My Top 8 WORST Games of 2016!
#8: All post-launch versions of
Pokémon Go
I stand firmly by my original review
of Pokémon Go in all respects, including the 8/10 I gave it. It was a fantastic
little mobile game that improved my stamina and gave me a reason to get out of
the house and walk around on a nice summer day. I frequented known Pokémon
hotspots and went outside a lot more than I normally would. For the first
little while, I thought the game was fantastic, and evidently most others
agreed with me, as it took the world by storm in July.
But ever since then, the game has gone
from a fun experience to an unplayable mess. It all started when developer
Niantic quietly removed the tracking system necessary to finding the Pokémon of
your desire mere weeks after launch. With no fix to the tracking in sight, the
game’s fanbase attempted to salvage it by creating online maps that detailed
where Pokémon were. These were a decent fix for some time, but it wasn’t long
before Niantic swooped in and erased all the fanmade maps. As a result, there
was no reliable way to track Pokémon, and you could only wander around
aimlessly and hope you came across something cool.
I still remember exactly what made me
stop playing. I was walking around searching for a Bulbasaur, but once I
realized that without the tracking it could be on the other side of town and
I’d never know it, I gave up and went home. Ever since then I’ve heard they’ve
added some new stuff including Generation II Pokémon, as well as a fix for the
tracking that makes it so you’re not flying as blind as you were back in
August, but as I have no intention of gearing up and venturing out into the
harsh Canadian winter to find a Jigglypuff, I think the damage is done.
#7: Street Fighter V
If you have friends to play couch
co-op with, Street Fighter V can be a blast, and for good reason. The fighting
mechanics are some of the most refined we’ve seen from the series to date,
making it so that newcomers actually stand a chance even without memorizing the
infamously lengthy combo strings.
Aside from that, however, Street
Fighter V has literally nothing going for it. This is a game in the same vein
of Evolve and Star Wars Battlefront that is less a full release and more the
Triple-A publishers trying to slip us an Early Access game for $60 with more
content coming later…for a price. Capcom
made it clear in early press releases that Street Fighter V was being made to
primarily cater to the competitive fighting game scene, but in doing so they
created a game that floundered to the far more important casual crowd.
Unless you want to play online, the
only real single-player option is a pitiful Story campaign for each character,
with each only having a couple of battles strung together by some dreadful looking
cutscenes. There’s no Arcade mode and the stories are the same every time,
minimalizing single-player replayability. Last I remember the online mode
worked about as well as the Smash Bros online servers as well, which is to say
it barely worked at all.
As I’ve said, more characters have
become available, but only if you’re willing to fork over real-world cash for
them. As far as I can tell, Arcade mode also remains absent, meaning that this
game is essentially worthless unless you have friends to play with or if you
can somehow manage to find a match online. It’s a real shame, considering how
much fun the gameplay itself can be.
#6: Miitomo
This one’s not even really a game, per
se. I enjoyed 2014’s Tomodachi Life, although I had several problems with it.
The biggest issue with Tomodachi was that the more you played the game, the
more tedious it grew. Despite this, I liked the game and all the wacky antics
of my Miis were fun to watch.
So as Nintendo’s first attempt to jump
onto the mobile market, I thought Tomodachi Life was a great choice to adapt to
a phone. Imagine my surprise when I found that, like Street Fighter, this was a
game that required friends to be playing it too in order to properly enjoy it.
Without that, the game is essentially worthless.
All you do in Miitomo is you create a
Mii and give it stupid things to say. Then, your Mii will repeat those things
to your friends Miis, and then their Miis will tell your Mii what your friends
told them to say, and then you delete the app because it stopped being fun
after half an hour.
The only mildly interesting part of
Miitomo was the Mii Camera, where you can insert your Mii into whatever
pictures you have on your phone’s camera roll. Although just like the rest of
the game it grows boring very fast, I was able to use it to create
monstrosities like this:
They say an image is worth 1,000
words, and I think that image says everything that needs to be said about
Miitomo.
