Video games as an artistic medium have certainly earned their keep among the likes of novels, film, and the various other methods of storytelling as an exceptional, striking experience, complete with many masterful works of art that make of its use of player control and variance. However, for every truly great game that pushes the medium forward, there are also a handful of notoriously awful games, with some of the very worst being downright shocking in their complete lack of quality.
From awful relics from periods of growth and evolution for the medium to botched games with no budget or direction, several of these games manage to be nearly unplayable in their disastrous executions. The only legacy that they have achieved for themselves is that of downright failure, being arduous to play and completely going against everything that makes video games such a striking and long-lasting medium.
10
‘Ride to Hell: Retribution’ (2013)
Following the continued success of games like Grand Theft Auto, there were a wide array of games that wanted to try their own hand at a vast open world for the player to explore. While Ride to Hell: Retribution originally had plans of being a vast, open world with grueling roads and biker gangs, the final product abandoned this idea to instead tell a basic, linear story of revenge. Not that an open world would have really done much to save Ride to Hell, as its shoddy execution completely undoes anything that the game was actually trying to achieve.
Plagued by lackluster visuals, bad shooting mechanics, and awful writing and voice acting, Ride to Hell’s only real enjoyment comes from a place of unintentional so-bad-it’s-good comedy. However, with so many disastrous glitches that hinder the player from actually progressing, as well as an array of tasteless, abrupt sex scenes (featuring fully clothed characters), any fun had while playing the game quickly goes away.
9
‘The Lord of the Rings: Gollum’ (2023)
Licensed video games based on pre-existing pop culture can vary massively in terms of quality, as while it can result in exceptionally great games like Insomnia’s Spider-Man or Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, it can also result in absolute disasters like The Lord of the Rings: Gollum. While Gollum is far from the only licensed game to appear on this list, it’s a massive outlier in being the only game released within the past 10 years.
Gollum was an idea that seemed effective as a concept, but as release drew closer players came to realize that it’s hard to imagine actually having fun playing as the meek, shifty creature. It didn’t make things better that the actual execution proved to be laughably bad, with terrible visuals worse than the decades-old movies and terrible stealth mechanics. Glitches on release also made the game nearly unplayable, as a buggy mess that constantly crashed and made the entire experience extremely unstable.
8
‘Shaq Fu’ (1994)
While Shaquille O’Neal is still widely celebrated as a beloved celebrity nowadays, his level of dominating star power as an NBA all-star was near inescapable in the 90s. This resulted in him being in a wide array of obnoxious, poorly-made pop culture films, and while films like Steel and Kazaam will forever be infamous as some of the worst 90s movies, Shaq Fu equally stands as one of the worst video games of the 90s.
Especially in an era where fighting games were arguably at their peak with the recent releases of Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat, Shaq Fu is one of the most uncomfortable and sluggish fighting game experiences of all time. It reaches a point where difficulty doesn’t come from any real balancing, but from the pain of actually making sense of the controls and trying to play the game. This doesn’t even go into the chaos of the game itself, where Shaq has to fight a bunch of interdimensional warriors to save a child from an evil mummy.
7
‘Bad Rats’ (2009)
