The Biggest Gaming Fails Of 2015

A video game is a mind-bogglingly complex program with millions of moving parts, assets, and bytes. When these parts don't sync together perfectly, you've got a very expensive problem on your hands. Whether a company hurries to ship a poorly-tested game with terrible mechanics and crippling bugs, or they just don't get the reaction that they'd hoped for, a bad game is usually undeniable. As a result, 2015 had its fair share of craptacular titles. Here are nine games that were released way too early or should never have been released at all until they were fixed.

While Battlefront is universally regarded as a beautiful game that captures Star Wars better than any predecessor ever has, critics have been merciless about what the game lacks in content. For a game called Star Wars, there are literally no spaceship battles among the stars, with every aerial dogfight happening just over the surface of a few random planets. Even more unfortunate is the fact that Battlefront has no campaign mode. Unless you're really into tutorials or hours of online gunfights on extremely limited maps with no actual conclusion, the game has little to offer the hardcore first-person shooter scene. Reviews have praised its presentation values and the sense of nostalgia you get from the authentic sights and sounds, but that's about it, as a ton of potential was lost only months before the explosive release of Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

Quick time events are horrible. Not only are the symbols on controllers unintuitive, but games usually expect you to have memorized the controller's layout and be able to press them at a moment's notice. Instead of an engaging gameplay experience, you have gamers looking between their TV and hands to make their way through interactive cutscenes that may have otherwise been enjoyable. The worst offender for these in 2015 is Battlefield Hardline, which included an alligator attack QTE that forgot to display its button commands on screen. Lots of players ended up being stuck at this portion until it was finally addressed in a post-launch patch. Mind you, this is a game that encourages you to arrest the bad guys instead of shooting them. Ultimately, Battlefield Hardline is a legitimate failure when it comes to fun—Bad Boys indeed.

Originally a manga created in 1999, Afro Samurai was adapted into an anime in 2007, before getting its own video game for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC a few years later, which scored a underwhelming 65 average on Metacritic. Why its producers decided to pursue a sequel for a mediocre game to begin with, let alone six years later, is anyone's guess, but many regard Afro Samurai 2 as the ultimate fail of 2015, with busted gameplay, bugs, inconsistent audio, and an absurd plot. The game was so bad that developer Versus Evil actually issued refunds to every single person who downloaded it as an apology.

Announced in 2011 and delayed throughout 2013 and 2014, Raven's Cry finally saw a release in 2015. The developers wanted to create a game with a more historically accurate portrayal of pirates, rather than the Johnny Depp-ification that they have taken on in recent years. Unfortunately, the game was released after Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, another pirate game that was critically acclaimed, so the comparisons were inevitable. In Raven's Cry, the dialogue audio is spotty, the scripting is universally regarded as embarrassing, and the button-mashing ends up being the only answer to a good ol' pirate fight. Raven's Cry isn't a cursed treasure—it's just booty.

Amiibos themselves aren't a terrible invention. Toys-to-life is a fun idea, and physical talismans that interact with your video games is the kind of thing that kids fantasized about in the '90s when video games were becoming a household thing, but Nintendo's amiibo line has had a terrible effect on video game culture. While they may have a bit of usefulness in games like Super Smash Bros., they're little more than $13 chunks of plastic micro-DLC, introducing an intense level of scalping to the video game economy. Nothing is worse than an adult whining because his first edition Pikachu amiibo isn't in mint condition with its original packaging intact. The figurine line is a cash cow for Nintendo, at the cost of the gamer's soul.

Since the controversies of the Grand Theft Auto series, we have seen plenty of titles awash in political debate, whether it's been about violence, art, sexism, or any other topic that might tangentially appear (or not appear enough) in a video game. While all of these are important discussions, the producers of Hatred, Destructive Creations, decided they just wanted to make a game that was violent and shocking for no reason other than to upset people—it's basically a mass shooting simulator that plays as a twin-stick shooter. Hatred is the perfect example to use for all the torch-carrying protesters who blindly believe that video games consist of nothing but mindless violence.

Doug TennApel's 1996 game Neverhood is an innovative classic in which you navigate a charming clay character through an awesome, quirky world backed by a weird but catchy soundtrack. When the same team announced a Kickstarter for a similar game, Armikrog, in 2013, old fans were psyched. Armikrog was released over a year late in 2015, and left fans wondering where the rest of the game was. A very short storyline, simplistic puzzles, limited use of talented voice actors, game-breaking bugs, and a soundtrack that would randomly decide to stop playing all left fans extremely disappointed—especially those who paid $100 on Kickstarter for barely an afternoon's worth of gaming. It's hard to think this came from the mind behind Earthworm Jim.

For many players, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater series is a very nostalgic part of gaming history, but its fifth entry smashed all of those warm memories with a wicked nosegrind. Even though the game included downloadable content where you could play as a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle, that wasn't enough to save it from an abysmal Metacritic score of 32. THPS5 was known for its boring environments, broken mechanics, poor button usage, dated graphics, and overall bugginess, making it one of the absolute worst games available in the PlayStation 4 library.

Unless you're a Kaiju enthusiast with an unfettered love for Godzilla (we are), his titular game for PS4 and PS3 is regarded as one of the worst games of 2015 according to North American gamers. On the other hand, the Godzilla game remains very popular in Japan, despite how horrible it is. While you can play as a huge number of Godzilla-related monsters, most critics noticed the title's substandard graphics, awkward controls, and extremely slow gameplay—but you're playing as a giant, lumbering monster, speed shouldn't be your first concern. Even the arcade classic Rampage seemed to capture Godzilla's essence better than this 2015 game did. Time for this green giant to head to the sea once more and not return to the video game medium until Japan is finally ready to care of one of its most iconic monsters.