#5: Dragon Quest Builders
A lot of people really liked this
game. I honestly wish I could say that too.
In my time with Dragon Quest Builders,
I looked everywhere and honestly couldn’t find the awesome game everyone said
it was. Instead, all I got was an extremely boring and tedious fetch quest that
never seemed to end. All the game was was running back and forth, collecting
items and blocks for denizens of your town in an endless cycle of repetition
that never stopped being boring.
Now that wouldn’t be so bad on its
own, but Dragon Quest Builders also included graphics that would be considered
bad by GameCube standards and an absolutely dreadful combat system. In fact,
fighting monsters was so awful that at one point the game flat-out tells you
killing things is basically worthless unless you need a specific item.
But that’s not all! The absolute worst
part of the game is the awful 30-second
bits of music that loop and loop and loop and loop and loop and loop and loop
until you want to tear your ears off. I’m honestly surprised that the main town
theme hasn’t haunted my nightmares.
If you enjoyed this game, fantastic.
More power to you. But as for me, I honestly can’t see what was so great about
it.
#4: No Man’s Sky
I traded in No Man’s Sky for one
specific reason: there was no way I was ever going to play it again. While I
gave it a 7/10 in my original review (frankly, if I were to review it again now
it’d probably wind up with a 5 or lower), I wrote that before I discovered the
full implication that the game was an endless cycle of repetition. Even the
much touted centre of the universe was nothing more than another way to repeat
what you’d already done.
But the repetitive nature of No Man’s
Sky is not why it’s on this list. Actually, nothing on the disc is the reason
it’s here. No Man’s Sky is one of the worst games of the year not for what it
was, but for what it wasn’t.
We’ve all seen the videos and the
articles and the massive Reddit thread calling the game “One Man’s Lie”. We’ve
looked back on the trailers and called out Hello Games on everything that was
missing from the game. No Man’s Sky was a Class-A example of lying to game
consumers and what can happen if you release a game without several features
that were promised in the pre-release stage. This is to say nothing of all the
false advertising, with the Steam page still using the trailer from E3 2014
that includes several features nowhere to be found in the game.
Between August and October it seemed
as if the No Man’s Sky controversies wouldn’t stop, which was extremely fitting
for a game that was plagued by controversy all throughout its pre-release
stage. Throughout all of this, Hello Games and Sean Murray kept radio silence,
stooping so low as to not even give out patch notes at some point. They later
finally returned to show off an update to the game, but with how much people
ridiculed them once that happened it seemed like it was too late for No Man’s
Sky.
With all the crap that Hello Games pulled in the marketing
for this one and with the sheer amount of people who got scammed in the
process, I felt it was only necessary that No Man’s Sky got some sort of
recognition although it missed out on the top spot. As such, No Man’s Sky both
names and earns our first ever Sean
Murray Award for Most Anti-Consumer Game of the Year! Congratulations,
guys!
#3: Mario and Sonic at the Rio 2016
Olympic Games
The only award this game will be
winning is Longest Title of the Year, because this new installment in the Mario
and Sonic at the Olympics series was a dull, uninspired attempt at continuing a
series that should’ve died with the Wii.
The original Mario and Sonic at the
Olympics game primarily used waggling Wii remotes as a means of controlling
your character, and while those games have aged extremely poorly, they were at
least fun to play with some family members. Now that motion controls are
essentially gone for good, what did the developers decide would be a good replacement?
Quick-time events. Yep, the Olympics
have become a test of who can mash the A button the fastest. Not only is this
incredibly boring, but the developers even found a way to screw up controls
that consist of pressing a single button repeatedly. They seemed unresponsive
at times for whatever reason. I played this game with some family members, and nobody out of the 4 of us was able to
win the Triple Jump minigame, even after several attempts.
