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15 Video Games That Really Are As Bad As People Say

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The hate is earned.

Nazarii Verbitskiy

Gaming - September 16th 2026, 16:10 GMT+2

Call of Duty Ghosts 2013 cropped processed by imagy — 15. Call Of Duty: Ghosts
Call Of Duty: Ghosts promised a fresh start for the franchise but delivered one of the most forgettable campaigns in series history, complete with a plot about South American invasions that felt ripped from a rejected action movie script. The multiplayer maps were too big for the frantic pace that made previous entries work, turning matches into tedious hunting expeditions across empty space. Even the fish AI that Infinity Ward proudly showcased became a running joke about misplaced development priorities. The whole package felt like a franchise running on autopilot while pretending to innovate. | © Activision

Sea Of Thieves — 14. Sea Of Thieves
Sea of Thieves launched with the most beautiful water anyone had ever seen in a video game, and almost nothing interesting to do on it. The core loop asked players to sail across gorgeous seas to dig up treasure chests, then sail back and turn them in, over and over, with barely any progression systems or meaningful rewards to show for the effort. Rare built an incredible foundation for pirate adventures but forgot to put any actual adventure on top of it. The game felt like a tech demo stretched into a full release, leaving players staring at stunning sunsets while wondering why they were still playing. | © Microsoft

No Mans Sky — 13. No Man's Sky
No Man's Sky promised infinite exploration across a universe of 18 quintillion planets, then delivered endless variations of the same empty experience. The procedural generation created worlds that felt mathematically assembled rather than discovered, with alien creatures that looked like random body parts stuck together and landscapes that grew boring after the third or fourth barren rock. Sean Murray's pre-launch interviews painted a picture of meaningful exploration and player encounters that simply did not exist in the shipped game. What stung most was not just the missing features, but how the core loop of mining, crafting, and jumping to another identical system revealed itself as hollow within hours. | © Hello Games

Sim City — 12. SimCity
SimCity promised to revolutionize city building by forcing players online, then immediately proved why that was a terrible idea. The servers crashed constantly at launch, leaving people unable to play a single-player game they had paid full price to own. Even when the technical disasters got fixed, the cities felt weirdly small and the always-online requirement never stopped being an insult to players who just wanted to build roads and zone residential areas in peace. EA turned one of gaming's most beloved franchises into a lecture about digital rights management that nobody asked for. | © EA

STAR WARS Battlefront II — 11. Star Wars Battlefront 2
Star Wars Battlefront 2 launched with a progression system so aggressively focused on microtransactions that it made Darth Vader cost 40 hours of grinding or a credit card swipe. The backlash hit so hard that Disney stepped in, EA pulled the pay-to-win mechanics entirely, and one Reddit comment defending the system became the most downvoted in the site's history. Underneath all that controversy sat a decent shooter with beautiful visuals and solid gameplay, but the launch damage was already done. Sometimes a game can be technically competent and still earn its terrible reputation through pure corporate overreach. | © EA

Starfield — 10. Starfield
Starfield promised to be Bethesda's grand return to single-player RPGs, but the final product feels like someone took all the walking from their previous games and spread it across a thousand empty planets. The procedural generation creates worlds that look different but feel identical, filled with the same handful of outposts and creatures scattered across barren landscapes that take forever to cross. Combat stays stuck in 2011, exploration becomes a chore of fast-traveling between loading screens, and the main story never finds a reason to care about any of it. What should have been Bethesda's space epic instead feels like their most hollow game yet. | © Microsoft

Saints Row — 9. Saints Row
Saints Row tried to reboot a franchise built on outrageous chaos by making it safer, cleaner, and more concerned with millennial financial anxiety than actual mayhem. The new cast feels like they wandered in from a different game entirely, talking about student loans and startup dreams while the world around them still expects the gleeful destruction the series was known for. Nothing about the tone works because the writing wants to have serious conversations about friendship and responsibility in a sandbox that only makes sense when everyone involved has completely lost their minds. The result is a Saints Row game that feels embarrassed to be a Saints Row game. | © Deep Silver

Mass Effect Andromeda — 8. Mass Effect: Andromeda
Mass Effect: Andromeda promised a fresh start in a new galaxy, but delivered facial animations that looked like they were rendered on a potato and dialogue that made the original trilogy's worst moments seem Shakespearean. The game's attempt to recapture the magic of exploring unknown worlds got buried under technical disasters, forgettable characters, and a plot that felt like fan fiction written by someone who missed the point entirely. Even after patches fixed the most meme-worthy animation glitches, nothing could save the fundamentally hollow experience underneath. BioWare had built their reputation on making players care about alien companions, and somehow forgot how to do it when it mattered most. | © Electronic Arts

