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Welcome, I’m Kinglink and I’ll be your host tonight, for our first of two award shows. The more popular category. Worst of year.

Maybe it’s just me, but I love the worst lists. This is always far more interesting than finding out if Breath of the Wild or Mario Odyssey won the top award for the year. Instead, let’s talk about the worst games I played and just what makes them terrible. Unfortunately, because this is a video program, I will be forced to replay these games for… admittedly minutes. Just minutes. I’m not subjecting myself to these games for longer.

Some rules for this year’s award show. I don’t review a ton of games, and I don’t review everything that came out this year, so I’m going off of about 60 titles I reviewed this year. I have to have a full review for the game, the Oculus mini pieces don’t count. And this is a personal opinion. I review games for you. I give awards out for me. That also means scores don’t matter here. I could recommend a game and still have it on this list, but not this year.

Apparently I also don’t care about worrying about what publishers think of me. I no longer try to be their friend and I don’t even accept review copies so there’s nothing to stop me from calling out the worst of the worst. It’s kind of freeing to say that.

With that said, well let’s start with three honorable mentions… No that sounds wrong… three dishonorable mentions, let’s call them what they are. There is no particular order for these three.

You’re already seeing it on the screen. The first dishonorable mention is No Man’s Sky. The only reason I didn’t drop it on this list…. is I didn’t review it. But I do want to call it out. I probably won’t review it but, I keep hearing it’s gotten a lot better. That’s true, but it’s still not that good. It’s as boring as ever, and honestly, why do people think this is good enough. I played it at launch on PS4, I played it this year on PC including using the Occulus. It’s interesting in VR, but it’s not good.

Second Dishonorable mention. Injustice 2. Now I have a huge hate boner for Microtransactions. I think they’re one of the worst things to ever happen to gaming. But that’s not enough to be on this list. I can enjoy games with microtransactions in them. The problem is what bad microtransactions do to gameplay. Injustice 2 is a perfect example of this. It has RPG leveling in a fighting game, which gets you more power. Do I have to explain more? Alright, I will, there’s also power from different equipment. And the equipment is level capped and pulled from loot boxes, and of course, you can buy loot boxes and more. WHO thought this was a good idea? And even if there was a good idea in the single-player progress, which it’s absolutely not, why was this the default for online play? That is just a horrible idea.

Third Dishonorable mention… This is a game I gave a decent review to… but it deserves to be here.  Just Cause 4. Guys. I love Just Cause 2, at least at the time. Just Cause 3 is still fun. But Just Cause 4… What the hell? This was the best they could do? This is terrible. It’s a bad sequel. It is less playable, and just a terrible replacement. Go back and play Just Cause 3 rather than paying for a sequel that isn’t as good. Save some bucks.

Alright with those three out of the way, let’s talk about the worst games I reviewed this year….. Why?

Starting with Number 5. We have our first double booking. Wolfenstein Youngblood and Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus.

To be clear, Wolfenstein: Youngblood won this award all on its own. But I might have given this to Wolfenstein 2: The New Colussus. It is yet another disappointing sequel. A worse story, a more pointless game, and a weaker experience.

Good news Wolfenstein 2, you were saved because they made another sequel, and Wolfenstein: Youngblood is everything wrong with sequalization. We change main characters, though this is done due to a change to co-op we could have probably done BJ and Anya, but I like the idea it was two girls.

It’s just a shame the gameplay is just crap. Making this a possible co-op game could have worked, but drop in drop out, made this into a hub game with a few levels in it and it never works. If you have a friend you could have a good time, but the majority of people are going to have to play a rather crap game.

No checkpoints on 45 minute long missions, repetitive enemies, and uninteresting gameplay just made this so disappointing. Now some of this has been improved, I’ve heard there are patches, but we could allow that, and that’s why I liked to play games after launch, but you can’t fix bad design, and there’s a lot of bad design in Wolfenstein Youngblood. Oh and leveling… and microtransactions. Also, there’s still not an RTX patch for ray tracing graphics which is why I got this game as part of a new computer. Oops.

Next up Number 4. I want to be clear on this one. This game probably deserves the worst game of the year. But I shouldn’t have played it or reviewed it. It’s Rapture Rejects.

At the time of writing this script, Steamspy says that this game has a max of 19 concurrent players in the last month. That’s because it was part of the Jingle Jam through Yogscast at Humble Bundle. Today it has 3 concurrent players. I’ll try to get footage, I don’t know what I’ll be able to get, but…

Well ok, It’s probably going to be of the microtransactions. Really nothing about this game is good. It was dead on arrival, dead when I played it and actually dead now. All this for a Battle Royale game that… yeah never took off. I shouldn’t have reviewed it but it was in a humble bundle. Damn.

