The Worst Games of Q1 2018

Metal Gear Survive

Worst Games of Q1 2018

Metal Gear Survive was doomed from the outset. Fans were not happy, angry even, when the game was announced, due to the way series creator Hideo Kojima had seemingly been treated by publisher Konami. Many labeled Metal Gear Survive as ‘money-grabbing’ and ‘the answer to a question no one had asked,’ meaning that the game was already set up to be dead on arrival.

It’s hard to argue that all of this backlash was unfairly detracting from the game when it ended up being this poor. The links to the excellent Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain are tenuous at best, adding crystal-headed zombies and other dimensions into the mix. There’s a solid gameplay experience buried in there somewhere, but honestly, with the mood surrounding the game being as hostile as it was, not many people wanted to give it the time of day.

Metal Gear Survive also couldn’t have released with its grubby approach to microtransactions at a worse time. Even a year ago, Konami could have gotten away with it, but in the current climate, charging $10 for an extra character slot is simply egregious. There’s some mindless fun to be had with Metal Gear Survive, but it’s carried completely on the shoulders of a franchise built on an entirely different experience. It’s our worst reviewed game of 2018 so far for a reason, we concluded that ‘Survive is a serviceable game, but its story and writing lack the one thing that drew fans to the series in the first place: heart.’

Past Cure

Worst Games of Q1 2018

Past Cure is described as ‘a dark psychological thriller that blurs the lines between dreams and reality.’ Unfortunately for those who bought the game, it ended up being more of a mundane nightmare, which had you itching to go back to your boring, ordinary life. Past Cure had so much promise in the lead up to launch. It had a focus on narrative, and what little of the game we had seen looked promising, sitting somewhere between a Max Payne game and an indie movie.

Ultimately, Past Cure is a victim of throwing too many ideas at the wall, attempting to tackle third-person shooting, psychological horror and even puzzle mechanics, all the while not fully committing to anything at all. The game is just so mediocre in everything it attempts to do. The voice acting is bad, the facial animations are bad, enemy AI is non-existent, and the whole thing is simply boring.

Past Cure will likely fade into obscurity, and those who do remember the game will be the ones constantly checking to see if their Steam refund has come in.

Super Seducer

Worst Games of Q1 2018

Honestly, it’s kind of incredible that we’re talking about a game like Super Seducer in 2018. It’s almost an elaborate joke in just how tone-deaf the game manages to be. For the uninitiated (and good lord do I envy you right now), Super Seducer is a ‘live-action seduction-simulator,’ ew, which aims to teach hopeless men about the best ways to pick up women. All of this is delivered via the self-proclaimed master of seduction himself, Richard La Ruina.

Now, there would certainly be fun to be had here, that is if the game wasn’t so poorly implemented. The cheese factor alone would be entertaining if the whole thing didn’t exist in such a grey area of intentions. Sometimes the game seems to be poking fun at itself, other times, and this is where it is most worrisome, it carries itself like an actual educational tool. This kind of garbage would maybe have been funny in the mid-’90s, but now, it’s just not something that needs to exist.

Weirdly for a game like this, the finished product somehow manages to be incredibly boring. The acting is God-awful, the ‘choices’ rudimentary and the subject matter problematic. It’s remarkable that the game was even made, let alone carried through until release. Avoid Super Seducer like the tacky aftershave-wearing grease ball that it is.

Bravo Team

Worst Games of Q1 2018

Supermassive Games were once the studio to watch in terms of PlayStation VR content. They had released the delightfully pulpy Until Dawn: Rush of Blood and seemed primed to knock it out of the park with the two games which followed. Unfortunately, the first one, the psychological horror The Inpatient, was a dud, but more average than downright bad. Bravo Team, on the other hand, is a bad game through and through.

It’s hard to pin down just what feels so off about the game. The general feel of being inside the gaming space feels incorrectly proportioned, the shooting is inaccurate and the whole thing takes itself seriously to eye-rolling effect. There’s nothing visually appealing or even adequate in the game, a real shame considering how good the game often looked in the quite frankly excessive marketing it received in the months leading up to launch.

Bravo Team was supposed to be a flagship title for PSVR, or at least it was certainly marketed as one. What we got instead was a poorly executed and incredibly forgettable experience which continues a bad streak for a studio which once shone so bright.

Fear Effect Sedna

Worst Games of Q1 2018

The worst games aren’t always the ones which are downright bad. Sometimes the games which really leave a bad taste are the ones that are so mediocre that there’s no fun to be had whatsoever. A bad game can be fun, provoking a reaction at least from its player. A game like Fear Effect Sedna though, deserves little more than a shrug. The game is a sequel to the original Fear Effect, a game which has a seriously devoted fan base and a cult classic status. Sedna takes what was great about the original and throws it out of the window, switching to an isometric, top-down view.

Almost every aspect of the game is dull. The environments all gel together, the voice acting is awful and the story convoluted, even by Fear Effect standards. Fear Effect Sedna is bogged down by its gameplay systems, which is a shame because the developer clearly knows the series well, even if they choose to ignore the majority of it.

In the end, Fear Effect Sedna is a cheap-looking, poorly designed affair that, without the series it is attached to, wouldn’t be given the time of day.

