The Worst Video Games of 2013

It was a long 2013.

The gaming industry gave us two shiny next-gen consoles, a slew of amazing games from both indie and AAA developers, and a chum filled basement of not-so-great titles that will never go on to become annualized franchises. 2013 was a year for whale hunting pirates, meth running hoods, and a selection of some of the more memorably odious dreck ever burped up. Shovelware, heinous cash grabs, and the officially licensed, movie tie-in all made multiple appearances throughout 2013.

Three cheers to the trash.

It's too bad the list couldn't have been longer. Here are the worst video games of 2013.

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You may or may not remember how bad the first Ken's Rage was.

It looked like an up-resed Dreamcast game that would've felt overpriced in a bargain bin, with each of its series of levels (which bafflingly spanned the whole Fist of the North Star narrative saga) appearing to be rendered with the same gigantic one-texture wasteland level, using the same enemies with the same death animations for Ken to painfully slog through with the same geologically timed moves ad nauseum. (Bonus: there may as well have been a hundred other playable characters, all with their own reskinned quests to complete.) Ken's Rage 2 was, if you can believe it, not only covers almost the exact same ground as the original Ken's Rage, but did so using uglier graphics and with even less moves to choose from.

At least it wasn't all bad – it was something to play on your Wii U!

Despite what pop-culture may otherwise dictate, the last time vampires were actively cool was probably back in 2002, when Guillermo Del Toro's Blade II had Kris Kristofferson delivering lines like "Some of us can't see in the dark ya fuckin' nipplehead!" (Oh wait that wasn't cool. Uh something something Let The Right One In.)

Dark does little to scrub out the deeply etched embarrassment left by the likes of Twilight and True Blood, instead giving you a horrid stealth action game with enemies so brain dead will just stare in one direction. Aside from the idiotic AI, the mind-numbing tedium of the your limited stealth-fixated skillset feels like a throwback to bargain bin PS2 era design. If you want your bloodsucking kicks, wait for the new Castlevania or Jim Jarmusch's upcoming vampire film instead.

Between mainstays like Forza and Need For Speed (and with Codemasters' fantastic niche entries to fill out the genre with skill), there's really almost never any reason to consider picking up a tie-in racer (no, kart racers don't count).

Fast & Furious Showdown, on the other hand, is the dirt-encrusted finger in a fresh bullet wound kind of tie-in, replete with barely functional physics, cars with no sense of speed, a distinct lack of setpiecs (and an even more telling utter absence of anyone involved from the film series), all in a visual package that would make you feel insulted to pay $5 for it on a digital download service (it wasn't $5). Paul Walker deserves a better memory than this – at least the films' goofy action legacy is intact.

It's no worse than you'd expect from a licensed game—OK, it is worse than you'd expect. Especially these days, when games like the Batman Arkham series are proving that licensed games don't have to be terrible.

Then again, take a look at the source material and that's all you really need to know.

It may not look that bad on the surface, but Girl Fight is really nothing more than a crass rip-off of Dead or Alive. No doubt some teenagers will be drawn in by the T&A, but as soon as you're old enough to have your own computer there's no reason to pay money for this unfulfilling fan service.

As if the cheese factor wasn't enough, everything from the controls to the level design is mediocre as well.

There were high hopes for Plants vs. Zombies 2, but when the game finally launched it became clear that the free-to-play gambit hadn't paid off. Well, it paid off in the sense that a lot of people probably spent a lot of money on it, but at the expense of any semblance of a functioning in-game economy.

The keys required to earn new plants and other upgrades were incredibly rare, and the only reasonable way to get more was to spend real cash. Meanwhile the coins used for purchases in the first Plants vs. Zombies were all but useless in this iteration.

Thankfully the game received a massive update in December, an overhaul that eliminated the need for keys. But at what cost?

Knack was touted as one of the PS4's biggest and best launch titles, but it turned out to be a linear and unimpressive Ratchet and Clank-esque snoozefest.

Its biggest problem might be that it can't decide what it wants to be. Is it a stealth game? A kids game? A hardcore game that only looks like a kids game? We have no idea, and we suspect its developers don't either.

When you try to make a game for everyone, you wind up with a game for no one. Unless you're Nintendo. Lesson learned?

Controversial! No, seriously, though. There is no excuse for Ni No Kuni.

"But it was gorgeous!" "Studio Ghibli did the animation!" "It's so whimsical!" Yeah, OK. It also has the most broken battle system of any RPG released this year. Your companions' AI is so dumb, they'll use up all their magic casting buffs, then be unable to heal you—even when you tell them to stick to healing magic. Or they'll cast all their most powerful spells at peons, then spam their weakest, most ineffective attacks at huge bosses.

