Inspired by the “Golden Turkey Awards” of the 1980s
Let us give thanks by saying “no thanks” to these abysmal failures of our favorite medium. In true Thanksgiving holiday spirit – here’s our feast of the all-time winners for PlayRatedGames’ Digital Turkey Awards of gaming hall of shame.
Table of Contents
Most Pathetic Game: Call of Duty: Black Ops 7
DO NOT BUY THIS! If you need to play an online shooter, just go play Battlefield 6 or Arc Raiders, but for the love of all that is digitally sacred — stay away from this slop. We need this series to burn. It’s over. They outsourced their campaign to AI. This is completely unacceptable. This is a soulless tragedy, and I implore you to boycott it.
Worst Executed Concept: Darkest of Days
What could have been a captivating narrative about traversing the darkest moments in human history is muddled by a contrived, confusing, and poorly written sci-fi approach. This game not only gets the award for worst concept, it also wins the award for most hilariously absurd moment in game history — firing a barrage of futuristic rockets in the Battle of Gettysburg. You could not make this stuff up.
Worst Character Redesign: Crash Bandicoot in ‘Crash of the Titans’
Eager to take the series in a more open-ended, free-roam direction, Crash of the Titans wipes the entire slate clean and starts completely fresh. The story and voice acting, while nothing top-tier, are solid enough. Where it really faults is its combat system; opting for a more beat-’em-up approach would have been fine if it weren’t so simplistic and repetitive. Where it objectively fails miserably is the redesign of the titular character. Crash looks like he’s going through his college edgelord phase, and it looks like rotten Wumpa fruit.
Worst Dialogue: Richard “Dick” Marcinko – Rogue Warrior
A wannabe gritty, dark, and grimy title with about as much self-awareness as a middle schooler thinking that My Chemical Romance is Plato-tier philosophy. The gameplay and aesthetic are woefully uninspired, but what’s somehow even worse is its dialogue — bar none the most juvenile and immature lines ever spoken in a game. One of my personal favorites: ‘Suck my b@lls, my hairy fcking big b@lls, wrap them around your fcking mouth!’ Seriously, this crap makes the banter in a 2007 COD lobby look like a John Steinbeck novel in comparison.
Worst Online Multiplayer: Rogue Warrior
Broken mechanics, bare-bones maps, and no variety in its game modes. The multiplayer somehow turned out even worse than the main game. It was so basic there’s really nothing else to say about it.
Worst Spinoff: Resident Evil Survivor
Without a shadow of a doubt, the worst game in the entire franchise. The first game to implement a light-gun style with no gun accessory, it plays as smoothly as gravel sprinkled with glass. The protagonist, Ark Thompson, is about as interesting as a wooden fence. All your favorite monsters are here, but the AI is so poorly programmed you’ll find yourself laughing at how they walk around like they can’t find where the bathroom is. Never has a 90-minute game felt like such a waste of time.
Worst Soundtrack: Hong Kong 97
There have been some truly terrible soundtracks to accompany games. Hong Kong 97 decided to dial things up all the way to 11 by not only having a three-second music loop, but one accompanied by lyrics! The song ‘I Love Peking Tiananmen’ plays nonstop to the point where even dying doesn’t pause it. It’s so headache-inducing you’d think it was a Chinese torture method.
Biggest Fraud: ‘The Day Before’ – Developed by Fntastic
A development team consisting of ‘volunteer’ collaborators — unpaid workers. You get what you pay for. Yet another zombie survival game — hooray. The gameplay shown prior to release looked sketchy — a little too polished or something. Something just felt off. After various delays and back-and-forth copyright disputes regarding the title, we finally got The Day Before — and wow, what a piece of crap. Broken, janky as hell, unfinished, hideous. The game was dropped from Steam after an apocalyptic failure of a launch, and developer Fntastic deleted all their socials. What a fantastic mess!
Worst Story DLC: ‘Fallout 76’ – Steel Dawn / Steel Reign
Why anyone stuck with this game long enough to become invested in any expansion packs is beyond me — but for those masochists of monotony who did, they were treated to a highly unfulfilling conclusion to the Brotherhood of Steel storyline, offering zero closure and buried under bloated dialogue with no real payoff. I don’t know what else I should’ve expected. Honestly, is anyone with even a semblance of a life actually playing this?
