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Top 10 Worst Games Of 2012

Top 10 Worst Games Of 2012

2012 turned out to be a halfway decent year for gaming, all things considered. Players got the phenomenal Walking Dead from Telltale Games, Halo 4, and the criminally overlooked Far Cry 3, for starters. The indie scene brought us incredible hits like Journey and Fez, and even the mod scene delivered with the groundbreaking DayZ.

But even with so many great titles, 2012 managed to drop some real stinkers on us. The team scraped the bottom of the barrel and managed to pull out ten games that we would have been a lot better off not having to play this year.

10. NeverDead

10. NeverDead

NeverDead might be trying to say that immortality would actually kind of suck. It goes about proving its point by being so terrible that players will just want to die. However, they can’t because Bryce Boltzmann is immortal. Well, whoopity doo. Nothing was memorable or really interesting.

9. ORION: Dino Beatdown

9. ORION: Dino Beatdown

While not sporting the best title ever written, ORION: Dino Beatdown sounded good on paper, and its trailers made it look a lot like Halo with dinosaurs. How could anyone screw up a premise that awesome?

Unfortunately, when the game launched, it was so buggy that it was practically unplayable. In fact, some of its developers eventually went on record to admit that they pretty much hated their lives throughout the development cycle. (Well, that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but Spiral Game Studios sounds like a terrible company to work for.)

Either way, this is a game that should be avoided at all costs.

8. The War Z

8. The War Z

The War Z started out as a fairly interesting rip-off of DayZ until the developers made some of the worst PR blunders ever seen. They didn’t deliver on advertised features, they started charging players real-world money for respawns, and they ran their forums like an Orwellian police state. To top it all off, they were caught stealing art assets from The Walking Dead. It caused so much outrage that the game was eventually removed from the Steam marketplace.

Oh, and then there were some legal issues with the game’s title: Apparently, Paramount Pictures wasn’t happy with how similar it sounded to World War Z. It looks like The War Z managed to piss off pretty much everyone in the world.

There’s a chance—albeit a pretty small one—that the developers at Hammerpoint will come through, change the name, patch up all the issues, formally apologize to the fans, and deliver something halfway decent in 2013. At the end of 2012, though, The War Z was nothing more than a huge waste of money to anyone who was able to snatch up a copy before Steam pulled the plug on it.

7. AMY

7. AMY

AMY was a title that a lot were legitimately excited about. Then, upon launch, it slapped the community in the face with its insistence on being so bad.

Not only were the controls frustrating, but the checkpoint system was unforgiving. Which made the control issues even more frustrating. And that’s to say nothing of the absurd storyline.

6. Battleship

6. Battleship

Okay, so this one’s not even fair. Battleship is a game that never had a chance to be good. As a licensed game based on a movie that had no right to ever exist in the first place, how could it have been anything but terrible?

Still, that didn’t stop Activision from trying to sell it to us.

5. Resistance: Burning Skies

5. Resistance: Burning Skies

The Resistance series makes most players just sad. Resistance 3 was actually quite a good game, though it was unfortunately plagued with network issues that killed its multiplayer far too early in its lifespan. Still, the single-player campaign was great, and if you find this game in a bargain bin somewhere, don’t pass it up.

Burning Skies, though, takes a series that could have been great and stomps it into the ground like a cigarette butt. Even the word bland is too interesting to be used to describe Burning Skies. In fact, it almost feels like the game hates you the entire time you’re playing it.

The only upside: This might be the easiest Platinum Trophy you’ll ever earn.

4. Call of Duty: Black Ops: Declassified

4. Call of Duty: Black Ops: Declassified

Nihilistic Software released two games in 2012. Both of them were PlayStation Vita entries in existing FPS series, and both of them made this list.

Yeah, Black Ops: Declassified managed to be somehow worse than Resistance: Burning Skies. People may want to start to think that Nihilistic simply hates gamers.

3. Tank! Tank! Tank!

3. Tank! Tank! Tank!

While Tank! Tank! Tank! may be a fun title to say out loud, but it’s not very much fun to play. It’s a shallow port of an arcade title that was never really even worth a couple of Chuck E. Cheese tokens players would use instead of any other fun game.

In fact, we have to wonder why NAMCO Bandai insisted on throwing this into the Wii U’s launch lineup soup when they had such a strong entry already with Tekken Tag Tournament 2: Wii U Edition.

2. Postal III

2. Postal III

Postal is a game series that’s mostly just known for being controversial. It’s like Grand Theft Auto, in a sense, minus pretty much everything that makes Grand Theft Auto games fun to play. By the time Postal 2 came out—which was almost ten years ago—the formula was already getting stale.

Postal III is basically the Duke Nukem Forever of 2012, only it disappointed a far smaller group of people. And that’s only because no one cared to begin with.

1. Steel Battalion: Heavy Armor

1. Steel Battalion: Heavy Armor

While a Kinect-based mech title from the developers of Dark Souls doesn’t sound like it could possibly be all that bad, Steel Battalion: Heavy Armor was by far the worst thing anyone who bought the game put into their Xboxes this year.

The game’s worst problem was that the controls didn’t really work as intended.

Wait, that last sentence was an enormous understatement. This game’s controls were so bad that they rendered it completely unplayable. In fact, our own Michael Rougeau tried to get through this one for his review, but he ultimately had to give up and admit defeat. It’s too broken for even the pros here at Cheat Code Central to ever finish it.

If you were unfortunate enough to find a copy of this one under your Christmas tree this year, you have our deepest condolences.

*The views expressed within this article are solely the opinion of the author and do not express the views held by Cheat Code Central.*

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