Scribblenaughts Showdown (Nintendo Switch)

Worst Games of Q1 2018

Since debuting on the Nintendo DS back in 2009, Scribblenaughts has carved out a name for itself as being one the most wonderfully imaginative and versatile series in all of gaming. Players use their creativity and wordplay to guide the protagonist Maxwell through the 2D, side-scrolling levels. The series has always thrived on its surprising level of depth, with it being genuinely baffling just how many of the weird options you offer up actually work.

Scribblenaughts Showdown on Nintendo Switch forgets this core dynamic, instead focusing on party-style mini-games instead. There are three modes to choose from, with Sandbox Mode being closest to the original experience. Problem is, there are only nine levels to play through. Even worse is that these levels focus on short mini-games like hatching an egg or solving riddles. The Versus Mode on the other hand, feels very little like Scribblenaughts at all, with players going from controlling tiny helicopters using motion controls, to dancing away in a rhythm game.

Gone are the intuitive touch controls, with clunky and unresponsive motion controls taking their place. It’s such a disappointment given the pedigree the series usually boasts. The absolute best part of the game, actually using words to solve puzzles, is relegated to the side-lines, meaning that it is instead comprised of uninspired mini-games and a strange board game mode. Unimaginative should never be used to describe a Scribblenaughts game, but here it definitely fits.

Asemblance (Xbox One)

Worst Games of Q1 2018

Walking simulators get a particularly bad wrap, particularly those who aim to tell an more experimental type of narrative that is likely to alienate people. A few years back, a game called Virginia released. It was a cerebral, trippy experience that left a lot of its story up for interpretation. The game was also great, mostly due to its excellent character development despite the lack of any dialogue. Asemblance on the other hand, seems to aim to confuse rather than inspire. From the very outset, no time is given to fleshing out the characters or the world they inhabit. It to create a cerebral sci-fi story but misses the mark entirely.

There are puzzles to solve throughout, but they make such little sense that I’d wager almost every player ended up resorting to a guide. In its hour or so play through it offers nothing in the way of story resolution or really any plot to speak of. The whole thing kind of feels like that final episode of Twin Peaks, but without the 25 years of lore to back it up.

Asemblance is known purely because of just how confusing it is, and this alone should never be a reason to sit through any kind of gaming experience. Hopefully the creator knows a little more than those playing their game because if not, then it’s all just an exercise in complexity for pure shock value.

Hollow (Nintendo Switch)

Worst Games of Q1 2018

Hollow had a great opportunity to fill a hole in the Nintendo Switch’s library. First-person horror games are few and far between on the platform, so Hollow showed great promise when it was announced. Unfortunately, the game seriously falls short of expectations, presenting an incredibly slow and confusing story against the backdrop of a very ugly world indeed.

The story is dolled out using audio logs and on-screen text, much of which contains frequent spelling and grammatical errors. The shooting feels like something out of a PlayStation 2 game and the enemy design is as derivative as it gets. This game would make a perfectly reasonable college game-design project, but it is in no way up to the standard expected when compared to other Nintendo Switch titles.

The whole thing feels dated and misinformed, sitting somewhere between a Dead Space knock-off and a particularly slow walking simulator. There’s pretty much nothing redeemable in Hollow, making it one hell of a missed opportunity.

Mad Carnage (Nintendo Switch)

Worst Games of Q1 2018

There was a fear when the Nintendo Switch was announced, that because of its touchscreen and portable nature, we would be seeing a lot of low-quality mobile-style games come to it. Generally, this hasn’t been much of a problem but Mad Carnage is an exception. It was developed as a mobile game, something which really shows in the limited scope of its gameplay and visuals. Mad Carnage offers up a concept which is actually pretty cool on the face of it. A turn-based strategy game with a Mad Max twist, allowing players to use vehicles rather than guns to do their fighting.

A cool concept is about as far as Mad Carnage gets unfortunately due to over-simplistic gameplay and boring, repetitive missions. Huge walls of text dump story beats onto the screen with reckless abandon, a shame considering that the little comic strips used to convey the narrative are pretty cool. Gameplay is extremely limited, but somehow still confusing to grasp. Very little is explained early-on, meaning that it’s often better to just wing it rather than try to be strategic, never a good feeling in a strategy game.

Mad Carnage is at least very cheap, but does beg the question as to what the quality control of the Nintendo eShop entails exactly. Regardless, the game’s interesting style isn’t enough to cover up the mundanity of the gameplay.

Fantasy Hero: Unsigned Legacy

Worst Games of Q1 2018

For many players, JRPGs just aren’t their thing. For when they think of JRPGs they picture wooden dialogue and campy action broken up by extended periods of repetitive grinding and boring combat. Of course, there are so many great games which eschew these stereotypes but unfortunately, Fantasy Her: Unsigned Legacy is absolutely not one of them.

The game seems hell-bent on embodying every single genre stereotype into its core gameplay. There are incredibly random spikes in difficulty and a front-section loaded with grinding and dull combat sections. The game initially released on PS Vita in 2014, and was considered average even by those standards. When ported to the Nintendo Switch, in 2018, with no notable improvements to speak of, the game feels seriously lacking and painfully irrelevant.

There are so many great JRPGs on Nintendo Switch at this point so it is truly baffling that Fantasy Hero: Unsigned Legacy has the gall to sit alongside them. It’s everything unappealing about the JRPG genre condensed into a neat, overpriced package, one which shows that it is not always advantageous to put out a Switch port.