Cheapest Broken Mess: Skull Island: Rise of Kong
What a colossal heap of monkey sewage this game is. Chilean developer IguanaBee somehow managed to unleash the single most soul-sucking, glitch-infested, eye-bleeding, notorious piece of crap of 2023 — a monotonous, ugly, broken trainwreck of a video game. What the actual hell is wrong with these people? How do you playtest this abomination and think, ‘Done. Ship it!’? There is just no way — no way — a group of humans with opposable thumbs got together and collectively decided this was acceptable to profit off of.
Worst Tie-in Game: E.T. for Atari
What else is there to say about this? Atari enforced crunch time so the game would be released in time for the Christmas season — a mere five weeks of development. The end result was a sad, pixelated barf puddle on a screen. You awkwardly strut around indeterminate locations to find all the pieces of a phone to call the mothership while avoiding government agents and keeping an eye on your health before it runs out. Pits are everywhere; the collision detection is so poor that you’ll float out of a pit, slightly move the wrong direction, and fall right back down. This is a game that was so egregiously received it almost caused the entire industry to falter. For some reason, they were so assured of themselves that they made more cartridges than consoles. Most of the copies were returned by dissatisfied customers. There was such a surplus supply that Atari only had one sane solution — bury them in a New Mexico desert landfill.
Worst Shooting Mechanics: Drake of the 99 Dragons
This dumpster fire of a game was actually intended to be the start of a multimedia franchise: comics, an animated series, and action figures to boot! Well, those hopes would be dashed instantaneously. Drake of the 99 Dragons is supposed to be a third-person shooter… I think? The aiming and shooting mechanics are, bar none, the most broken and dysfunctional I have ever seen in any game. This guy flares his arms like an inflatable tube man, spraying bullets everywhere. This is the one instance I can think of where you do miss every shot you take.
Worst Protagonist: Jake Conway – Ride to Hell: Retribution
A mullet-wearing, bike-riding, dim-witted, unlikable, unrelatable, uninteresting concoction of all the action-hero stereotypes put in a blender and spilled all over the floor. Jake’s brother has been killed by cut-and-paste biker bad guys, and he goes on a bloody (boring) quest of revenge. He tries to come off as an edgy, bad-ass anti-hero, but all we are left with is a laughable and piss-poor excuse of a main character. One of the most infamous aspects of Jake is the extraordinarily juvenile approach to masculinity. Throughout the game, you run into women being harassed by men. After beating them up, you have fully clothed, inappropriate, and awkward intercourse. Someone looked at this and said, ‘Yeah, this is hardcore.
Worst Death Animation: Too Human
My grandmother was a great person — truly. But when I was little and she’d watch over me, she’d sometimes go clothes shopping, which meant I got dragged along to stores like Lord & Taylor. And listen — I don’t think words can fully capture how soul-crushingly dull these experiences were. What’s a little boy supposed to do? When I’d see the red light on my Game Boy start flashing, indicating that the battery was going to die soon, it felt like the weight of a hundred Mondays crushing down on my poor little soul. This was the second-greatest test of my patience I can ever recall throughout my 30 years of life. Playing a few hours of Too Human before rage-quitting and trying to sit still with smoke coming out of my ears levels rage to the point where I’d want to eat my controller. This was the weight of Too Human. That death animation felt personal. For my own sanity, I’m not playing that game again.
Worst Superhero Game: Superman 64
Superman super-flopped in this carbonized piece of kryptonite. Lex Luthor has trapped Superman’s friends in a virtual world. The only way to save them is an arbitrary series of tasks: flying through rings, picking up cars before they hit someone, and more rings. The combat and superpower mechanics are so broken you’d think someone was playing a joke. The draw distance is inexcusable — Silent Hill 1 did a better job; you can barely see anything in front of you. Not that you would want to, because above all else, this game is hideous to look at. Environments look unfinished and lifeless, with even more lifeless-looking character models. I don’t know what curse this game set in motion, but it clearly hasn’t been broken. Even today, there has yet to be a halfway decent solo Superman game.
