2023 was a truly incredible year for gamers. We were treated to some absolutely stellar titles across multiple genres. It was another great year for action/adventure titles headlined by games like Baldur’s Gate 3 and Alan Wake 2, and 2023 saw a resurrection of the Soulslikes with the likes of Remnant 2 and Lies of P reminding us why the genre is so popular.
But with the good comes the…not so good.
We got to play an array of captivating titles, but there were a few releases in 2023 that were a better source of memes than they were gaming experiences. And while The Game Awards and the highly-anticipated Gfinity Game of the Year awards celebrated the best that the year had to offer, we also want to pay tribute to some of the projects that copped an F on their test papers.
Without further ado, here is the soured cream of the crop in Gfinity’s Worst Game of the Year awards.
Worst Game of the Year
The Lord of the Rings: Gollum
In a title that, on the surface, showed some promise, The Lord of the Rings: Gollum was one of the biggest flops we’ve seen in a very long time. It is a complete 180-degree turn in the wrong direction from the franchise that brought us a GOTY nominee in 2014 and is a sobering commentary on how poorly the LotR universe has been handled recently in the context of video games. With the likes of The Witcher showing us what a good quality sword-swinging fantasy title looks like, Middle Earth fans continue to be disappointed that their franchise hasn’t attempted to move the needle like they potentially could. As other major franchises like Star Wars and Harry Potter continue to bring out quality content, LotR gets left further behind.
Garnering a dreadful Metacritic score of just 34, Gollum was brimming with issues. If the game isn’t crashing and glitching on you, then you’re inadvertently overestimating a jump and falling to your death on account of the game’s overly sensitive controls. Of all the characters from the Middle Earth sagas to give a dedicated game to, Gollum had the lowest potential (aside from Grima Wormtongue) on account of his little-to-no combat skills and reliance on stealth. This made for a repetitive mess of a game that quickly grew dull.
While there were some hefty contenders for Worst Game of the Year, Gollum stung more than any others as it reflected poorly on a franchise that has been adored for decades. Many diehard fans who read the reviews before picking up the game chose not to pick the title up to preserve their love for the series, which just goes to show how much LotR fans were let down. The only silver lining for Gollum was the memes.
Worst Port
Jedi Survivor (PC)
Star Wars Jedi: Survivor on PC makes the crushingly disappointing mistake of being an awful way to play a genuinely brilliant game. On consoles, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor is one of, if not the, best Star Wars games you could ever play, but on PC it’s a broken, near unplayable mess that should be avoided if at all possible.
On PC, no matter how much juice you throw Survivor’s way, you’ll be greeted with horrendous shader compilation stutters, lurching framerates and even crashes. Yes, the port is better now than it was at launch with DLSS support and less egregious performance issues, but Respawn Entertainment’s amazing Star Wars game is still mired on PC.
With Xbox One and PS4 ports of Jedi: Survivor somehow coming next year, the sorry state of the game’s PC version should not be forgotten. Even as someone who prefers to play on console, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor shows that PC gaming is still treated as an afterthought, despite serving millions upon millions of gamers. Not only is this the worst port of the year, but a depressing moment for Star Wars fans on PC.
The Christopher Judge Most Disappointing Campaign Award
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3
The CoD devs did not appreciate being Christopher Judged at The Game Awards, but we found it inspiring. In fact, as soon as the memes started flooding the internet, we were motivated to put together this prestigious award. As we put together this little speech for the most disappointing game campaign of 2023, we’re also finishing the Modern Warfare 3 story for the second time today.
CoD MW3’s campaign is perhaps the franchise turning a corner to focus primarily on multiplayer game modes, which, in fairness, are perfectly respectable in the latest instalment, but that’s only if we’re being super nice about it. The reality is that the story felt short and incomplete in a Sopranos-esque cutting off the ending mid-sentence. And let’s not talk about that death in the story that just felt like the death of the series itself.
With the amount of time it took to download and the number of games many players had to remove from their consoles just to fit the enormous MW3, a movie-length campaign that takes about as long to play as it does to download doesn’t bode well for the creative direction of the CoD narrative.
Scam of the Year
The Day Before
If we’d actually had enough time to properly play and review The Day Before, it might’ve given Gollum a run for its money for the least precious title of 2023. In the most bizarre tale of the year, it is still not entirely clear what the hell is actually going on over at Fntastic. From being shut down and deleting themselves off the internet to a potential Leo Dicaprio “I’m not f**cking leaving!” moment where they’ve just changed their studio name, the whole saga has us scratching our heads.
For those catching up on the whacky tale of The Day Before, the whole issue can be surmised in one statement - they failed to deliver on their promises. After an explosive reveal in 2021 that showed fans an expansive MMO set in a zombie-infested wasteland, the end product was a shell of what the reveal trailer - and all subsequent footage - promised. And to make matters worse, the whole thing shut down mere days after launch, with Fntastic attributing the closure of the game and studio to financial failures.