When the best option for combat is to grind until you're over-leveled, then kill two of your characters so they don't get in your way, you've got a terrible game on your hands—regardless of whatever positive properties it may possess.

For all the smack he talks about the game industry, Keiji Inafune's original titles have been generally less than stellar since he left Capcom.

Soul Sacrifice is no slouch in that department, either – what appears to be an interesting narrative tale about a wizard slowly going insane after being forced to murder his own partner as part of a rite of ritualistic passage is actually just an absolutely mindlessly god-awful slog through endlessly repetitive dungeons the size of shoe boxes. Everything promised here is a letdown: the gimmick of allies bestowing god killing sacrificial power is utterly neutered by hopelessly incompetent AI (and idiotically you can't play through the campaign mode with friends), equipping different elemental attacks Ocarina-style yields little difference.

Even the game's occasionally creepy and interesting monster design is rendered worthless by the sheer impossibility – and eventual boredom – of most boss encounters. Adding insult to injury, the few maps the game has repeat endlessly – and there are no other "RPG" trappings to speak of apart from battle and battle customization. You won't be able to turn it off fast enough.

Star Trek was so bad that J.J. Abrams commented that it "emotionally hurt" him after release, and it's easy to see why.

Yeah, it was probably never a good idea to put Kirk and Spock together in something that initially looked like a quasi-asymmetrical Uncharted in space, and it certainly didn't help that after about a year of development, all of the game's original innovations had dried up as Abrams' Bad Company had more or less stopped working with Digital Extremes.

When Star Trek hit this Summer, what was pressed to the disc was akin to someone pulling a loose thread on a redshirt's uniform top, until whatever half-baked skeletal structure still remained made gameplay more like running between one unfinished level fragment to the next, until you were running into areas where Gorn on cue in cutscenes just flat out refused to appear and AI Kirk would get lost if you sprinted more than 20 meters ahead.

Once described as the vast and howling emptiness where a soul once resided, Barbie Dream House Party is a game in name alone.

The entire affair seems more akin to a consumer conditioning simulator that aims to program women into talking with a raised intonation that always sounds like they're asking a question. Shoes, shopping, baking, and some of the most haunting eyes ever seen in a video game are all that wait for those about to play this game. The whole thing reinforces stereotypes that were considered archaic in the 70s and gives them a new graphics engine. If you buy this game for your children, you're not just a bad parent, you're a terrible human.

What would be cooler than fighting huge dragons in mid-air? Somehow developers of Crimson Dragon make the raw-muscle experience that should come with of harnessing a fire-breathing beast and turned it into something like flying a kite with extreme motion sickness.

Crimson Dragon isn't a broken game, which can't be said for most of the “Worst of the Year List,” but that almost makes it worse. Not being broken you would assume that this is what the developer intended, a dragon roller coaster ride in an on-rails shooter grinding over the same levels, over and over.

Crimson Dragon isn't terrible when viewed as an arcade shooter, but it doesn't make it worth playing. The weak textures, constant repetition of environments and elemental effects that all fire out as perfect orbs just gets annoying. This game could be adapted as an excellent mobile port (there is a Windows Phone version out there) where players fly infinitely and blow stuff up, but as a larger game this simple gameplay doesn't hold up.

The most confusing gameplay come during the boss battles, where players must beat the clock against monsters. Why in the world would you need to beat a clock against a boss? This makes no sense in play and just adds a frustrating level of unnecessary tedium. Often players are left chasing a boss they have no hope of beating because their dragon just isn't strong enough, time expires and it's back to grinding away on the same levels over and over to unlock the possibility of a slightly stronger dragon to fight the boss clock again.

Leave this one in the bargain bin.

Think you've got what it takes to be in an Olympic grade athlete?

You probably do in Mario and Sonic, which basically tests your ability to aim a controller downward to pick up speed. Oddly, though the games vary from skiing to curling, almost all of them use the same basic control setup, necessitating on a reliance on motion control (if there's one thing that really makes the Wii U feel like it doesn't have any right to be considered next-gen, it's this).

Unlike, say, a Mario themed sports game, little in Sochi 2014's difficulty is all over the map, and it doesn't really give you much of a sense of variety, either – even in single-player your'e just racing against your ghost. So in theory you're left with a game that caters to a probably very small subsection of the gaming populous that is both really into the concept of the Olympics on a philosophical level that also happens to love Mario, Sonic or both. (In other words, it's a bit existentially suspect.) Sochi 2014 may not be the worst title on this list, but it certainly won't inspire you to much excitement, either.