Most Overrated Series of All Time: Sonic the Hedgehog
Ok, so being completely honest, I’m not a Sonic fan — never have been. However, I know a good product when I see it. Sonic in the ’90s was everything Sega needed to compete with Mario: a flashy, speedy, ’90s-cool character with attitude. The original games were simple, albeit challenging, side-scrollers that knew exactly what they were. Nothing more, nothing less. I dare say the series started to lose its sense of identity in the Dreamcast era. Sonic Adventure 1 and 2 are by no means terrible, but they set in motion a rather questionable decision: taking the series in a more serious and dramatic direction. You can only take a talking blue hedgehog so seriously. Not to mention, most of the games after Adventure 2 only declined in quality, with even more absurd narratives. Having a hedgehog fall in love with a human princess is not good storytelling — it never was. Having Sonic turn into a werewolf was also not a good idea. Quit throwing things at the wall; none of it sticks!
Biggest Letdown: Oddworld Soulstorm
This hurt me personally. Oddworld is my favorite game of all time, and I was looking forward to seeing the series make its big comeback. Unfortunately, this game was more dead on arrival than a Mudokon in a field of Slogs. I can appreciate trying to do something different and think outside the box, but being overly ambitious can also backfire in all the worst ways. The core gameplay the series is known for is present: a cinematic side-scrolling platformer. That is fine and dandy. Who thought a crafting system was a good idea? All it does is slow down the pacing as you check every trash can for supplies. The glitches were out of control, the AI was exceptionally sloppy, and all around, this game just lacked polish. Soulstorm, as of now, might very well be the final nail in Oddworld’s coffin, and a future title seems extremely unlikely.
Worst Fad: Motion Controls
What started off as a charming gimmick quickly became exhausted. Everyone and their pet ferret had Wii Sports in their living room. It was fun for about a month or two, but having an entire system built around it was a bit of an overstep. While the Nintendo Wii was a successful console with some genuinely great titles, it was still way more enjoyable to play Super Mario Galaxy later on the Switch port while lying in bed, rather than flailing my arms around like one of those Polynesian torch spinners. Then companies like Microsoft had the brilliant idea to incorporate the Xbox Kinect — which turned out to be a total swing and a miss.
Biggest Flop: Concord
As with every other overly ambitious title, it counted all its chickens — and none of them hatched. Concord was intended to be the next big multimedia franchise to rival Overwatch and even Star Wars. I remember seeing the trailer around the time I was getting into Overwatch and The Finals (I know I’m a very late bloomer). I honestly didn’t give it much thought and figured I would just wait and see when it actually came out. I quickly forgot about it, until I saw the articles on what an abject failure it was. With a budget of over 400 million dollars and a lifespan of less than a week, this game was single-handedly the biggest flop in the history of gaming. Congrats, Concord — in terms of absolute numbers, you actually managed to outdo E.T. on Atari. Take a bow.
Worst Console: Virtual Boy
Even Nintendo can’t always be winners, even with an interesting concept like virtual reality. While this was much ahead of its time, it was doomed from the start due to technological limitations. The games were monochrome blood red, not very fun to play, and, not to mention, caused horrendous strain on the players’ eyes if left on for too long. The console itself wasn’t even aesthetically appealing to look at, resembling bird-watching binoculars more than an actual gaming device.
Purchase one of these George Foreman looking gaming machines right here
Worst Game Ever: Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing
It’s questionable to put this on any games list because it hardly qualifies as one. You literally cannot lose. The enemy vehicle doesn’t move an inch; there is no time limit and no real objective besides just getting to the finish line. Collision detection and physics are non-existent — you can drive through anything and even drive up a cliff at 90 degrees. The best part is that the truck can literally go faster than the speed of light (only in reverse) and is technically the most powerful character in all of fiction, as it can be everywhere at once. This game was so terrible it is the only game thus far we gave a 0/10. It’s an unfinished product, and giving it even half a point would have been in bad faith.