While all players are being promised refunds for their purchases as Valve steps in to ensure everything ends up as it should, it’s hard not to consider the game a scam. Given the poor launch and awful experience had by its player base, it’s a wonder why the game was released in the first place.
The “Failure To Launch” Most Spectacular Flop
Crash Team Rumble
It’s a franchise that gave many of us our first taste of video gaming and we never looked back, but the sobering reality is that Crash Bandicoot is not what it once was as Toys for Bob and co struggle to keep the beloved marsupial relevant in 2023. Their mid-year, online-only battle arena game Crash Team Rumble failed to launch with any real splash. If you need any proof, take a look at Twitch, which had less than 50 viewers on the title within a week of launch.
In a game that players hoped would be a modern-day Crash Bash, fans were pretty disappointed in the limited number of characters, including a few blaring omissions, and the long wait for some of their favourites to be made available. On top of that, the maps all felt to be too similar in structure with only changes in the aesthetic of each arena. But perhaps the worst part of the game that really put everyone off was the price. The game looked and played like something that fans deserved to be free-to-play, but instead came with a purchase cost on top of a paid battle pass. Compared to the 2017 original trilogy remaster, Crash Team Rumble just didn’t scream value for money.
Most Overhyped Game
Starfield
Who could forget all the potato explosions?
Look, we’re not saying it’s a bad game, but it certainly didn’t live up to the hype. Are we, the gaming community, partly to blame? Perhaps. But the folks over at Bethesda had all of us hanging on to every single word, every trailer, every snippet of footage we could get our hands on. Hell, it did such a number on us here at Gfinity that we created an entire website dedicated to the game in Starfield Portal. But, alas, once Starfield touched down on our planet and the dust settled, it was seemingly forgotten by the majority of mainstream players. In fact, many turned back to Skyrim, a game that’s almost old enough to start high school.
In a gaming Christmas of a year that gave us incredible titles like Baldur’s Gate 3, Alan Wake 2, and Spider-Man 2, all that lived up to the incredibly high ceilings we had for them, Starfield just didn’t quite grab us the way we hoped. The promise of over 1,000 planets was intriguing, but when 90% of them are called home by a bunch of tumbleweeds, the novelty wears off after the first couple of dozen non-storyline planets.
But hey, at least we got Sam Coe. He didn’t let us down *heart eyes emoji*.
Dishonourable Mentions
Just because a game didn’t take home the infamous bottom-of-the-bottom prize, doesn’t mean it wasn’t woeful. Here are the staff picks for some of the worst games to disgrace our PCs and consoles in 2023.
Redfall
Arkane Austin’s Redfall is one of few Xbox exclusives to release in 2023, and as one of the first true exclusives to release since the start of the Xbox Series generation, it wasn’t just awful, but downright insulting.
Coming from the studio behind the utterly enthralling Prey, Redfall shouldn’t have been shoved out of the door. Of course, not all of the blame can be placed on Arkane; Xbox is the reason the game was allowed to release in this state. While Starfield may be disappointing and Forza may be good-but-uninspiring, Redfall is a mistake.
Atomic Heart
One of the biggest bait and switches of the year, Atomic Heart is a dour experience from start to finish. Outside of some truly spectacular visuals, this BioShock-lite FPS game is one of the most disappointing games to ever feature slender robot ladies. From terrible level design to horrendous bugs to some of the worst dialogue ever put into a game, Atomic Heart is the “crispy critter” of 2023.
Overwatch 2
Overwatch 2, to put it simply, betrayed the masses. The second version of Blizzard’s (now) 5v5 shooter was meant to herald a new dawn with its highly-anticipated ‘Hero Mode’, a single-player experience that had been in the works since Overwatch’s inception back in 2016. So when the project was scrapped seemingly out of the blue, plenty of fans were quick to vent their frustrations, and rightfully so. We were sold a dream and instead had to spend money on grossly inflated skins.
Flashback 2
An awful, barely working sequel (sorry, prequel) of one of the most interesting cyberpunk action adventures of the 90s. Badly rushed to meet a non-existent deadline, Flashback 2 clearly came out barely finished. Among its other exciting features we can count AI-generated character portraits which look nothing like the in-game models, bugs aplenty, nonsensical story, bad dialogue and awful gameplay mechanics. If nostalgia baiting was a crime punishable by law, and, let’s face it, it will probably be soon, Microids would get prison for life.
EA Sports FC 24
Having ditched the FIFA label, this was a chance for a fresh start. And yet, despite the new name, players got the same stale gameplay, the same copy-paste career mode, and the same predatory, power-creep-ridden Ultimate Team. It’s often claimed that EA Sports FC is the best-looking football game, but even the graphics still aren’t anything to shout about: some player faces wouldn’t look out of place in good old FIFA 15. There’s never been a better time to jump off the EA bandwagon than now, especially when competitors such as Football Manager keep going from strength to strength.
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