Top 10 Worst Games of 2022

I have never done a Top 10 worst list in all the years I've done Game Infinite. Each year we do our end of year lists, and end of year event, and I'm thankful each year is better and bigger than before. I've added new topics and new lists, and it is super fun to do. Most outlets also do a "worst list" and I have always avoided it. Mostly because I like to celebrate games and keep things positive. I know a lot of developers, and I know how much hard work, passion, and time goes into games. I think a lot of gamers underestimate how hard it is to make a video game. Many times games that go on these lists were usually made by talented passionate developers who were pushed to release things by incompetent leadership at the tops. I also know pretty early on if a game is objectively bad or just not to my liking, and I don't like to waste my time with them. I have to play so many games in a year for the top 10 list to come to be, that I don't like to waste time on games I hate.

I try to be positive, I have defended some pretty low effort games in the past because I managed to find fun in them. I give more benefit of the doubt than deserved, and I just have never done this before.

HOWEVER.

Let's talk about 2022. Holy Sh!+ was this a crappy year that changed my mind. 2022, like any year of course had phenomenal games. I don't want to take away from the fantastic games that made it on to my various best lists. In many ways, 2022 is one of the best years. Like years prior, I struggled to narrow my top 10 list down to just 10 because I played so many amazing games. But just as it had many great positives, good lord did it have a major negative side to it as well. This is one of the most polarizing years. 2022 is home to some of the WORST games I have played in recent memory. It didn't help that 2022 had just like 6 months of NOTHING to play that wasn't garbage. It was like there was this massive desert between February and September where nothing but garbage was releasing. It wasn't JUST that some massive BOMBS released this year. This was a year where some of the greediest studios, some of the greediest money hungry billionaire CEO's wanted to see how much good will they could absolutely destroy with gamers. There were several games I had on my MOST ANTICIPATED list that launched with massive failings. Some games launched this year that were SO BAD and SO GREEDY that it made someone like me who was "anti worst lists" decide to change my policy and launch our first ever Top 10 Worst Games of 2022... We need to start to push back against these large corporations putting out garbage and tricking gamers into wasting their money.

As always, these are just my opinions so if you enjoyed any of these games, then I am happy for you. Also, games are often made by huge teams of people, and it is possible for awful games to release unfinished or have monetization details all of which were not decided by the people who made the games. I just want to say If a game sucks, blame the people at the top, not the hard workers on the floor.

10. Life is Strange Remastered - WTF/10 / (You call THIS a Remaster???)

Remaster...you keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means...

How on EARTH this was not more of a controversy is beyond me. I think it is because it was such a under the radar release, and this is one of those rare instances where launching next to a major release HELPED a game. February has 4 major releases so I think it hid this from the headlines. Life is Strange Remastered launched within a few weeks of Elden Ring so I have to think that that massive popular game helped shadow the absolute insane and insulting thing Square Enix tried to pull off in February of 2022. (well... ONE of the insane and insulting things Square tried to pull off. It's actually crazy how many Times Square appears on this list in one year.)

Life is Strange is a 10/10 fantastic game. I would probably include it in my top 10 ALL TIME. It has a fantastic story, art style, and characters. I love this game. I highly recommend you play it sometime if you haven't. So what you may ask is its remaster doing here on this years 2022 Worst List?

This years most talked about controversy for "did it need a remaster?" goes to the larger and more well known Last of Us. As someone who thought the first Last of Us looked beautiful and didn't think it needed one, I was in the camp of people confused by early rumors it was getting one. After I actually played it, I admit it was phenomenally done if but maybe a little overpriced. However, the Last of Us remaster/remake had noticeable side by side differences. It turned out to be well worth the experience; It was pretty drastic.

When I tell you, that this Life is Strange "remaster" is the LEAST "remastered" anything I have ever played, I cannot stress that enough. Honestly, I had to go to YouTube videos to watch side by sides and SQUINT really hard to notice even the slightest differences! IT. LOOKS. EXACTLY. the SAME. I don't mean like how people complain call of duty is the same, I mean like it feels and looks like they just copy and pasted the old game and labeled it a remaster. Maybe there's a faster load time here or an improved visual there but it is indescribable just HOW same it feels. At the minimum, you could argue that it was just a VERY low effort next gen upgrade, EXCEPT the crazy part is this remaster wasn't even optimized for PS5 and XSX at the time of launch or writing. On console at launch they still show as last-gen titles just like the original game. I played it on PC, and it just looks the same.

