With a new decade looming ever closer, we here at TheGamer have been looking at the games that helped define the industry in the 2010s. There’s been so many incredible, innovative titles that have changed the expectations we have for video games or even created entirely new genres. We’ve been so lucky to have played some of these amazing projects that developers have given us these past ten years.
Now let’s talk about the crap.
For every great game, there’s one that equals it in complete and total awfulness. Whether it’s a lack of resources, a release date that couldn’t be pushed back, or just general incompetence, there’s been some real trash scattered across this era of gaming. So let’s dig into the big sack of garbage, and look at 5 of the absolute worst games of the 2010s.
Aliens: Colonial Marines
Aliens: Colonial Marines was a disaster in more ways than one. The original E3 trailer for the game looked amazing as it showed you and a band of unprepared soldiers going up against Xenomorphs in a tense, action-packed first-person shooter. What we got instead was this:
Needless to say, this was not the Aliens game we wanted.
Instead of the horrifying monsters that Ripley had to deal with, we got dopey, brain-dead oafs that moved around like out of shape dudes in a bad Halloween costume. It was also much, much uglier than the gorgeous trailer we were originally shown, which was allegedly - but also probably - the result of Gearbox’s president and resident creepy reprobate Randy Pitchford taking the funds given to them by Sega to make the game and funneling them into development on their own title, Borderlands 2. The whole mess ended up with a big ol' lawsuit against Gearbox, and honestly, when you make a game like Aliens: Colonial Marines legal action seems more than justified.
Fallout 76
Where do you even begin when talking about the constant stream of negative news coming from Fallout 76? There was, of course, the pre-order bag fiasco, where fans received incredibly low-quality duffel bags, and Bethesda's customer service department basically told fans that they weren’t going to do a damn thing about it. There’s the bugs that would delete players’ bases, items, progress or even just their entire characters. Do you like stories and talking to interesting NPCs? You know, one of the important parts of a Fallout game? Well, you won’t get that in Fallout 76, although there is an expansion coming that adds in NPCs, but that was delayed until next year and like most patches added to the game will probably end up breaking it even further.
We’re all used to bugs in Bethesda's games, but Fallout 76 wasn’t just buggy, it was borderline irreparably broken. It showed that Bethesda is on a whole other level when it comes to incompetence. This sad attempt to squeeze money out of their fans by releasing a busted live-service Fallout game has all but killed any interest we have in a new Elder Scrolls game or whatever the hell Starfield is going to be. No matter how much self-deprecating humor Todd Howard and the gang use during their E3 conferences, there’s no excusing such a shoddy product.
But hey, at least you can play Skyrim on an Amazon Alexa, right?
Duke Nukem Forever
Congratulations Gearbox, you’ve made this list twice! What an honor!
Now this one isn’t entirely Gearbox’s fault. If anything Randy Pitchford’s desire to finally get Duke Nukem Forever onto store shelves was almost an altruistic endeavor as 3D Realms was one of the first developers he ever worked for. Of course, this move was also likely motivated by the hopes that the Duke name still held enough cache to turn a profit, but it’s still pretty nice by Randy Pitchford standards.
Unfortunately, Duke Nukem Forever had Chinese Democracy levels of anticipation that couldn’t possibly be met. This was made even worse by the fact that after 16 years of development, this misogynistic drivel was the end result. The FPS gameplay was boring and basic, the graphics were eye-numbing and bland, and its poor excuse for comedy was groan-worthy at best and offensively sexist at every other juncture. Not only was the sexual humor awful, but in many cases, it was troublingly problematic and made us concerned for the mental state of the people who wrote these jokes. Put all this all together, and you have a deliriously terrible game that no one in their right mind should ever play. The King is dead, baby.
Mass Effect: Andromeda
The Mass Effect series was the closest thing gamers had to a Star Trek or Star Wars franchise. A galaxy-spanning sci-fi series where we met new alien races and went on an epic space adventure trying to stop an ancient race of sentient battleships from destroying civilization. Even taking the ending into account, it was one of the greatest game trilogies of all time.
And then Mass Effect: Andromeda came along and dang near killed the entire property.
You might think that traveling several hundred years into the future to an entirely new universe would give us something special, but instead, we got a generic version of the other games only with unlikeable characters, a bad story, and some of the worst animations you could expect from a triple-A title. When your characters are T-posing in the middle of a firefight it's obvious that something has gone horribly awry. It also doesn't help that Sara Ryder might have the goofiest facial animations of any video game protagonist ever.
FemShep would wipe the floor with her.
Anthem might technically be a worse game, but considering how insulting Andromeda is to the Mass Effect name we feel it belongs on this list. It almost makes us wish that the Reapers had succeeded in their world-ending mission just so this game wouldn’t exist.
WWE2K20
Finally, we end with what might be the worst game of 2019, and the purest example of a genre that's been terrible for nearly an entire decade. The WWE games arguably haven't been good since the days of the Smackdown series on Playstation 2 - and some may go as far back as No Mercy on the N64 - and this generation saw the wrestling game genre get steadily worse and worse until this abomination was foisted upon the poor, put-upon fans who just want a good grappling game.
WWE2K20 was the culmination of several years of lazy, rushed development on a series that's been forced to release a new iteration annually even though it was in desperate need of an engine overhaul. Long-suffering developer Yukes finally left the project leaving it to the team at Visual Concepts to pick up the pieces and scramble to glue together a game in time for October. As a result, we got a wrestling title that was embarrassing in how unplayable it was. Characters would fall through the ring, float in the air, have their faces disappear or their hair phase through their heads, you name it there was a bug for it. It was ugly, glitchy, and as bad as watching as modern-day WWE Raw.
Oh, and since this game was received so poorly, there's a good chance that the next game's budget will be slashed in half. So we can probably look forward to adding another WWE2K game to the list of Worst Games Of The 2020s in the distant future.
These are the creme de la creme of crap from the 2010s. There's a lot to be excited about in the world of gaming as we roll into the 2020s. Let's just hope the new decade doesn't produce any stinkers that make these games look like Ocarina Of Time.