Square-Enix practically has a monopoly on mobile price gouging, but there are few games in or out of their catalog more cynical than the execrable All The Bravest.

ATB isn't really a game so much as it is an insidious money grab disguised as one – ostensibly you're given an ultra-lean (as in, you can attack and that's it) version of the series famous Active Time Battle and a slew of warriors that all gang up to kill baddies without any story, towns, dungeons or anything that would make this an actual video game, much less an entry in a beloved JRPG series.

Here's where it gets nasty: all of your characters die in one hit and you can only revive them by spending money or waiting the typical BS free-to-play real-world allotted time system before trying again. Of course, with the way the game's breakneck battles are designed – just touch the screen to make your party attack – no one dumb enough to play ATB is going to wait, reducing players to forking over actual money to mindlessly tap on a touchscreen until you fall again or your foe does.

Easily one of the most shamelessly exploitative middle fingers to fans ever pulled in the industry.

There are some pretty solid zombie games out there. So if you're going to make a zombie game based on the current cross-media hit The Walking Dead it better be at least up to par with the the TV series or Telltale Games' interactive narrative game The Walking Dead. Somehow The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct manages to completely sidestep nearly everything good about the series. Instead becoming a reanimated corpse of a game; shoot it in the head.

The game focuses of the redneck brothers Daryl and Merle Dixon in a prequel to their stories in the AMC television series. Players takes the role of Daryl, the loveable crossbow wielding country boy with a heart of gold, who is voiced incredibly well but is wasted on a game that should go down as game of the year for disappointment.

First off, the developers didn't want anyone to know this game was out, it clearly knew the crap state of the title. No review copies landed anywhere meaning it hoped to get to store shelves and sold to some hapless Walking Dead loving fan before anyone could figure out how bad it was. The graphics are straight out of 1999 and that's being generous. With lots of flat ground and unrendered textures on everything it looks worse than freeware. The gameplay is suppose to let gamers use Daryl's sneaky abilities to get through a level but this doesn't work, every level becomes a sprint and slash fest where gamers end up just jumping on top of a car and knifing zombies because apparently zombies can't reach the top of cars.

The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct includes lots of cool features, if they worked. Players can pick and choose survivors to add to the group and send them on resource runs to keep stocked of gas, car parts and weapons but when you kick them out, essentially leaving them do die, they don't even get a line of dialogue; they're just gone.

Gameplay problems and weak story aside, the game just seems rushed. With a little more time Survival Instinct may have become a genuinely good game, but instead its half-finished, pumped full of filler and doesn't provide any of excitement we've come to expect from the series.

Holy fuck, was this game an absolute nightmare to play.

The only redeeming quality this game can point to was that it was a mercifully short affair. The game is broken. Enemies that simply vanish, screen tears that threaten gameplay entirely, AI that is essentially non-existent, and an absolutely absurd voice acting performance by all involved should have been enough to scrap the game entirely. But, no, we slogged through all of the above and then some.

That 'then some' is the sex. Oh, god in heaven, the sex.

Oh, where do I start? Many gamers and reviewers have waxed poetic about just how terrible this game turned out. But given there is so much to not love about how the officially licensed title of one of the most terrifying action movies ever made turned out to be a boring, glitchy sleeper this author will attempt tot stick to the lowest of the low.

Aliens is the action movie follow-up to Ridley Scott's terrifying space horror film with a vulnerable, half-naked Sigourney Weaver trying to escape the death grip of H.R. Giger's horrifically phallic Xenomorph. Aliens is the action-packed sequel where the horror of Alien meets the ass-kicking might of Space Marines, before space marines became a cliché. Aliens is one of the scariest action films ever made by the nerd-loving physics major James Cameron just two years after he made the first Terminator film.

For Aliens: Colonial Marines developer Gearbox – creators of the hit Borderlands series – was given full license to use all the charterer, locations, sounds and more from the film in what was dubbed a sequel that would directly tie into the story. Instead what happened is Gearbox admitted to half-assing the development, got canceled once, then finally finished in what can only be described as one of the most comically bad games ever made.

