Worst games of the year 2024

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While 2023 was a rollercoaster ride of huge highs and lows, 2024 has been a little smoother. We simply won't find truly awful games like Kong: Skull Island or The Lord of the Rings: Gollum this year, and even a notoriously poor publisher like Gamemill Entertainment has actually managed to release relatively decent games for the most part - the world has ended!

That said, as always, the list of the worst games of the year contains a good mix of objectively bad games - with lousy graphics, poor controls and lots of bugs - and games that are technically entertaining but disappoint so badly that they have to be considered complete failures.

Kong: Survivor Instinct - 7Levels

Kong: Skull Island was by far the worst game of last year and without a doubt a serious contender for worst game of the decade. This year, the famous gorilla finds his way onto the list again, but the developers at 7Levels are pleased that their game still tops last year's Kong game.

You play as a grey-faced but physically capable man trying to find his daughter in a dilapidated city destroyed by giant apes and monsters. As a setup it's not bad, but unfortunately the graphics are so flat, the controls so stiff and the combat so uninspired that the biggest threat ends up being your own boredom. Kong deserves better.

Pneumata - Deadbolt Interactive

Ever since Amnesia: The Dark Descent scared the pants off us in 2010, we've seen a steady stream of atmospheric first-person horror games. Unfortunately, the scariest thing about many of these titles is their distinct lack of quality, and unfortunately, this is also true of the rather bland Pneumata.

Visually, it's creepy enough, with fleshy monsters and plenty of darkness that's only illuminated by limited light sources. But everything below the game's surface is almost insultingly poor. From the thin story that hints and promises a lot only to deliver a disappointing and bland ending, to the gameplay that suffers from poor design and extremely dumb AI. Deadbolt Interactive clearly had no real ambitions with Pneumata, and unfortunately this shines through on all parameters.

Skull & Bones - Ubisoft Singapore

Ubisoft's pirate game started life as an evolution of the sailing part of Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, but development went off course several times and had to be restarted. After 11 years, Ubisoft Singapore's multiplayer game was finally released earlier this year, but unfortunately the result was extremely disappointing.

Skull & Bones has absolutely no meaningful activities on land, and what happens at sea is nowhere near enough to justify the game's high price tag. In fact, in many ways the experience is worse than Black Flag, as you can't board other ships and fight man-to-man, for example.

Ubisoft's 2024 has been a bit of a nightmare, and a lot of the blame can be attributed to Skull & Bones.

Ario - Vata Games

The 2.5D platformer Ario is just one letter short of sharing its name with the best platform series on the market. Unfortunately, the game itself is missing so much more.

You can count on one hand how much good Ario does, and that hand doesn't even need to have all its fingers intact. The level design is cramped, the simplest interactions require millimetre precision, and our protagonist has precisely zero momentum, making the game far too rigid.

Graphically, Ario is no gem either, and the most positive thing about the experience is that it's over in an hour or so.

Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League - Rocksteady

Rocksteady delivers with Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League one of the best-looking games of the year, and although the story doesn't reach the same heights as their acclaimed Arkham series, there are still several entertaining sequences along the way. So what went wrong?

In some ways, it's an identity crisis. The game tries to be both a multiplayer and single-player experience, and the two legs of the game constantly end up straddling each other. Other times, the design is just plain bad. For example, the appearance and behaviour of the enemies lacks variety and the game's missions are extremely monotonous. Suicide Squad can certainly entertain, but compared to Batman: Arkham Knight, it's a drop in quality.

South Park: Snow Day - Question

With the fun role-playing games The Stick of Truth and The Fractured but Whole, South Park finally got a couple of game releases that captured the series' adult yet infantile humour. Unfortunately, this year's South Park: Snow Day reminds us more of the series' not-so-successful Nintendo 64 game with its lacklustre action gameplay and amputated humour.

We appreciate that the game actually has a single-player campaign with cutscenes and - a few - funny lines, and a rogue-lite card system that grants new abilities provides some much-needed variety. But that doesn't change the fact that South Park: Snow Day is a sloppy and monotonous affair that fails to get enough out of its licence.

Taxi Life: A City Driving Simulator - Simteract

When we think of the small yet popular niche of driving-based job simulators (whose uncrowned king is arguably Euro Truck Simulator), we tend to think of grey and generic environments. This is not the case in Taxi Life: A City Driving Simulator, which lets you play taxi driver in Spain's second largest city, Barcelona.

Unfortunately, neither the Sagrada Familia nor the Gaudi architecture of the world can save what is a technically choppy and relatively flat simulator. Now, tourists rarely excel in intelligence, but here their AI is too stupid, and neither they nor the other road users show any signs of intelligence. The result is an unsatisfying driving experience that is not compensated for by the other management aspects.

Finally, the game (despite the title) simply lacks life. There are no conversations with passengers or fun experiences in the taxi to break up the monotony. It's all clinical, sexless and utterly boring.

Concord - Fireaxis Studios

In a year where one game developer after another laid off countless employees, Concord became the ultimate symbol of everything that is wrong with much of the gaming industry. While anyone could almost say that the here shooter genre was saturated, Sony Interactive management insisted on spending hundreds of millions of dollars on Fireaxis Games' Concord - only to pull the plug on the project after a measly two weeks, shut down the game's servers and refund all customers.

However, the game's lack of success can ultimately be attributed to the developers who, according to several media outlets, had an unhealthy corporate culture where there was no room for criticism and scepticism. The result was a game that, despite a long development time and an almost unlimited budget, was devoid of both charm and quality, as if it had been focus grouped into a shapeless, grey mass.

Hopefully Concord will be a lesson to the industry's money men to focus more on quality and offline content in the future, but we have our doubts.