Being an absolutely bare bones "remaster" to the greatest extent I have ever seen maybe wouldn't be enough to warrant a spot on this list because the original game is still fantastic. It may be nothing better, but its not worse (looking at you GTA Trilogy) However, it is the monetization of this remaster that is the thing that secures it's spot on this list. Had this been a free update, I wouldn't be complaining. If it was just a free update, or even a small optional 5-10$ patch for PC and NEXT GEN than maybe I wouldn't be complaining. I don't think it's worth 10$ but I'd get it; they need to make some money.

THIS WAS 40$.

FORTY

FORTY US DOLLARS

There were no patches or upgrades for existing owners. This was a SCAM through and through. If you have never played Life is Strange, go back and find the original on sale for a 1/4 the price somewhere. Day One back in 2016 I would have happily paid 40$ for this masterpiece. But re-releasing a nothing remaster for 40$ is a scam. period. This is a shame because even though it only ranks 10 on this list, it is my biggest disappointment. This game is too incredible; it deserves a remaster worthy of the name and price.

9. Rainbow Six Extraction - 3/10

Good lord what is going on over at Ubisoft? Half their leadership is being sued the other half is pressuring developers to delete female protagonists. Staff Protests. Unfinished Games rescheduled to release for no reason other than grant money. More games than ever are being delayed to high heaven or canceled or straight up shut down. I feel like the offices must at Ubisoft must feel like the "This is Fine" meme.

I never had a huge connection to the Rainbow Six universe, but I was interested to give this one a chance. Hey, it was free on Game Pass so it was worth checking out. Right? RIGHT? Well even for being FREE* it still felt like a waste of money. Ubisoft dropped the launch price of the game a few months before its final, much delayed, release date stating they no longer felt it was a standalone AAA release, and that was a super smart move. It felt like a bad generic military shooter you find on steam you've never heard of, not a brand name title for sure. The gameplay was terrible, the shooting was terrible. Enemy hotboxes were garbage bullet sponges that wouldn't always register. It was just awful. This game even got multiple delays so I am not sure how it didn't have enough time in the oven. How does a pan of cookies sit in the oven come out raw as this video game I don't know. Maybe if they were less concerned about offending people with its covid reminiscent sounding original name of Quarantine, and more time on the actual game it could have been something playable.

8. Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin - 3/10

My Eyes! My Eyes are burning!!!

The first new Final Fantasy anything since the absolutely fantastic GOTY worthy Final Fantasy 7 Remake, I was excited to try out Final Fantasy Origin. Being newer to FF fandom, I was excited to check this out. The first trailer was a little generic and people mocked the dialogue, but I was still happy to give it a shot. I got to play it early, and my goodness was it terrible. The visuals were straight out of Playstation 3, with hair so staticky and pixelated it looked like Square Enix had never done hair before. This game makes no sense, because these graphics shouldn't look so bad because they JUST did 7's remakes. Tifa and Aerith's hair look amazing on PS4, so how does this PS5 title look THIS bad? Gosh it hurt the eyes. You think the HAIR was bad? Get a load of this field of grass that made me think something was wrong with my TV. The grass looks like the static the tv's of our childhood had when it wasn't on channel 3. The gameplay was so generic and uninspired. I'm sorry but this game needed another year and more than a 5$ budget. I think Square Enix had 10 dollars left over after developing FF16 and FF7R so they split the left overs and gave it to Origins and our #1 pick...

AND...We're only on number TWO for the insane and insulting things Square tried to pull off this year...

7. Valkyrie Elysium 3/10

This one is a real shame because I was excited for this one and thought it looked interesting. This list is surely guaranteed that I will never be hired by Square Enix, as we have ANOTHER piece of hot garbage from Square Enix. 2022 seemed to be the year Square Enix just released all it's terrible games they had sitting unfinished in their vault. Valkyrie has all the terrible problems of Final Fantasy Origin, but with even more terrible "next-gen" graphics and even more terrible boring story. To say that the story is blander than unseasoned tofu is putting it mildly. The game is just terribly generic, as its just boring open spaces with painfully repetitive gameplay. It's just a ripoff at 60$ and a complete waste of your time. I really wanted this to be great...because the character designs were cool; But I was massively disappointed.

6. All these Generic Shooters...

"You get a generic shooter, and you get a generic shooter,

and YOU get a generic shooter."

