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
- Worst Port/Remake
- The “Why is this taking so much space on my memory card!?” Award
- Most Disappointing
- Worst Game
- Additional Commentary – Day 3
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Worst Microtransactions
The Elder Scrolls: Blades – Some of the games in this year’s nominees earned my ire by targeting kids with microtransactions, some made the overall game a worse experience by pushing them, and some outright pushed players to pay not to have to wait. But The Elder Scrolls: Blades earned this award by being a game that can’t really be played in any reasonable fashion without shelling out for microtransactions, resulting in a game that feels more like a moneymaking scam than the epic quest it poses as. What’s more, the game never lets you forget this, constantly hounding you to give them money. As I’ve said before, I’m not opposed to free games using microtransactions to earn money, but The Elder Scrolls: Blades isn’t a free game looking to make money with microtransactions, it’s a microtransaction money trap posing as a game to lure in victims.
Runners-Up:
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Most Overrated
Wide Ocean Big Jacket – While all of the nominees in this category earned a higher Metacritic score than I feel they deserved (well, and then there’s Carrion, which somehow got nominated for Best Indie Game and Best Debut Game at The Game Awards), only one of the highly-celebrated games on this list is one I actually think is a terrible game. However, more than that, I do not understand what anyone sees in Wide Ocean Big Jacket in the first place – the graphics are clearly ugly, the gameplay is tedious and frustrating, and the story is pedestrian and uninteresting. Yet despite this, the game scored a 79 on Metacritic. Nope, hard disagree. Don’t believe everything you see, this game is not worth it.
Runners-Up:
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Laziest Copycat
Sudoku Relax 5: Full Bloom – For the fifth game in a row, this series has changed absolutely nothing of note except the puzzles in the game, and minor elements of the presentation. It has gotten so bad that two of the Sudoku Relax games made this list this year (along with two of the Picross S games, which have a similar problem), and the only reason Sudoku Relax 5 edges out the fourth game is because it’s one number higher and yet still nothing has changed. At the very least the Picross S series can lay claim to being the best of its kind on the Switch. But Sudoku Relax 5 is a frustrating game that features exactly the same problems that all its predecessors had – it automates so much of the process that it essentially solves the puzzles for you. And the most frustrating thing is… I can already predict that Sudoku Relax 6 (and possibly Sudoku Relax 7) will be nominated for this award next year…
Runners-Up:
Offroad Racing – Buggy X ATV X Moto
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Worst Port/Remake
Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles Remastered Edition – It’s bad enough that not much was done to clean up the clunky menus, bad enough that the boring and repetitive combat wasn’t improved, bad enough that the game has absurd load times, but Square Enix couldn’t even get the core feature of the game, its multiplayer, to work right. As a result, old players will find themselves frustrated with a game that doesn’t work how they remember it, and newer players will wonder why anyone liked the game in the first place.
Runners Up:
Star Wars Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy
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The “Why is this taking so much space on my memory card!?” Award
Journey of the Broken Circle – Simple geometric shapes. No voiceover, nothing especially novel going on with the soundtrack, and a run time that lasts just a few hours… so why does this game take up over 1GB of space on my MicroSD card?
Runners-Up:
Save Your Nuts (1.9GB)
Chinese Parents (954MB)
RMX Real Motocross (1.65GB)
Retro Arcade Shooter – Attack From Pluto (1.07GB)
Wide Ocean Big Jacket (637MB)
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Most Disappointing
Carrion – This game had so much potential. Storming through a research facility as a murderous tentacle monster? Sign me up! Unfortunately, it ends up being more like “getting lost and going around in circles while trying to figure out where you haven’t already gone yet… as a tentacle monster”. I had high hopes for this game, but the reality is just… well, disappointing.
Runners-Up:
Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles Remastered Edition
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Worst Game
Kitty Maestro – Who is this game even for? It’s a music-rhythm game with terrible music, it’s a top-down Arcade-style game with poor controls and hit detection, it looks ugly, sounds ugly, plays poorly… this is without question the most joyless experience I had on my Nintendo Switch in all of 2020.
