy,” it plays like a broken-down GTA mod made by a college freshman with only a tenuous grasp on game development. Though the series has attracted a cult fandom and since spawned yet another installment in 2019’s Postal 4, that doesn’t make up for this big, fat failure.
9 Fighter Within (Metascore 23)
Released to coincide with the launch of the Xbox One, Fighter Within was one of a very small number of titles that dared to go all-in on the new system’s Kinect connectivity. Gamers already weren’t thrilled that Microsoft had essentially forced the peripheral on them, and the lackluster games released for it ensured that the Kinect wouldn’t successfully make the jump to the next generation.
While nothing worked particularly well with the accessory, this title was downright broken. A fighter that failed to register player movements nearly one-hundred percent of the time, it was a frustrating exercise that left gamers flailing around wildly in frustration more often than not.
8 FlatOut3: Chaos and Destruction (Metascore 23)
FlatOut3: Chaos and Destruction [sic] was, at one time, the lowest-rated game on Steam, and, given what the platform has become in recent years, that should be pretty telling.
A racing game that seemingly struggles to run at more than fifteen frames per second, FlatOut3 is the very definition of an unplayable mess. Painfully ugly and featuring vehicles as nimble and responsive as the finest of cruise liners, it was an outright atrocious experience. Oddly, the previous FlatOut games were fairly well-received, which only makes this title all the more difficult to deal with.
7 Rambo: The Video Game (Metascore 23)
Released seemingly out of the blue in 2014, Rambo: The Video Game was a perplexing movie tie-in title that came out thirty-some years after its source material.
It was also about as responsive as a game developed in the early 80s; an on-rails shooter riddled with quick-time events. Watching the original Rambo film on fast-forward via a busted VCR player would be a more enriching experience. What’s more, the voice acting was literally ripped from the movie in all of its grainy glory, leading to surreal moments in which non-diegetic sounds could be heard behind a character’s speech.
6 Fast and Furious: Showdown (Metascore 22)
Presumably released to coincide with the box office debut of the fifth main series film, Fast and Furious: Showdown is a mockery of a series that already receives a fair amount of mockery on its own. A failure as a shooter and an utter abomination as a racing title, Showdown’s driving controls feel like they’re on par with that awful Burger King cart racer on the 360.
Beyond that, the game is downright hideous – as in, it would have looked bad on the original Xbox, let alone the Xbox 360. Muddy and downright difficult to look at, far superior racing titles could probably be found on the Atari 2600.
5 Afro Samurai 2: Revenge of Kuma – Volume 1 (Metascore 21)
The video game version of pushing old, rusted bits of metal through a grinder, Afro Samurai 2: Revenge of Kuma was so awful that it holds the dubious honor of being one of the few games to have been canceled after it came out.
That’s right, this thing performed so poorly and received such negative reviews that the publisher decided to pull it from stores after it was released and refund everyone unfortunate enough to have purchased a copy. Though it tried to use cel-shading to obscure its downright PS1-era textures, this game was a major eyesore that constantly threatened to either crash or degrade into chunky, horrible frame-dropping madness. We aren’t holding our breath for a second volume.
4 Infestation: Survivor Stories (Metascore 20)
First debuting on Steam under the name The War Z, Infestation: Survivor Stories garnered such a negative reputation that it had to be rebranded. Today, the game appears to have spawned a free-to-play battle royale sequel of sorts titled Infestation: The New Z, but it’s hard to tell if this is a legitimate successor or an entirely different game with an eerily similar design.
Made to cash in on the popularity of Day Z back when it was still an ARMA 2 mod, Infestation: Survivor Stories felt like the culmination of the developer’s first few sessions with the Unity engine, and it was the first of what would become a torrent of awful zombie survival clones.
3 Alone In The Dark Illumination (Metascore 19)
The successor to a series commonly heralded as the true progenitor of the survival horror genre, it’s sad to see what Alone in the Dark has become these days. A broken, buggy Left 4 Dead wannabe on par with most of the other no-budget zombie survival guff found on Steam, it’s an absolute mockery of what was, 20 years ago, the scariest thing in video games.
The most laughable thing about Alone in the Dark Illumination is that it had the gall to be an online co-op third-person shooter despite the fact that server populations were often too low to get a single four-player match together.
2 Vroom in the Night Sky (Metascore 17)
Those who frequent worst-ever video games lists will probably be familiar with the infamous Superman 64. A game that was mostly about flying through rings with the world’s most slippery controls, Vroom in the Night Sky feels like some sort of awkward spiritual successor to that experience.
Released on the Nintendo Switch in 2017, Vroom in the Night Sky may seem like an inoffensive little title, but the wonky English translations and flat-out boring gameplay had most critics equating it to the entertainment value of filing a tax return. The Switch may have been desperate for new releasees in its early days, but we would have been far better off without this one.
1 Ride To Hell Retribution (Metascore 17)
Quite possibly the most infamously awful game of all time (and certainly the worst release of the decade), Ride to Hell Retribution is such an astounding catastrophe that it almost demands a playthrough. They should give it to software engineer undergrads as an example of how not to code.
Set in the American midwest sometime after the Vietnam War, the plot revolves around a biker gang member seeking revenge for his brother’s murder. It may sound engaging, but the voice acting is downright laughable, animations are mostly nonexistent (save for the horribly awkward fully-clothed sex scenes), and the combat is quite literally broken. Unfortunately, it doesn’t even fall into so-bad-it’s-good territory, as most of it is just unplayable.
