Isometrics Awards: Worst Game of 2015

Welcome to the Isometrics Awards for Worst Game of the Year, the Rancid Retrospective of the world of computer and video games. There was a huge influx of games, a lot of which were fantastic, unique or at least competent. With such a morass of games however, the inevitable hand of the greedy, the incompetent and the both ends up leading to quite a lot of crap. That said my longlist for worst games was far shorter than my longlist for game of the year, but my word what we have here plumbs new depths of terrible. So without further ado, we shall begin.

10: Batman Arkham Knight (WB Games/Rocksteady Studios: PS4/XB1/PC)

Pictured: The first mission of Arkham Knight

Let's start controversially shall we, by putting a game on this list I actually quite like. Batman Arkham Knight, the kinda-sorta swansong of the phenomenal Arkham series of bat-em-ups is actually a very good game. It's beautiful, features some interesting mechanics to add to the already excellent core gameplay elements of Arkham City and has enough intruigue and darkness to be worth your while. This would all be true if the game worked reliably. Even as of me writing this six months after launch there are problems with frame rate, the Batmobile (an otherwise fantastic mechanic) falling through the world and other random glitches that really hamper an overall experience, to the point that Rocksteady pulled the game, offering full refunds and only rereleasing it in November with much of the same issues.

If you're playing on a console that didn't suffer these problems quite as badly, feel free to replace this with F1 2015, another game which could have been fantastic but for lazy porting, terrible optimisation, inexcusable glitches and a basically unplayable multiplayer, although with less actual content and innovation over previous iterations to justify this. I gave the slight nod to Arkham Knight on the sheer scale of disaster of the launch, but honestly both could have been Number 10 on this list.

9: Godus (22Cans: PC)

Depicted: Abject Disappointment

So Peter Molyneux abandoned yet another project half finished and missing almost all the content claimed by the developer. Since Black and White he has been doing this and since Fable it has really affected the games, with them getting worse and worse up until this utter nadir of a life-simulation. Godus was a successful Kickstarter campaign in 2012 that had an early access launch in 2013, allegedly owing to problems with funding and complications that occurred during game development.

The rest of the story ends up getting very upsetting, the winner of an alternate reality mobile game ended up getting precisely nothing despite being promised real world revenue from a feature that was never put in the game. Many of the Backer's rewards (Read: The most important thing to give out when doing a Kickstarter campaign) were unfulfilled, leading to demands for refunds from irate gamers. Technically the game is still in early access but given the reduction to a skeleton crew as of February 2015 it's safe to say the game isn't being finished this side of ever.

What's in the game is fairly bad too, including terrible terrain deformation that seems designed to cause repetitive strain injury, a microtransaction model for the Android and iOS versions (The absence of which is touted a little too proudly in the PC beta), lots of annoying features borrowed from mobile gaming and an alarming lack of content. There is a potentially fun game here but the game causes too much pain both figuratively and literally to be worth more than derision.

8:Burgers (storm_sharks, PC)

The game may appear mildly exciting from still screenshots. They lie.

Well isn't this an odd curiosity of a game. Burgers is a Metal Slug clone of sorts with terrible controls, a fairly naff art style, a thoroughly baffling storyline and about an hour of content, and it only got that much due to some of the worst controls in a 2D action game I've seen for a while. It has a button for walking back which only made sense in a 2D shooter when the rest of the appalling controls were taken into account. The shooting is unsatisfying, the animation would have been laughed off of Newgrounds and the difficulty curve wobbles between absurdly easy to inexplicably difficult, while lacking much in the way of variety to justify it. The story, such as it is is so nonsensically absurd and riddled with spelling, logic and sanity errors that it's almost worth the incredibly low price of admission to see though, which is probably the highest praise it will get.

7: Battle Ranch (Playboom, PC)

Depicted: Veg vs Pigbies

Certain games are epoch-setting and blaze a trail that other games can but follow for years to come. Battle Ranch is not one of those games. A clone of Plants Vs Zombies whose derivation is only matched by sheer incompetence, Battle Ranch is the ever-so-original war between pigs and plants. Apparently that's a wacky original concept or something. Somehow despite being released in 2015 it looks like a game made with Visual Basic 6, with a frame rate that aspires for double digits and animations which aspire to actually animate at all. A game that would have been laughed off of Newgrounds.

6:Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5 (Activision, PS4/XB1)

Thinking Of Your Own Captions is much more fun than Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5

There was a time, ever so long ago when Tony Hawk and his series of Pro Skater games were some of the most fun party games you could ever play, and the brand was a symbol of a great experience with a mix of brilliant gameplay and the perfect amount of sillyness. Pro Skater 5, released over a decade after Pro Skater 4 and eight years after the last good entry in the series, has regressed in a manner not seen since the execrable Flatout 3 in 2011. The game looks ugly as sin to start, with a graphical style so bad it was very quickly converted to a cel-shaded style in a failed attempt to deflect criticism (known as the “DS Gambit”). There's an alarming variety in pretty much every regard, with repetitive missions, limited tricks and a social element seemingly limited in practise to shoving other people over online. Worse than all of this however is the regression in gameplay, taking a formula that had evolved over a decade and somehow managing to mess up most of the core mechanics, either through streamlining or simple glitches. The game is monstrously unfun outside of watching those hilarious montages of the game glitching out uncontrollably. It's funny to watch but once you realise that is the whole experience, you'll have a bad time.

