Worst games of the year 2024 –

While 2023 was a roller coaster ride of huge highs and lows, 2024 has been a little smoother. We just won’t find any truly terrible games like Kong: Skull Island or The Lord of the Rings: Gollum this year, and even a notoriously bad publisher like Gamemill Entertainment has actually managed to release relatively decent games for the most part – the world has ended!

That said, as always, the list of the worst games of the year contains a good mix of objectively bad games – with poor graphics, bad controls and lots of bugs – and games that are technically entertaining but so badly disappointing that they should be considered complete failures.

Kong: Survivor Instinct – 7 levels

Kong: Skull Island was by far the worst game of last year and without a doubt a serious contender for the worst game of the decade. This year, the famous gorilla once again finds its way onto the list, but the developers at 7Levels are happy that their game still tops last year’s Kong game.

You play as a man with a gray face but physically able to find his daughter in a ruined city ravaged by giant apes and monsters. As a setup it’s not bad, but unfortunately the graphics are so flat, the controls so stiff and the battles so uninspired that the biggest threat is ultimately your own boredom. Kong deserves better.

Pneumata – Night Shot Interactive

Since Amnesia: The Dark Descent blew our minds in 2010, we’ve seen a steady stream of atmospheric first-person horror games. Unfortunately, the scariest thing about many of these titles is their obvious lack of quality, and unfortunately this is also true of the rather dull Pneumata.

Visually, it’s creepy enough, with meaty monsters and plenty of darkness illuminated only by limited light sources. But everything beneath the game’s surface is almost insultingly bad. From the thin story that hints a lot and promises to deliver a disappointing and boring ending, to the gameplay that suffers from poor design and extremely stupid AI. Deadbolt Interactive clearly had no real ambitions with Pneumata, and unfortunately this is reflected on all parameters.

Skull and bones – Ubisoft Netherlands

Ubisoft’s pirate game began its life as an evolution of the sailing portion of Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, but development ran off course several times and had to be restarted. After 11 years, Ubisoft Singapore’s multiplayer game was finally released earlier this year, but unfortunately the result was extremely disappointing.

Skull & Bones has absolutely no meaningful activities on land, and what happens at sea is not nearly enough to justify the game’s high price tag. In many ways, the experience is even worse than Black Flag, because, for example, you cannot board other ships and fight man-to-man.

Ubisoft’s 2024 was a bit of a nightmare, and much of the blame can be attributed to Skull & Bones.

Ario – Vata Games

The 2.5D platform game Ario is just one letter away from sharing its name with the best platformers on the market. Unfortunately, the game itself lacks so much more.

You can count on one hand how much good Ario does, and that hand doesn’t even have to have all its fingers intact. The level design is tight, the simplest interactions require millimeter precision, and our protagonist has exactly zero momentum, making the game far too rigid.

Graphically, Ario is no gem either, and the most positive thing about the experience is that it will be over in an hour or so.

Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League – Rocksteady

Rocksteady delivers one of the best-looking games of the year with Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, and while the story doesn’t reach the same heights as their acclaimed Arkham series, there are still several entertaining sequences along the way. So what went wrong?

In some ways, it’s an identity crisis. The game tries to be both a multiplayer and a single-player experience, and the two legs of the game constantly end up straddling each other. Other times, the design is just plain bad. For example, the appearance and behavior of the enemies lacks variety, and the game’s missions are extremely monotonous. Suicide Squad can certainly entertain, but compared to Batman: Arkham Knight, it is a drop in quality.

South Park: Snow Day – Question

With the fun role-playing games The Stick of Truth and The Fractured but Whole, South Park finally got a pair of game releases that captured the series’ mature but infantile humor. Unfortunately, this year’s South Park: Snow Day reminds us more of the series’ not-so-successful Nintendo 64 game with its lackluster action gameplay and amped-up humor.

We appreciate that the game actually has a single-player campaign with interludes and – a few – funny rules, and a rogue-lite card system offering new abilities provides much-needed variety. But that doesn’t change the fact that South Park: Snow Day is a sloppy and monotonous affair that fails to get enough out of its license.

Taxileven: a driving simulator in the city – Simteract

When we think of the small but popular niche of driving-based job simulators (of which the uncrowned king is arguably Euro Truck Simulator ), we tend to think of gray and generic environments. This is not the case in Taxi Life: A City Driving Simulator, which lets you play cab driver in Spain’s second-largest city, Barcelona.

Unfortunately, neither the Sagrada Familia nor the world’s Gaudi architecture can save what is a technically jerky and relatively flat simulator. Now tourists rarely excel in intelligence, but here their AI is too dumb, and neither they nor the other road users show any sign of intelligence. The result is an unsatisfactory driving experience that is not offset by the other management aspects.

Finally, the game (despite its title) simply lacks life. There are no conversations with passengers or fun experiences in the cab to break the monotony. It is all clinical, sexless and utterly boring.

Concord – Fireaxis Studios

In a year when one game developer after another laid off countless employees, Concord became the ultimate symbol of everything wrong with much of the game industry. Although anyone could almost say the here shooter genre was saturated, Sony Interactive’s management insisted on spending hundreds of millions of dollars on Fireaxis Games’ Concord – only to pull the plug on the project after a measly two weeks, shut down the game’s servers and refund all customers.

However, the game’s lack of success can ultimately be attributed to the developers who, according to various media outlets, had an unhealthy corporate culture where there was no room for criticism and skepticism. The result was a game that, despite a long development time and an almost unlimited budget, was devoid of both charm and quality, as if it had been grouped into a shapeless, gray mass.

Hopefully Concord will be a lesson to the industry’s money men to focus more on quality and offline content in the future, but we have our doubts.