The first 10-seconds of gameplay is as good as Colonial Marines ever gets. The film-authentic bing and hum of the motion tracker, ticking away Xenomorphs as they hunt their pray, you! After that, it's all downhill. The aliens themselves are not scary, they are small, sort of look like skinny cats and are really easy to kill. In fact they're so easy to kill that there is little need to be afraid of dying at all, just charge thorough and mop-up with your pulse rifle. In making the aliens weak developers lost the scariest device in the game, the motion tracker. Aliens are suppose to come out of nowhere, wound you and retreat until they pick your squad off one by one. Instead what's happens is that you aim your rifle at a spawn point and just keep firing until you're prompted to follow someone else to do something, who knows what, I stopped caring at that point.

If a gamer ever feels like punishing themselves by playing this game to try to redeem some of the $60 they just shelled out for it, they end up at one of several terrible boss battles. At this point the comic failure of Colonial Marines just turns to sadness. Some battles are simply a strings of quick-time events (hit X now!) or worse so glitchy that gamers are left to run in circles until the alien gets stuck on a corner, which happens all the time, then just shoot till dead - so fun.

Far be it from anyone to suspect a new, no-fanfare TMNT game that was exclusive to XBLA (a PSN port was seemingly axed), to be of much quality.

Lo and behold, Out Of The Shadows is a far cry from the turtles' gaming appearances of yesteryear, and has all the usual trappings of a slapped-together tie-in property – a shitty camera, malfunctioning progression parameters and poorly programmed button-mash combat being chief among them. What's even weirder is how the turtles sit around and jaw philosophically about everything from pizza to the existential quandary of switching masks with each other, which, while not out of character, is presented in a surreal way that seems wouldn't feel totally out of place spliced together in the David Lynch film.

Speaking of Lynch, the turtles' creepy-realistic appearance definitely have a touch of Elephant Man to them. But what's most insulting about this throwaway brawler – apart from the fact that they released another Turtles game just two months later so that anyone who may've cared would find it pretty hard to get them straight – is that so few deemed Out Of The Shadows worthy of a review it was relegated to utter obscurity before the boys' mutagen had time to take hold.

LocoCycle is a classic example of an underdeveloped, over-hyped launch game designed to do one thing: drop on day one of a console's release (in this case the Xbox One) and then fade forever into the index pages of history. Anyone remember Kameo? Didn't think so.

OK, so the intro and outro videos were kind of funny. But when it comes to the actual game LocoCycle is repetitive, sophomoric, and fundamentally flawed.

That dude doesn't even have shirt sleeves—there is no way he'd survive that long. His elbows would be toast after the first quarter mile!

Hedging on an MMO cross-media experiment that shapes the way its corresponding TV show is certainly an interesting and risky proposition, yet it's maybe not the best move when the show's only just started and carries the stigma of being a SyFy channel original (that went on to barely crack 2 million viewers at its peak).

But so it went with Defiance, a free-to-play shooter that did little to show any sense of personality – nothing but deadly dull shootouts through similarly uninspired apocalypse-blasted wastelands and sloggy PvE combat with offensively inept AI (not to mention some of the ugliest animations of last generation) as far as the eye can see. There's a reason this seen-it-all-before title can be picked up for less than $10 – you won't want to play it for very long.

Forget all your preconceived notions about Kinect, including every terrible Kinect game that, on top of not recognizing your movements 95 percent of the time, also had awful writing, graphics, and every other basic fundamental. Then play Fighter Within, and they all come flooding back.

The Xbox One's new Kinect sensor was supposed to prove that waving your arms in the air like an idiot is the gameplay of the future, and Fighter Within, a Kinect-only fighting game released regrettably by Ubisoft, was supposed to help it do that.

Unfortunately it's the worst game of the year by far in every category. The writing is idiotic, the art is ugly, the plot makes no sense, the basic premise is terrible, and the gameplay is so bad you'll wish you were playing Steel Battalion: Heavy Armor instead.

Fighter Within was definitely the worst game of the year, and probably the worst game of the last several. Just be thankful you didn't have to play it.

For a game with as much potential as Remember Me has in just its premise, it falls, and does so hard.

What starts out as what might seem like a 1984 esque cautionary tale about the evolutionary reliance on the cloud comes up completely short early in, showing a reliance on tired genre tropes in a number of weak attempts to manipulate you into caring about one of most poorly written characters of the year (whom in very Crofitan fashion does an emotional 180 from simpering victim to inexorable killing machine in about five minutes). Like Remember Me's fundamentally broken combat system – which succumbs to its own egregiously tedious fundamentals after a few short hours, punishing you for trying to play the game how the designers seemingly wanted you to – the game seems afraid to say anything unique or original, doubling back on any initially implied narrative innovation that might push the player to think about the context of their in-game actions in a different light.

All that's left is a lot of wasted potential and hours of your life you'll never get back.