Next up we have Number 3. Our second double booking. Danganronpa Another Episode: Ultra Despair Girls, and Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony. This is strange. I gave Danganronpa and it’s sequel a game of the year award last year because I loved them. They had amazing stories, solid gameplay, and an interesting system.

But this year we’re at the bottom. Danganronpa V3 only avoided getting this award because of Another Episode. V3 has the best gameplay of the series, but a terrible story that does something wrong. Yet… it’s Another episode that is truly terrible. It doesn’t have a good story on its own and I think that’s a huge problem. I think Another Episode could have been saved by a better story even if it didn’t connect to the series.

But the gameplay is awful, it’s like a bad version of Resident Evil. It just doesn’t try to be engaging and after the first hour or so you just shoot more and more robots. Even when there are gauntlets of enemies, it’s all shooting more robots, and aiming for the eyes.

The boss fights are the only good parts of this game. The puzzles and normal gameplay was just a slog, and it’s a slog to get to more story that you won’t care about. Ugh.

We’re getting to the bottom. And for number 2 we have…. Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor

The other games had reasons for me to cover them. They were parts of the major series that I wanted to play or were in the Humble Bundle that I cover. Maybe they had connections to major comics, like Cyanide and Happiness, or were heavily promoted. Not Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor. This game is just an odd indie darling that caught my eye for how weird the style was. Probably should have been a warning.

Nothing works with the game. The graphics feel like glitches more than anything. The gameplay is repetitive, and the story is non-existent. But it’s that all of this is trying to be social commentary. It’s trying to shove this message in your face, while not trying to shove it in your face.

You’re supposed to feel bad for the character and see an example of poverty but the message doesn’t really work, and as it’s only social commentary because there’s nothing else to do. You can’t make deals, you can’t sell items unless they’re being sold, you have limited space in your room. It’s all gameplay systems that are there with the express purpose of being gameplay systems. That’s what social commentary is at least for this game.

Or maybe I’m just overthinking it and it’s just a terrible game. Weak.

Finally… we have the worst game of the year… Call of Duty Black Ops 4. Now I should be able to get a game with this one which is why Rapture Rejects probably should be worse. But this is Call of freaking Duty. This should be a great game, they probably put twenty to fifty million dollars into this game and more in marketing.

And it’s dead. Now there is a new Call of Duty and that’s, of course, why it’s player counts are low now. But at least on PC, this was never healthy. Especially a couple of months after launch til… well ever after that.

This is also a multiplayer-only Call of Duty because instead of a single-player campaign, they pushed the Battle Royale mode of Blackout. So this is the first main Call of Duty to not have a single-player campaign when they still had multiplayer on each game.

Maybe it’s too harsh to expect a single player since they never promised one. But I recently reviewed World War 2, the game before this one. Unless you’re playing it for the Battle Royale there’s no need to upgrade. And also this came out as a sixty dollar game, it’s still sixty dollars new at Gamestop. That is more a commentary on Gamestop though. This is a full-priced game that isn’t worth it.

If this was a free game, even if it started at 20 bucks, fine. I’m sure I could understand it. If they released a version of Blackout for free so the player numbers didn’t drop like a rock, that could have been a saving grace.

But instead, this is just a sixty dollar Battle Royale game. It’s a sixty dollar Battle Royale game. I don’t even know another example of that. Apex Legends, Fortnite, Ring of Elysium, and every other Battle Royale game outside of the forty dollar PUB:G is free. Yeah, I’m glad this didn’t take off.

Oh, and there are microtransactions as well. This is just terrible.

So that’s it for the Worst of my 2019. You know, one day, I kind of hope to make this list just the weakest games I played in a year, and not awful games, but there’s a lot that goes into that. It also means my review scores would have to raise on average due to not playing… crap.

Still with this out of the way. Coming up next we will talk about the best, and there are some amazing games I reviewed this year. If you haven’t already, click the subscribe button and ring the bell so you can get notified when that’s happening.

I have said I’ll be doing a new series in the new year. I’ll announce it next time, but I’ll give you a hint. I’m going to be reviewing a very long series of games retrospectively, reviewing them and talk about how they are in 2020. I won’t say which series yet, but you probably have played at least one of their games. It also will have at least one game a month just on PC. More on that next time.

And I’m going to pop up my review of Black Ops 4, and my awards from last year in case you want to see either of those.

Until then, I’m Kinglink and thanks for watching.