The Worst Games of 2025

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Of course, this time of year is all about celebrating the best games of the year, and that's broadly what we do. But there is no light without shadow, there are no good games without the bad, reminding us that sometimes failures are just as crucial as successes. The titles here undoubtedly gave it their all, or if nothing else, there are employees who gave it their all in an attempt to create a successful development framework. But for one reason or another, it just didn't work.

We should also remember these games, both because it's fun to look back with a different perspective, but also to use our entire emotional register so that we're ready for new experiences in 2026.

These are the games the editors consider to be the worst games of 2026.

NINTENDO SWITCH 2 WELCOME TOUR

While this is somehow "just" a glorified tutorial, and there are good ideas here and there, the Welcome Tour was a gigantic enigma, a vortex of open questions, from the moment it was revealed - and especially when people found out that it wasn't included on all Switch 2 consoles like Nintendoland was on Wii U, but was a paid product.

There is undoubtedly a principled dimension here that permeates the whole gaming experience; it feels odd to have a new console's core features marketed through a game you bought on the eShop. If the purpose of the game is to explain and teach in an entertaining way, wouldn't it have been beneficial to give it away for free?

Add to that the relatively uninventive gameplay, which despite some clever graphics, neither innovates nor develops key concepts we've seen before, and the game came across before, during and after the launch of both it and the console itself as Nintendo completely out of touch with what represents good value, and perhaps most crucially; good style.

MINDSEYE

For most, Leslie Benzie's controversial action game is probably the most high-profile failure of the year, as it really ended up being a perfect storm of mud-slinging and bad decisions.

Lack of marketing, misleading trailers and gameplay previews, and rumours of poor working conditions plagued the game right up to launch, and before that there was the confusing transition between the Roblox/Fortnite project Everywhere, where MindsEye was a kind of experience built "in" this universe, to Everywhere failing to appear at all, and then Everywhere returning after launch in a shadow of its former self.

But all of this is context, and the truth is that measured entirely on its own parameters, MindsEye is just an unmitigated disaster; a bland story brought to life through generic gameplay that was thrown to the dogs long, long before it was actually finished.

FAST & FURIOUS: ARCADE EDITION

What happens when you convert an arcade game to home consoles and PC without making any changes at all? Then you get Fast & Furious: Arcade Edition, which is a paper-thin racing game that probably works quite well in arcades, with these little bursts of action-packed racing before you move on to the next game machine. As a game at home in the living room on the sofa or in front of the PC, it's a completely different story, because it's simply too simple and in less than 15 minutes you've seen almost everything the game has to offer.

There is nothing to connect this game to the Fast & Furious films, as neither Dominic "Dom" Toretto nor Brian O'Conner are anywhere to be seen. There is almost no progression, no story and very few cars and even fewer tracks and it seems like a shameless attempt at a quick cash-in on the Fast & Furious name - and then you had this arcade game lying around that you could just port over to the consoles and PC. It just didn't work.

FALLOUT 4 ANNIVERSARY EDITION

This list isn't "principled" per se, but it's clear that we're taking cues from context, from pricing, from developer intent. It's clear that Fallout 4 on its own isn't one of the "worst games of the year", but this re-release was a kind of crystallisation of how Bethesda has a habit of looking for the most anti-consumer version of a given idea, and then going with it, completely unaware of what reaction it will get.

This year they released Fallout 4 at full price - that's crazy in itself, but in some strange way this game arrived in worse technical condition than the regular old Fallout 4. Many people, including our reviewer, couldn't launch the game for days after launch, the accompanying Creation Club items wouldn't redeem, and the whole package reeked of unoptimized, poorly conceptualised software from a publisher that really, really should have known better.

CAPTAIN BLOOD

If you're not familiar with Captain Blood, it's an understatement of the year to say that the game has had a difficult development. But that's no excuse. What ultimately snuck across the finish line was, just as many had feared, a game that felt like it was conceptualised in the 2000s, and in the worst possible way.

The missions are identical in structure, there are strange intermezzo paths that feel rushed in their inclusion and interpretation, and the whole thing is so imprecisely put together that it's hard to describe.

Worst of all, the developer doesn't seem to have realised that many fans saw a kind of time capsule in the game's trailers and wanted to return to simpler times. Instead, they've delivered a game that wouldn't have made anyone's top charts in 2005, but today feels eerily archaic, old-fashioned and outdated, and that's without technical quirks, unoptimized gameplay and an insulting story.

LA QUIMERA

La Quimera is the game on this list that hurts the most because a number of the characters that brought us the solid Metro games were behind it via a breakaway group called Reburn. The split was revealed in February, and already in May Reburn released their first new game without the rest of the Metro legends at 4A Games - La Quimera.

And while the result is far more ambitious than other games on this list, it was almost eerily unfinished at launch. It was so unfinished that after the first negative reactions emerged, they... well, the studio unlaunched the game and re-released it 10 days later.

However, the final game is still extremely disappointing, especially considering the talent that undoubtedly exists at Reburn, and it's hard to recommend to... well, anyone at all. Our reviewer went a step further and called it an "asset dump in the Unreal Engine" - that may be harsh, but that's how it felt at the time.