With only a few days left in the endless void that many know as 2020, the team at MetaCritic has compiled the ten worst-rated video games from across the Internet. Year-end lists are one of the few holiday traditions that 2020 can't delay or postpone, so it's almost heartening to see them start to emerge from sites across the web. While many focus on giving their Game of the Year honors to outright successes like Hades and The Last of Us 2, someone has to focus on the other end of the spectrum.
Failures in the gaming realm aren't always as interesting as bad movies or bad TV, so they're usually forgotten just as quickly as they emerge. This also means that they sometimes escape the critical eye, avoiding the dubious dishonors of MetaCritic's worst-rated lists just due to their obscurity. In 2020, many will forget the tale of Crucible, a game with such a poor reception that publisher Amazon took it back into beta after release before outright cancelling it. There was also Slide Stars, a simplistic arcade game starring TikTok stars that sold for $40 at launch. And who could forget Cooking Mama: Cookstar, an entry in the long-running series on Switch that was sold via a third-party website for a time because the franchise's rightsholders didn't want it to see the light of day.
Those games escaped the eye of MetaCritic's Screen Rant's own Cody Peterson called "tough to recommend to even the biggest fans of the series" in his review earlier this year.
Up two spots from Remothered is Fast & Furious: Crossroads, a bafflingly bad adaption of the Hollywood film series from the creators of Project Cars. Even the presence of Vin Diesel once again protecting his car-based family couldn't save it, and one hopes that Ark 2 does better work with his likeness. The #2 spot belongs to this year's reimagining of Ubisoft's XIII, which ended up stripping everything unique out of the FPS and replacing it with faulty gameplay and bugs. Finally, the dubious honor of the worst game of MetaCritic's 2020 goes to Tiny Racer, a budget Switch title that achieved an eye-popping 29 Metascore due to its frustrating gameplay. For completionists out there, the full list for 2020 is reproduced below.
- Tiny Racer (Switch)
- XIII Remake (Xbox One)
- Dawn of Fear (PS4)
- Fast & Furious Crossroads (PC)
- Arc of Alchemist (Switch)
- Remothered: Broken Porcelain (PC)
- Tamarin (PS4)
- Street Power Soccer (PS4)
- Gleamlight (Switch)
- The Elder Scrolls: Blades (Switch)
Just like there's value in recognizing the best games in any given year, looking at MetaCritic's worst games of the year can also say a lot in of gaming history. An entry might mark the end of a given franchise or its developer. A game might be a one and done from a once-promising studio or it could be a release from a developer that strikes it big in the future. It can mark strange shortcuts for successful franchises and attempts at a rebirth for long-dormant names. No matter what these games are, at least no one will them as one of the lowlights of this miserable year.
Source: MetaCritic
