10 Worst Video Games From The Past Decade

Let's not mince words – Destiny is a complete chore, a never-ending grind in which players shoot enemies, explore environments and gradually progress towards an unreachable goal. 

The story is occasionally interesting, admittedly – but, the singleplayer isn't as rewarding as the multiplayer, which means anything you accomplish solo is essentially worthless. Teaming with online players is 95% of the experience – working together to achieve an array of unconnected, unsatisfying objectives for the promise of XP.

So, why’s the game so popular? Destiny is a safe pair of hands. It's duller than dishwater, but at least you know what you're going to get – which is the reason you keep playing it, isn't it?

Sonic Boom – released in 2014 – is a notoriously terrible game, panned almost universally. For one thing, the game barely functioned – allowing players to escape the confines of the environment, skipping significant portions of the game.

Besides that, it was generally repetitive and uninteresting, brought down by a substandard combat system, monotonous action sequences, and an over-emphasis on generic platforming, rather than speed. Worse, players experienced constantly frame-rate drops in framerate – which would make the character glitch around uncontrollably.

Sonic has always had a troubled history – but, the franchise had maintained a certain mainstream appeal – until Sonic Boom, which just about everyone despised.

Essentially a remake, Fallout 4 is guilty of something pretty unforgivable – tedium. Fallout 4 was an entire museum of disappointments all rolled into one uninspiring chore of a game.

Dialogue sucked – the quests lacked variety, and the story was just re-treading the same ground as the previous game. Worse, it barely worked upon release – it was buggy and unresponsive, and it was so bugged that Bethesda had to immediately start releasing updates just to get the thing into some kind of working order.

Hopefully, Fallout 4 isn't a sign of things to come – it might be the most poorly received entry in the entire series, besides Brotherhood of Steel. That said, Fallout 4 performed incredibly well commercially, despite its rushed release and mixed reception.

Assassin’s Creed 3 – incomprehensibly, the fifth instalment in the series – received a mixed critical reception due to its unimaginative, mind-numbing story and unmemorable characters. Unlike Sonic Boom, Assassin’s Creed 3 was completely functional – the series had just become noticeably stale following the release of AC2.

AC3 was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

For one thing, the story revolved around men signing documents in cut-scenes, trailing endlessly after NPCs in a forgettable, bland environment, and engaging guards in monotonous combat sequences. Turns out, the time-period and setting weren’t necessarily compatible with the requirements of an open-world action/adventure game. The entire experience lacking any sense of personality, excitement or narrative investment.

Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag turned things around several years later – revitalising the franchise with a healthy dose of swashbuckling plundering and adventure.

The Division sold exceedingly well since its release last year, topping Watch Dogs as the most successful release in Ubisoft history. That said, the game received a mixed reception, despite its commercial success – garnering a number of negative reviews.

That said, The Division is a complete chore – it’s a competent shooter with a decent multiplayer focus, but the game’s positives are staggeringly outnumber by the negatives. The Division contains a sprawling open world with zero personality and no memorable characters. Instead, players scour the same landscape endlessly, looting the same enemies for the same equipment and rewards – it’s completely soulless.

The Division is a boring game; in fact, it’s everything that’s wrong with gaming today. It’s an uninspired chore that feels more like a second job than a video game.

Developed by Turtle Rock Studios, Evolve is multiplayer focused FPS about monster hunting. It doesn’t have a campaign – it’s essentially just a handful of multiplayer modes thrown together with little in the way of narrative justification, like Battlefront.

The objective: four players attempt to track down a monster – another player controls the monster, who must escape the other player, grow in size and destructive capabilities. After four – maybe five games, if you’re lucky – you will have experienced everything.

Unlike similar games – like Left 4 Dead – the gameplay doesn’t vary enough to justify the lack of content. It may seem unpredictable at first, but you’ll quickly realise how repetitive the experience is after twelve or thirteen indistinct attempts to neutralize the same handful of monsters, again and again.

The idea of customising a bunch of characters, designing them a house and shoving them inside to revel in the resulting chaos has always been the central appeal of The Sims. With each new instalment, more and more creative options have become available – and many others have been slowly stripped away, including terrain tools and other staples of the series.

In fact, it was estimated that over seventy-five features were removed from the most recent instalment of the series, The Sims 4.

The Sims has greatly depreciated in value over the years – but honestly, the fourth instalment is perhaps the worst thing EA has put out in over a decade. It’s not detailed enough to be called a simulator, options are more limited than ever – so much so, it’s barely a game.

The biggest, loudest shooter on the market, Call of Duty is perhaps the most contentious entry on this list. For whatever reason, people love Call of Duty. Granted, most of those people are prepubescent – but the point still stands: CoD is a beloved franchise, played all over the world by a multitude of different people.

Why? I haven’t a clue. The series hasn’t developed in any meaningful way in over a decade, the multiplayer is bland and uninteresting, and the singleplayer is just a succession of myriad cutscenes and set-pieces that rarely allow for any real sense of player involvement.

Worse, the story has developed into something almost laughable; Advanced Warfare was essentially about Kevin Spacey trying to invade the United States, and Ghosts III – despite the title, which suggests an element of stealth – involved cyber-augmentation, killer robots and lots and lots of armoured tanks.

Thank goodness for Resident Evil 7 getting the series back on track after the dismal efforts of its predecessor, Resi6.

In 2005, Resident Evil 4 introduced a third person perspective, shifting the series’ emphasis away from survival horror, and accentuating gunplay more so than ever before. Equally, in 2009, Resident Evil 5 introduced co-operative play, further distancing the franchise from its roots, developing the formula for an all new generation of players.

Resident Evil 6 brought nothing to the table, honestly. It was a mess in terms of both gameplay and story – and, though it certainly took the series in a new direction – it wasn’t necessarily a direction anyone wanted Resident Evil to go.

It’s exceptionally long, and remarkably shallow – it’s not particularly challenging, or especially scary. Arguably, Resi6 is the most accessible entry in the series, but the larger plot – which is completely depedent on previous entries – prevents new players from jumping on board. It fails in every way imaginable.