Why did 2022 seem to deliver more generic boring uninspired shooters than normal? Is it just me? Maybe it's just me but good lord some of these were just terrible. From Superpeople that felt like a lazy PUBG-clone further made awful with its hilariously bad idea for monetization that included "temporary cosmetics" Some genius had the idea that not only should people pay real money for digital goods but that they should also only be allowed to keep them temporarily. Good lord I hope AAA developers don't hear about that insane idea. Super People "could" have had potential if it actually delivered on the idea of "PUBG but with Super Powers" premise that it seems to be trying for. However, the superpowers were limited to an occasional "ultimate" that meant the majority of the time you're just still just shooting and collecting armor and ammo. It could have been cool, but the "super" part of "super people" was just so minimal. This game really should just be called "People" The most hilarious thing about this game is they even tried to pull a Overwatch but in the same year they updated it to be called Super People 2 for some reason? It's just embarrassing.

Two of these shooters were so bland, I actually forgot their names by the time I got to writing this list and had to look them back up. Honestly, these are games that you will download, play a few hours (if that) and quickly uninstall because they're just not worth the hard drive space. There was Shatterline and Lost Light. They are both so bad and boring that I honestly forget which one was even which. They're just terrible and don't even warrant discussion of their differences and pros/cons.

My word of advice to these obviously underfunded and understaffed teams? Stop trying to go alone. You are not going to make the next Call of Duty. Collaborate together and make ONE GREAT game instead of multiple forgettable shooters. There's potential here. Sometimes I see these types of games, and I can't help but think, if more studies came together, less might be more. I'd rather get less games in a year if more of them are better. Imagine if 4 or 5 of these smaller teams just came together to make a truly great shooter to compete in this genre.

There was ONE more absolutely awful generic shooter...but it was so bad it deserved it's own spot farther down the list.

5. Re:Verse 2/10

Good lord Capcom. You REALLY need to just give up on multiplayer games or just out source it to someone who knows how to F**** to make one. They keep trying and they just keep failing. With a "mostly negative" score on Steam, RE:Verse is pretty terrible. I held out hope longer than most...and it just arrived with a whimper.

In concept they have a good idea with the idea to bundle a multiplayer game with a single player game. I really enjoyed RE3 remake, and bundling it with a multiplayer game is a cool concept to add value to this titles. RE Village was a well beloved game with many GOTY noms, so bundling it with a multiplayer game makes good business sense. Instead of just a mode, you can have a different game with different genre and different install, just bundled together for consumer value. The 60/70$ price tag is synonymous with AAA titles, but not all story games are worth 60, and neither are multiplayer games. Take two and package them together for 60 makes a lot of sense. The idea is good; their execution has just been terrible.

However, if you can't deliver on that bundled multiplayer game for a whole year after release, than it's time to rethink that strategy. Having a multiplayer game bundled to the purchase of a game form a previous year is just a bad value for players. It will only ever hurt player bases and queue times. However, that's not even the worst of it. The game is just bad. I don't even know what they did with that extra year because it feels like buggy early access multiplayer shooter. It is a heavily imbalanced, buggy, clunky game with terrible visuals. I was excited to play as some of my favorite RE characters again, and I enjoyed no moment of it. Stay away from this piece of trash.

4. Blood Hunt 2/10

Gosh,

A free to play battle Royale with VAMPIRES.

What could go wrong? Terrible ugly graphics. Terrible gameplay. Just total and complete waste of hard drive space. If this game had really smooth gameplay, or was generic but looked really good, it could pass as forgivable niche. But it really just has no redeeming qualities. It hurts the eyes to look at with its early PS3 graphics and clunky controls. I really hated this one, and even mr positive over here I can't think of one nice thing to say about it. Stay Away. I am embarrassed that I had this on my anticipated list knowing how it turned out.

3. Diablo Immortal 2/10

Honestly a LOT has been said about Diablo Immortal, that I feel like I am beating a dead unihorn with this. However, Diablo Immortal is so INFAMOUS that it made it onto every major gaming news outlet. It set records for badness, aiding in crowning Blizzard with the undesirable title with more games in the top worst of all time on Metacritic, and Diablo Immortal hitting a ground shattering 0.3 user score. Why was this game hated this much? Other than the fact that it is a pretty bland generic diablo game, on PC it felt like a pretty poorly ported sub-par mobile title (because it essentially was). It is a shame because I don't think we have enough console level games on mobile, or games with mobile versions of PC games. This had potential to bring a very PC to mobile friendly genre to the masses.

However, it was because of the infamous micro transactions, or should we say GALACTIC transactions. Even the industry coined "macro-transactions" feels insufficient. This was a game that made headlines for it's insane monetization. Estimates put max characters into the 100,000's of dollars. This game wasn't built for whales or krakens but for freaking Kaiju's. Streamers were spending thousands or tens of thousands (Lord knows why...) on upgrades on stream and still not getting very far. The game also had controversies like hidden special gems that could only be unlocked with money, and hidden grind walls preventing progression without paying. To this day, it is known as one of the most aggressively monetized games ever made.