5:F-1 Chequered Flag (Turn6, PC)

Depicted: Bob Slayer's Dirty Little Secret

Speaking of Flatout 3, their developer Turn6 is back, releasing an F-1 game in 2015 which may go down as one of the flat out worst racing games in existence. Not having controller support may be forgivable in comparison to the more readily apparent sins of the game, such as the complete lack of competence in any technological respect. The graphics would be dated in 1995, something that is not hidden by terrible blurry visual effects. Every track feels the same and appears to be in the same environment and the only distinction between yourself and the other racers is what washed out colour you happen to be. The gameplay really sucks as well. One would assume you could not use the skidding mess that was the Glacier 3 engine in a formula one game, however Turn6 vehemently disagree adding terrible drifting and a destruction based boost mechanic to a discipline of driving intended to be about careful precision. An appalling, bargain basement excuse for a video game.

4:Temper Tantrum (Digital Homicide, PC)

Depicted: Baby Jesus Simulator 2015

So Digital Homicide are back, with their patented blend of bought, borrowed and stolen assets, mixed in with unbelievably pathetic gameplay. The sheer volume of crap they effused onto steam was so excessive I could have filled the top ten list with DH (and affiliated shell companies) games and had done with it. I was torn between this and the completely dysfunctional Galactic Hitman, and Temper Tantrum only won because of the sheer offence of it. It's a painful game to witness, partly because of the gaudiest textures ever sold via Unity, but also because of a bizarre framerate, unresponsive controls and a camera that seems obsessed with spinning. The one moment of respite was on my first attempt playing the game where I phased through a wall and ended up standing atop a swimming pool. When glitching your way out of playing a game is the best thing about it, you know you've reached a particularly rough level of bad.

3:Bloodbath Kavkaz (Dagestan Technology, PC)

Depicted: Race Relations. Also Depicted: A Repulsive Video Game

From mere technological failures to outright offensively awful messes, we have the Russian mockbuster take on Hotline Miami, Bloodbath Kavkaz. The steam page promises “all the horrors of russian [sic] modern culture” and it delivers in spades, providing a nonsensical experience seemingly made in MS Paint by a fourteen year old white supremacist. It is racism, terrible art and memes, and apparently there is no room for good gameplay, graphics that don't seriously harm people with photosensitive epilepsy and oddly enough for a Hotline Miami clone, a lack of difficulty for the most part. Beyond pathetic.

2:Gynophobia (Andrii Vintsevych, PC)

Depicted: An attempt to take a picture of the most repulsive part of the game, where the main character's dad is a massive homophobe.

Gynophobia literally denotes a fear of women, and the game takes this mildly intruiging concept with all the subtlty of a spider-shaped brick with breasts. The first issue is that the main conceit of the game is mostly a con, since two fifths of the game take place within another terribly generic zombie first person shooter, where you are wowed by awful controls, location damage limited to headshots, a grand total of three weapons (and I'm magnanimously including the knife in that as well), ugly store-bought enemies with AI completely limited to chasing the player and a level objective which consists of car maintenance. Once the actual misogynist parts of the game begin and you're shooting women-shaped store-bought zombies in the head, needless to say the game gets a little bit unhinged. The game is only an hour long as well, even taking into account the often unfair level design and lack of checkpoints, but by the end you'll have been so beaten over the head by this half-assed misogynist bollocks that killing a scorpion sorceress and the bizarre Oedipal aspects of the game are no longer even slightly amusing. A soul-destroying mess.

1:Hatred (Destructive Creations, PC/PS4)

Depicted: Deep Sociological Satire.

I didn't want this to be the winner in all honesty. I suspected there was a good chance this jaunt through the life of a spree killer was going to win the worst game award, but I wanted to give it the benefit of the doubt. After all, brilliant games sometimes cover insanely dark themes, and providing there is a level of balance, enjoyment or some form of enlightenment a game can be entertaining. Hatred manages to get everything wrong that games Hatred is so desperate to emulate got right, games like Manhunt and especially Postal 2. Hatred is not the worst game of the year because of its appalling graphics, inexcusable framerate, iffy controls, generic mission objectives, its litany of bugs or its short lifespan. Not at all, the game is the worst game of this year, and indeed the worst of all time because of how much of a complete and utter waste it is. It wasted the Unreal Engine 4, providing a game that looks bad by late PS2 standards and has a framerate that aspires to reach double digits on a good day when nothing's on screen. It wasted a graphical style that sought to emulate dark age comic books but is a generic sludge of black and white nonsense that forces the player to rely on the “Killer's Sense” mapped to the right analogue stick to actually find enemies. Most importantly, it wasted what could have been a fascinating conceit, of a twisted disturbed spree killer far too psychotic and murderous to be an antihero, who kills for some purpose never said and possibly never known. It is a conceit succeeded in the disturbing Manhunt, the shamefully hilarious Postal 2 and even the controversial Super Columbine Massacre RPG, a free game made in 2005 about a real mass shooting. Hatred inspires complete apathy, a complete lack of care, effort or interest in the game they are making and trying to sell, trying to pass this lack of effort and talent as some slight against the politically correct world. It makes me furious that a game like this hoodwinked masses of people on Greenlight, Gabe Newell who stepped in to allow the game to be published after an initial ban, and myself into thinking this was a game with merit being a victim of censorship. Of the top three games, at least Bloodbath Kavkaz attempted and failed at being as satirical as Hotline Miami, and at least Gynophobia had attempted and failed to cover its subject matter. Hatred simply did not bother, and because of this complete antithesis of fun, enjoyment and meaning, Hatred gets the Isometrics Award for Worst Game of 2015.

Thank you very much for reading, and have a lovely 2016. Much better games and the honourable mentions are incoming.