Skull and Bones — 7. Skull and Bones
Skull and Bones promised to be the pirate game everyone wanted after Assassin's Creed Black Flag, then delivered a hollow shell that strips out everything people loved about being a pirate. You spend most of your time staring at menu screens and inventory management instead of actually sailing or fighting, and when you do get on the water, the combat feels lifeless and detached. The game somehow makes commanding a pirate ship feel like filing taxes. After nearly a decade in development, Ubisoft managed to create the most boring pirate experience possible. | © Ubisoft

Aliens Colonial Marines — 6. Aliens: Colonial Marines
The demo footage looked incredible, but Aliens: Colonial Marines shipped as something completely different, with downgraded visuals and AI so broken that xenomorphs would run straight into walls. Gearbox had outsourced most of the actual development while using the marketing budget to show a version of the game that barely existed. The final product felt like a cheap knockoff of its own promotional materials, turning one of the most anticipated sci-fi licenses into a masterclass in how not to handle a beloved franchise. | © Sega

Redfall6 — 5. Redfall
Redfall promised to be Arkane's take on cooperative vampire hunting, but the studio that mastered immersive sims somehow delivered a hollow open-world shooter that felt like it was made by someone else entirely. The vampires lack any menace, the world feels lifeless despite being packed with objectives, and the whole experience plays like a rough draft that accidentally shipped as a finished product. Co-op was supposed to be the main draw, but even playing with friends couldn't mask how fundamentally broken the AI and mission design turned out to be. This is what happens when a developer gets pushed so far outside their wheelhouse that they forget what made them special in the first place. | © Xbox Game Studios

Tony Hawks Pro Skater 5 — 4. Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5
Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5 arrived fifteen years after the series peaked, looking and feeling like a game that forgot what made skateboarding fun in the first place. The physics felt broken, the graphics looked outdated even for 2015, and basic tricks that should have been smooth became frustrating exercises in fighting the controls. What made it worse was how it carried the Tony Hawk name while delivering an experience that felt nothing like the tight, arcade-perfect skating that built the franchise's reputation. This was supposed to be a return to form that instead proved some comebacks should never happen. | © Activision

Anthem — 3. Anthem
Anthem promised to be BioWare's answer to Destiny, but launched as a beautiful world wrapped around fundamentally broken systems. The flying felt incredible for about ten minutes, then you realized there was almost nothing meaningful to do once you landed. Loading screens interrupted every mission, loot drops made no sense, and the endgame consisted of repeating the same few activities until you questioned why you were still playing. Even the studio's trademark storytelling got lost somewhere between the technical disasters and the scramble to fix basic functionality. | © Electronic Arts

Fallout 76 — 2. Fallout 76
Fallout 76 promised the wasteland experience fans loved, except this time you could explore it with friends. What players got instead was a broken multiplayer experiment where the servers barely worked, the quests mostly involved reading computer terminals, and other players could grief you out of hours of progress. The game launched without human NPCs, turning the world into an empty theme park where you collected junk and listened to holotapes about more interesting people who were already dead. Even the canvas bags in the collector's edition were fake. | © Bethesda Softworks

Dukem Nukem Forever — 1. Duke Nukem Forever
Duke Nukem Forever waited fifteen years to prove that some things are better left unfinished. The game that finally emerged felt like a relic from 1996 that had been awkwardly stretched across multiple console generations, complete with juvenile humor that had curdled into something genuinely uncomfortable. Every system felt broken or half-implemented, from the clunky shooting to the baffling two-weapon limit that stripped away the franchise's signature arsenal mayhem. What should have been a triumphant return instead became a perfect example of how hype can't save a fundamentally broken game. | © 2K Games

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For every game unfairly dragged through the mud, there's one that absolutely deserves every bit of the criticism it gets. These 15 titles earned their bad reputations the hard way, through broken promises, busted launches, or just being genuinely no fun to play.

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For every game unfairly dragged through the mud, there's one that absolutely deserves every bit of the criticism it gets. These 15 titles earned their bad reputations the hard way, through broken promises, busted launches, or just being genuinely no fun to play.