Top 5 Worst Games of Q2 2018

Tennis World Tour

Top 5 Worst Games of Q2 2018

In the build-up to 2018’s Grand Slam tournaments, Tennis World Tour looked as though it might have the potential to translate our favorite sport to a solid video game experience. Plush with licenses and animated with what we thought would be solid graphics, it should have delivered a quality contemporary title to satisfy our craving for tennis on the digital screen.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t to be. Tennis World Tour is utter tripe, tarnished by bugs and glitches galore. It feels completely unfinished, and even when it does work, feels woefully disconnected from the sport it seeks to portray. Players don’t look at all realistic, the audio is dismal, and there’s ball lag and general inaccuracies that mean it simply doesn’t capture the precision and skill of tennis as a sport.

Tennis World Tour simply isn’t the return to Virtua Tennis that we hoped it might be. Instead, it represents more of a cheap cash-in on the fever surrounding Wimbledon. But trust us on this one, if you’re in the mood to immerse yourself in the sport with a video game, you’re far better off playing something like Hot Shots, which might not be grounded in realism, but is certainly a great deal more entertaining.

Agony

Top 5 Worst Games of Q2 2018

Agony is a terrible video game, and not in the way the developers intended it to be. Rather than being dark, edgy, and devilishly frightening, it’s a video gaming hell for committing very different sorts of sins. As we noted in our review, the level design is horrendous, the AI dim-witted, and the challenge often stupidly unfair. About all Agony does well is depict a morbid satanic environment, and even then, its attempt to shock with nudity, violence, and brutality often feels a little vulgar rather than scary.

It’s such a shame because Agony’s premise had plenty of potential. Sadly, it’s just no fun to play at all, with survival-horror gameplay that quickly degenerates into the tedious, long before the intensity that it tries to tee-up ever feels compelling. And all this before we’ve even got to the technical issues… Agony’s performance is mediocre at best, and even when the framerate isn’t chugging, its aesthetic is actually poor by design —everything sort of melds into one, which makes it rather difficult to tell what’s going on or where to locate key items.

If you’re after a quality first-person survival horror game, look to Outlast or Resident Evil 7 and basically every other title in the genre before Agony.

Extinction

Top 5 Worst Games of Q2 2018

If you play 15 minutes of Extinction you’ll have experienced virtually everything the game has to offer. Arrive in town, free hostages and kill a big ogre before a certain percentage of the town is destroyed; rinse, repeat. Nothing about the gameplay is particularly fun, save perhaps for the novelty of its traversal. Its big showpiece, the Shadow of the Colossus-style scaling and decapitating of giant-scale Ogres, is almost always frustrating, and elsewhere the combat is limited and doesn’t require any finesse.

Worse yet, the entire premise is a shameless copy. Rather than developer Iron Galaxy flexing its creative muscles during the inception of its first unique IP, Extinction is a quite blatant Attack on Titan clone —except far less interesting. There’s a budget feel to the whole experience that permeates virtually every aspect of its design. Suffice to say, I didn’t score it particularly high in my review. 

New Gundam Breaker

Top 5 Worst Games of Q2 2018

Another complete trainwreck of a release this year was New Gundam Breaker. Ironically, the name itself is rather appropriate because you’ll certainly want to do some breaking after you’ve played it for any length of time. Framerate issues even on PS4 Pro are compounded by wonky controls that make gameplay feel disconnected from the player. Not that we were especially excited about playing more of it even looking past these hiccups, though.

New Gundam Breaker is another blight on the resume of a franchise that hasn’t had the best track record over the years. Here, the gameplay loop centers around a shoot-and-loot blueprint, beating missions to upgrade your mech as you progress through what is an extremely dull story. But there’s precious little variety in each mission, so it all ends up feeling so stale that the purpose of upgrading your mech in the first place quickly loses its appeal.

Between the clunky gameplay, cliche story, and technical issues, it’s hard to think of anything that’s very good about New Gundam Breaker.

Gal Gun 2

Top 5 Worst Games of Q2 2018

Gal Gun is a series that’s grabbed headlines for the perverted silliness of its previous entries, but the lack of substance to its gameplay a second time around can’t save this latest sequel. Gal Gun 2 —actually the fourth game of the series— relies too heavily on vulgar shock value rather than adding any new layers to its composition that we haven’t seen before.

If you aren’t up to speed, this is a game about shooting angry school girls in their genitals to make them climax. If that excites you, we’re not judging, but don’t for a second think that the gameplay is anything else but tedious and boring. The entire experience is completely on-rails, the mission structure is monotonous and samey throughout, and the locations all look the same.

Gal Gun 2 is just more of the same —a linear and uninteresting one-trick pony of a video game that’s kinky novelty wears thin after half an hour. Ultimately, it’s a sequel that doesn’t pack anywhere near enough content or innovation to ever warrant existing in the first place.