Honestly, if it weren't for the fact that I didn't care for, or expect much from this game, it may have landed at number one. While this game didn't interest me much, the next two I actually wanted to play...and they're unforgivable garbage. I could argue that some games ranked farther up this list are actually worse to play, but this game had the potential to be great, but instead they chose the dangerous combination of greed and laziness.

2. Crossfire X 2/10

How does a BETA from two years prior play better than a release product? That is beyond my understanding but that's exactly what happened for Crossfire X. Cross Fire X was announced way back during the SCORPIO reveal, that's right the ONE X, not the Series X. It eventually gave us a beta that was a fun, if not a little generic for a military shooter. Years of silence later, we finally got very under the radar news that Crossfire X was finally releasing. To say that it was terrible is an understatement. It's console HUD feels like someone who has never ported a game to console before, as its an absolutely terribly ported pc hud and menu. I don't know how to describe it, and others pointed it out too in other reviews and outlets, that shooting just "feels weird". Aiming and shooting just seems noticeably OFF. It was buggy, generic, and bad. It's campaign was bugged so gamepads users couldn't get in for days after launch and when we finally could, it wasn't worth it. The campaign was also boring and terrible. Crossfire X is the worst military shooter I've played in recent memory, and in a year that gave us a LOT of bad generic military shooters. I waited years, excited for this game only for it to be complete garbage at release. We need competition in the military shooter space and this was NOT it. This could have been number one any other year if not for the ABOMINATION that is number 1.

1. Babylon's Fall - 0/10 (Worst Game of 2022)

This Game.

THE FOURTH PIECE OF GARBAGE out by Square this YEAR. What is GOING ON??? I am honestly worried about FF16 and 7 Rebirth at this point.

THIS STEAMING PILE OF [insert which ever animal excrement you wish].

This is the game that really inspired me to make this list in the first place. All the other games really were terrible, but this one just pushed me over the edge. This isn't the worst game I played this year...this is one of the worst games I have EVER played. This game told me I need to better hold the greedy rich billionaire CEO's at the top accountable for the shovelware they are trying to feed us gamers.

Unlike ash other 9 games on this list where I could maybe see someone maybe getting some entertainment value out of them. Maybe with some time and effort they could be improved. Maybe different gamers with different taste could appreciate some of them. Not this. This is trash. This is shovelware. This is insulting to gamers. This is a breach of trust between Square Enix / Platinum Games and gamers.

In a year that included DIABLO IMMORTAL, this game somehow is one of the most anti-consumer video games I have ever seen. I picture one random first year intern at Platinum messing around with old square assets throwing this together in a week as a learning project on his computer, and Square accidentally thought this was a project they were working on, and some executive who's never played a video game in his life, pushed the "release button". This is a low effort piece of garbage that was marketed and masquerading as a AAA release. It's sole purpose is to try to trick however many gamers into burning 70$. I don't know WHY they even gave pre-release demos out because I tried to tell everyone I could the days leading up to avoid this like the plague.

Platinum games, took TEN YEAR OLD assets from FFXIV and asset flipped them with some tiny re-colors, and created this awful ugly terrible fantasy world. THIS LOOKS LIKE A PS2 GAME. This world was blurry, with a weird glowing hue, and this absolutely eye burning "filter?" that overlaid this weird 2D paint stroke over the already ugly world. It is seriously one of the ugliest games I have ever seen. This game was so bad, some news outlets pointed out that it had ONE PLAYER world wide at its lowest peak. (No that wasn't me) This game is SO BAD, it is ALREADY set to shut down. The fact that this piece of garbage was allowed to ship at all let alone for SEVENTY DOLLARS is a scam. The fact NO ONE at square or platinum had the bravery to stand up and be like, "hey guys...have you actually seen this game?" The fact that they sold this game only to shut it down right away is also a scam. This is worse than Cyberpunk 2077 ever was, and deserved more backlash and mandatory refunds by all retailers.

I really don't know what went wrong with Square Enix this year. They made or published so many terrible games, sold off some of their best IP's, and doubled down on everyone's favorite idea NFT's. They just went off the deep end.

THANKS!

Thanks for reading our Top 10 Worst Games of 2022 Article and stopping by our Best of 2022 Event! Come back for more top lists and other end of year celebration content!

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