I’m not buddy-buddy with game companies, and I’m not afraid to call them on their BS when they mess up. While I don’t take joy in crapping on someone else’s hard work, I believe it’s important to point out when a developer does poorly, in hopes that they can improve in their future efforts. Here are the games that failed spectacularly in one area or another this year.
- Worst Microtransactions
- Most Overrated
- Laziest Copycat
- The “Why is this taking so much space on my memory card!?” Award
- Most Disappointing
- Worst Game
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Worst Microtransactions
Growtopia – There are games with nasty microtransactions, and then there’s Growtopia, which pushes the worst players in your face while you’re still trying to learn the game and charges you protection money to get them to stop harassing you. I’d be impressed with the gall if I wasn’t so enraged. While every one of the runners-up for this award did something particularly nasty to deserve being placed here (a crappy kid-friendly knockoff created just to sell microtransactions, a kid-friendly game that added post-launch microtransactions, and a game with lootboxes and wait mechanics), Growtopia is the one game that truly pushed the bar in finding a new way to extort players I hadn’t even heard of yet, and we’ll all be worse off if the rest of the industry tries to copy it.
Runners-Up:
Angry Bunnies: Colossal Carrot Crusade
Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled
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Most Overrated
Untitled Goose Game – Put your pitchforks down. I liked this game – the fact that it has already been a runner-up for multiple awards should make that clear. However, with its short length and occasionally obtuse puzzles, I simply didn’t feel the huge outpouring of love everyone else seemed to give it was justified. Yes, the goose is funny, and messing with people is fun… but while it makes for a great meme, I don’t think it’s a truly spectacular game, and while I absolutely want indie games to get more love, there are plenty of others I played this year that I felt deserved it more than this one did.
Runners-Up:
Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled
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Laziest Copycat
Angry Bunnies: Colossal Carrot Crusade – There are some companies out there that take a game, make a cheap copy of it, put it out for free and load it with microtransactions. Heck, that’s practically a standard business model on smartphones at this point. But it takes a special kind of courage to make a cheap knockoff of a game that’s already free, pump it full of ridiculous microtransactions, and not even bother to put any effort into graphics, presentation, or the gameplay… yet that’s exactly what this terrible Angry Birds clone does.
Runners-Up:
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The “Why is this taking so much space on my memory card!?” Award
SmuggleCraft – When an indie racing game uses featureless, untextured, polygonal terrain, and looks cheap, you kinda’ don’t expect it to be one of the biggest resource hogs on the Nintendo Switch. Yet this game takes up a whopping 11.6GB of space on your memory card, putting it at nearly twice the amount of space taken up by Mario Kart 8 Deluxe. It is simply astounding that a game that takes up this much space can look this bad.
Runners-Up:
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Most Disappointing
Merchants of Kaidan – I love the concept of this game so much – the idea of building a trading empire in a fantasy world sounds amazing! However, terrible controls, a game that stacks the deck against you, and game-crashing bugs all worked to make my time with this game absolutely miserable.
Runners-Up:
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Worst Game
Growtopia – I give a lot of leeway to free games when it comes to monetization. However, Growtopia’s monetization is ugly, offensive, and damn near abusive, and that’s on top of an ugly game that’s poorly cobbled-together in the first place. Do not download this game.
Runners-Up:
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That’s all for today! to keep up with all of the eShopperReviews 2019 Game Awards, be sure to check back at the Awards’ Start Page, which I’ll be updating throughout the week!
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