The 10 Worst Video Games of 2022

by Jason Dietz, Metacritic Features Editor – December 13, 2022

The gallery on this page ranks the lowest-scoring games released for any platform between January 1, 2022 and December 31, 2022. Games are ranked by Metascore (as of December 12, 2022) prior to rounding, and any titles with fewer than 7 reviews from professional critics are excluded. (In other words, these bad games are all major enough to get reviews from multiple publications.)

If a single title would have landed on the list multiple times due to low scores on more than one platform, we only included the lowest-scoring version.

3 of 11 photo by Gato Salvaje Studio

51 #8: The Waylanders (PC)

An RPG with real-time combat set in two different eras in Galicia, this PC exclusive from Spanish studio Gato began as a Kickstarter project that cited Dragon Age: Origins and Baldur's Gate as inspirations. But The Waylanders didn't come anywhere near the heights established by those titles, as a buggy launch turned into ... well, a game that remains buggy to this day.

"The Waylanders tries to imitate a variety of mechanics from leaders of the RPG genre, but fails to implement any of them effectively, while offering nothing original apart from the astonishingly poor dialogue." —New Game Network

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