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.

8 of 11 photo by Square Enix

41 #3: Babylon's Fall (PS5)

The highest-profile gaming dud of 2022—but somehow not quite the worst game of the year—Babylon's Fall is an all-new IP from Bayonetta studio PlatinumGames that blends RPG and hack-and-slash action in a fantasy world dominated by a giant tower. Reviews were ugly from the start—as ugly as Babylon's visuals, perhaps—and no one showed up to play it, resulting in an usually quick termination: The publisher is shutting down Babylon's servers on February 27, 2023, rendering the online-only game unplayable.

“From a dismal effort on the front of graphics, user interface, player onboarding, sound design, and essentially every other aspect of game design, Babylon’s Fall is a failure. Games have bounced back from disastrous launches in the past, but in this case, I feel like it may be best to let sleeping dogs lie. The game’s one and only saving grace is that Platinum Games truly are the kings of combat, and while Babylon’s Fall is nowhere near the top of their collection of works, hacking and slashing your way through the Tower of Babel is at least, occasionally, kind of fun. It is just a crying shame that there is very little else to enjoy from the game; there isn’t anything pretty to look at, nice to listen to, or easy to engage with." —Checkpoint Gaming

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