Game:

Halo: The Master Chief Collection (2014)

Category:

Review

Duration: 4:31

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2014 is all wrapped up, and, in my opinion, it was a pretty average year for videogames, mostly because so many great titles were delayed to 2015. So, today, let’s chat about the worst games of 2014, because that’s always fun, and there are quite a few.

The first thing that comes to mind is Fighter Within, which is an Xbox One exclusive Kinect-based fighting game, with absolutely atrocious motion detection. There’s nothing quite like a Kinect game that can’t figure out where the hell you are, especially when the gameplay isn’t even complicated – it was slow, simple and shallow. The whole game just reeked of poor production quality, too, with cheesy cutscenes and horribly long loading screens. Even those would be excusable if you could actually play the game, though, which you pretty much can’t.

Next up is Yoshi’s New Island, which was pretty intolerable. You have to protect Baby Mario as part of this pretty standard platforming adventure, with the most stressful part probably being trying to avoid Baby Mario’s horrible whining if you lose him. It’s shrill, and horrible, and the rest of the soundtrack isn’t too much better, with a combination of kazoos, squeaks, flutes and whatever else they decided to throw in. Actually, most of the sound effects are overly urgent and irritating, but at least Yoshi stays adorable for the duration of the time.

There are a few more new additions that aren’t quite so welcome – the random vehicle sections rely on imprecise motion controls, and the boss fights recycle the same character and only last a few minutes, the multiplayer is riddled with lag, and, well, you’re probably better off playing the original.

Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric is another Sonic the Hedgehog game that’s absolutely awful, featuring loads of bugs and glitches, with crappy level design, repetitive, dull gameplay and a really ugly game world with cringe-worthy level design. It’s hard to think of things about Rise of Lyric that are actually good. Sometimes your inputs aren’t even acknowledged, and combined with a crappy camera system, it makes the platforming within the game all but impossible. It’s easily the worst Sonic game I’ve ever played, and that’s even without the game-breaking bugs.

Next is Rambo: The Video Game, which is so bad it’s almost funny, except that it doesn’t even feature any cheesy one-liners. Come on!? It’s a totally on-rails, predictable shooter with no personality, and it kind of just feels like a complete waste of time. Even shooting, in this shooter, is lifeless and dull, with enemies responding to you the exact same way in every encounter. It’s also pretty damn ugly in terms of visuals, and buggy, with audio ripped from the original films instead of re-done, so it comes across as weirdly disjointed, especially when it’s stuffed in alongside the new audio.

Making a Rambo videogame is a weird choice in general since the franchise is pretty old now, but making a bad Rambo videogame is even stranger. A bad game, that isn’t even self-aware, so it doesn’t feature that ‘so bad it’s good’ thing which can sometimes be fun. Rambo: The Video Game, is nothing close to fun. It might even be torture.

Now, the last 2 games I’m mentioning here are extremely high-budget games that weren’t necessarily bad, but were released far earlier than they should have been, especially for full-prices titles. I’m talking about Assassin’s Creed Unity and Halo: The Master Chief Collection, both of which were initially riddled with game-breaking bugs, though a lot of those have been patched out by this point. I still just don’t feel like it’s inexcusable – if you’re going to make me spend the extra time and use up my downloads, which can cost money, you probably shouldn’t have released your game.

Assassin’s Creed Unity crashed for me, fully turning off my Xbox One, or otherwise crashing the game back to the dashboard. I had to manually close it down a few times too when it got stuck in weird cutscenes that hadn’t triggered properly, and lost save progress as a result. There were also issues with people levitating, character’s faces disappearing on PC and awful frame-rate issues around crowds, though both of those do seem to be fixed by now.

Halo: The Master Chief Collection froze for me a handful of times, somehow forgot that I had, indeed, completed certain missions, forcing me to re-do them or start them from the very beginning, and those are just some of the minor issues. The Master Chief Collection’s biggest issue is the multiplayer simply not working, and that’s what I was most excited for. I haven’t been able to connect even once since the game launched, and I know that’s not an issue on my end.

So, I guess that wraps up some of the worst games I played in 2014. What were yours?

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