Runners-Up:
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Additional Commentary – Day 3
Worst Microtransactions – None of the offenders on this year’s list are as bad as last year’s winner, but Elder Scrolls: Blades still comes close. I almost didn’t have the heart to put most of these games here, because they’re all free-to-play and have to make their money somehow. But games with wait mechanics? Or that target kids with microtransactions? Or that break the game unless you pay to fix it? Yeah, that stuff doesn’t sit well with me.
Most Overrated – I think I explained my selection for winner pretty well here. As for the others…
Florence got a Metacritic score of 90. What the hell? Seriously, I liked the game, but it was short, the gameplay was clever at parts but seemed to exist solely to be clever, and the story just seemed so inconsequential…
Carrion got a decent but not great Metacritic score of 76, which is fine… but then The Game Awards nominated it for multiple awards for some reason, including Best Indie Game. Seriously, they actually put this in the same category as Hades! What the heck were they thinking!?
Also, I heard no end to the love Spiritfarer got, but when I actually played it, it was… eh, fine, I guess. Slow and tedious. Not bad, certainly, but definitely not deserving the sterling reputation it seemed to have garnered.
There’s Paradise Killer, which gets points for originality and its absolutely bonkers writing and story, but then loses those points for being damn near incomprehensible.
Finally, rounding out the group is Mad Rat Dead, a Music-Rhythm game with mediocre music, yet somehow it got a Metacritic score of 80 on Switch, as opposed to the 66 it got on PlayStation 4… which I feel is a bit harsh, and I think the truth lies somewhere in the middle.
Laziest Copycat – Last year I had a bunch of games that copied other companies’ games, but this year the biggest copycats seemed to be from companies making simple Puzzle games that only copied themselves from prior entries. And you know, I would have been fine with this if they only fixed the flaws from earlier games, or offered more content, but no, they just swapped out the puzzles for new ones, made minor changes to the presentation, and called it a day.
Explosive Jake is a bad Bomberman clone, and Offroad Racing took ATV Drift & Tricks and added two vehicle types, but at least those games tried. But these lazy iterations on Sudoku and Picross? Ugh… it’s just depressing. Not because they’re bad (the Picross S series is generally quite good, actually), but because they could be so much better with simple tweaks the developer can’t be bothered to make.
Worst Port/Remake – This category was inspired by Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles. That’s right, people complaining about The Outer Worlds, this is how you completely screw up a port or remake. They just broke everything about the game that made it worthwhile and only left in the boring, tedious, bad bits.
Next to that, we have graphics so bad they make the gameplay worse (Ghostrunner), archaic controls that don’t transition well to the Switch (Jedi Outcast), all the problems of the previous game in the series plus framerate issues (Da Vinci 2), and a decent but failed attempt at porting a game that was clearly meant for another platform (Wonderful 101).
The “Why is this taking so much space on my memory card!?” Award – I’ll be honest with you, none of the selections for this category this year are nearly as outrageous as last year’s. I mean, the biggest one is under 2GB, so it’s not like these come even close to filling a modest-sized MicroSD card. However, at least on a smaller scale these games still seem way too big compared to what they are. Maybe next year I’ll rethink this category, I dunno. We’ll see.
Most Disappointing – Spiritfarer was overhyped, but Carrion edged it out because I felt like this could have been a much better game if it gave players a map or at least did a better job signposting. And Ghostrunner had the potential to be great, but just ended up being frustrating. The less said about Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles, the better. And I absolutely love Harmonix’s games and Fuser was good, but I expected more from the folks behind Rock Band.
Worst Game – I’ll just leave what I said about the winner of this category to stand on its own.
Chickens Madness is a Party game to get if you hate everyone at your party and want them to be frustrated with bad controls. Silent World is so very slow-paced and boring. Half Dead is a decent concept but doesn’t really explain itself or the logic of its puzzles, just leading to frustration. Ubermosh Omega is just an incomprehensible mess. And Sorry, James is broken and nonsensical.
You may notice I left one game I gave an F grade to off of this list. Suffice it to say, Northgard is a game that I want to revisit at a later time and give a second chance, and as such it didn’t seem fitting to include it on this list.
That’s all for today! to keep up with all of the eShopperReviews 2020 Game Awards, be sure to check back at the Awards’ Start Page, which I’ll be updating throughout the week!
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