Another year in the books. Or e-books. Or tiktok. I do not know. I’m older now, so I can’t keep up with all your newfangled gizmos and accounting tools. What I do know is that this year is basically over. So we can now look to Metacritic to see what game critics collectively called 2022 the worst of the worst.
We’ve said this before, and it’s worth repeating: liking a “bad” game isn’t a Poorly Thing. Numbered scores come with all sorts of asterisks and caveats, which is one of the reasons we don’t use them here. But if you see a game on this list that you happen to love, it just means you have different tastes than a bunch of other reviewers or gamers. It’s good! Enjoy what you like and don’t be an asshole and everything will be fine. Now, as we have done beforehere are the lowest rated games up metacritical with at least seven ratings, the number the site deems necessary before including a game on this list.
5. LEGO brawls | Score: 46 (PS5)
LEGO games are pretty good and at their worst really great at best. However, lego brawls, a smash bros-like fighting game, is an exception to this rule. It seems the main problem is that this is just a port of a 2019 phone game that wasn’t very good. (I played it and totally forgot about it until a few minutes ago.) And to make matters worse, the publisher had the audacity to charge $40 for this No-FRills port of a three year old mediocre mobile game. LEGO brawls on PS5 you’ve earned this spot on the list!
4. XEL | Score: 43 (switch)
When I first saw the name of this sci-fi 3D open world action game I thought for a split second some weird XFL game had appeared without my knowledge. That’s not the case and instead the somewhat nice look XEL is undermined by bugs, unpolished gameplay, and frustrating technical issues that also persist on the PC port.
3. Babylon’s fall | Score: 41 (PS5)
It’s not shocking that a game flops like this Babylon’s fall made it the top five worst games released in 2022. That’s probably due to the awful controls, lengthy combat, and anything else that feels incomplete. At the same time, it’s a bit shocking that this live service action role-playing game only got third place on the list. I would warn you not to play Babylon’s fallbut it’s actually incredibly cheap (sometimes even free of charge) now after Square Enix announced it Shutting down the servers for this live service game in February, less than a year after its release.
2. Crossfire X | Score: 38 (Xbox Series X/S)
Remedy Entertainment does good shit. I am in love Alan WakeMax Payne and Control, Games that average between 83 and 89 on Metacritic. This is how the studio came up with the idea of building a brand new single player FPS campaign, such as: Crossfire X was originally tuned, sounded great on paper. In practice, the actual game is a boring, meandering mess that mostly plays like a bad one call of Duty Imitation and only becomes interesting too late. By the time the game started flipping it, I was so fed up that I just didn’t care. And then I tried playing the online PvP portion of the game (which wasn’t developed by Remedy) and remembered that I have access to at least a dozen better, less buggy, and more interesting shooters on my Xbox, and stopped to play Crossfire X.
1. Post 4: No holds | Score: 30 (pcs)
There will be some people who will see this low score and use it as a weapon in their fight against the world’s so-called “WOKE” critics and journalists. But here’s the thing: I’ve played open-world shooters post 4 and its various quests and side quests set in a corrupt city, and even if I ignore its crappy, devastating humor and horrible jokes, I’m left with a crappy shooter that plays like this post 2 but worse. And if you created a game that is negatively compared post fuck 2, you made a mistake. The best I can say post 4 is that good…at least not post 3!