The only thing that saved this game
from being a complete disaster were the decent soccer and rugby modes, but
honestly if you’re looking for that type of game you’d be much better off
playing Mario Strikers Charged. And when a game from 9 years ago turns out to
be more fun than the best part of this 2016 release, I think that’s a signal
it’s time to retire your series.
#2: You Have 10 Seconds 2
You know, I seriously debated with
myself about whether I should put this game on the list. It’s just an indie
game available for free on Steam, after all. Why list it here at all, especially
above games like No Man’s Sky?
After doing some thinking, I came to
the conclusion that the fact that it’s a free indie game is exactly why this game needs to be here.
Because it’s free, that might give more people incentive to try it out.
This sequel was released a mere month
after its predecessor, the fun albeit forgettable You Have 10 Seconds (I
honestly don’t know what compelled me to give the original game an 8/10 in my
review of it, it’s nowhere near that good), and it holds the distinction of
being the only game I’ve seen this year that physically hurt to play.
The biggest problem with You Have 10
Seconds 2 is, somewhat unbelievably, the border around the game itself. Every
time a second ticks down, for whatever reason the entire border flashes from
black to white for a split second. And this happens every single time a second
ticks by in one of the many levels of the game. After only 5 minutes of playing
I already had a headache, and I dread to think what would’ve happened had I
played more. You can’t turn it off in the Options menu either. For the entirety
of the game you’re stuck with the white flash as it drills into your eyes
endlessly. It’s as if the game was actively trying to live up to the epilepsy
warning it opens with.
This game has other problems too, such
as the fact that it didn’t fix any of the problems left over from the original
game, but the fact that it caused me actual real-life pain just after playing
for a few minutes is completely unforgivable.
In fact, I can think of only one game I
played this year that I hated more, and if you’ve been a long-time reader of my
blog I’m sure you can see it coming.
#1: Star Fox Zero
This game. This god forsaken game.
As you can see, I’ve played some lousy
stuff this year, but none of them came even remotely close to how abominable
this one was. When it came time to make this list I never even considered
putting any other game at the top spot. I hated this game even more than I
hated the game that gave me a real-life headache and the game that actively
lied to me in its pre-release material.
Star Fox Zero is a complete
unqualified disaster, and nobody should ever be forced to play it.
As I said in my review of the game
this is the rare release that somehow screws up everything it tries to do. Most of the game’s issues are the fault
of its most notorious part, the heinous controls. Your ship’s lasers are
controlled through the Wii U GamePad’s gyro controls, and while that worked
fine when moving the camera in Splatoon, when trying to use it to shoot down
enemy ships in an on-rails Star Fox game it’s completely unplayable.
The way it’s supposed to work is that you fly your ship with the control stick
and aim your lasers with by pointing the GamePad where you want to shoot. But
here’s where it all comes crashing down. If you exclusively look at the TV to
fly, the GamePad aiming is so unresponsive that you can never hit anything. But
if you look exclusively at the GamePad, you can’t see where you’re going and
crash into everything! And even when you use the GamePad to shoot the camera
controls are so awful you still can’t
hit anything! Honestly, with how much smashing into stuff you do while looking
down at the GamePad, Star Fox Zero would make for a fantastic anti-texting and
driving PSA.
The presentation doesn’t do the game
any favours either, with Wii-era graphics filled with so much pop-in that you’d
think you were playing a game on that system, a horrible framerate, and
insufferable voice chat from your fellow pilots that never stops as Peppy, Slippy and Falco chastise you for every
mistake you make that is more often than not a result of fighting the dreadful
controls. The fact that the comm chatter only comes out of the GamePad and can
be easily muted is one of Star Fox Zero’s only saving graces.
Star Fox Zero is not only the worst
game I played this year, it’s the worst game I’ve played since Star Trek 2013.
The forced integration of the gyro controls that barely work cause the game to
be literally unplayable, and the awful presentation is just the icing on the
cake. Nobody should have to suffer through this complete and utter failure of a
game.
Well, that was cathartic. If you’d
prefer something more positive, check out my Top 10 Best Games of 2016!
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