Modern Combat 5 delivers a shocking blow right after you launch the campaign as it turns out to be a hack job. Instead of traditional levels peppered with checkpoints and scripted cinematics as in previous MC games, you’re treated to a poor man’s version of Dead Trigger.

For the second year in the row, Activision, like a crafty snake oil peddler, pushes ‘a next-gen Call of Duty’ by replacing developers, locations and characters. Goodbye, German cyber-shepherd, orbital kinetic missiles and a crazy Venezuelan dictator. Hello, exoskeletons, holograms and a corporate megalomaniac played by Kevin Spacey. But the glitzy CG cinematics and sweet PR songs hide the stale 10-year old gameplay formula.

Coldwood Interactive changed a lot of things in the sequel, but somehow failed to add more variety or make puzzles less trivial.

Obduction is a good-looking, mysterious, boring, annoying, sadistic adventure game that doesn't give a damn if you're having fun or not.

The developers of Lost Chronicles of Zerzura have Mata Hari and two Black Mirror sequels under their belt already, but this game is an adventure in the same way as a blueprint is an airplane.

Random chance plays a huge role in Armello, and the players rarely interact with each other. It is interesting to discover new strategies at first, but soon, after you stumble upon the optimal winning strategy, you realize that there is nothing more to do. The multiplayer lacks variety (just one mode without any settings), and the single player is just same, only with AI bots.

Jazzpunk is an equivalent of an avant-garde show – it doesn’t have a story or even a point to it. It’s nothing more than a collection of rejected ideas.

If Ubisoft believes that this is a successful attempt at experimental gameplay, I shudder to think of what their failures look like.

It feels like they conceived this game on a remote island or in a fallout shelter; it is absolutely devoid of any modern ideas, but offers many wild mutations of outdated ones.

A soulless Portal copycat built around a cool gameplay mechanic, which would have flourished in a game by Double Fine or Valve. Superliminal has more originality than other copycats (see The Bradwell Conspiracy), but it’s absolutely devoid of substance and leaves you indifferent.

Finally, there is a game that I can safely describe as “Even Hotline Miami was better!”

If you're lifting ideas from other games, you should at least try to hit their level of quality, otherwise it's a waste of time and resources. Regalia is a frustratingly simple exercise in micromanagement with colorful characters and passable writing which only seems like a serious strategy game.

A stellar example of a game that is totally not worth your time. No one will reward you for suffering through ho-hum gameplay with a well-crafted story, and there is not enough humor to make up for all the flaws.

There is no tactics, no strategy, no diversity, and, unfortunately, almost no similarities with the brilliant FTL.

A disgustingly average game not worthy of being a Leisure Suit Larry adventure. You have to get drunk if you want to squeeze any fun out of it.

By removing all the appealing elements of prison stories (colorful characters, daring escape plans as well as dangers and hardships of incarceration), the developers turned this virtual prison into its real-life equivalent — a punishment.

Even though the developers use the word ‘communication’ three times when describing their game, it doesn’t require you to communicate much. If you want to really test your teamwork skills, try a board game called Hanabi or Left 4 Dead on maximum difficulty.

A mindless, clunky, tedious, boring, and difficult for the sake of difficulty game.

Cold, formulaic gameplay sucks all the enjoyment from this game’s amazing, incredibly moving story.

Nearly every scene of Dead Synchronicity: Tomorrow Comes Today makes you want to dive headfirst into your facepalm.

A primitive adventure in all regards, complete with bad writing, poor puzzle design, and 10 years old graphics. It’s absolutely helpless.

Beyond: Two Souls is nothing more than a movie where they occasionally allow you to press some buttons and advance the story. The shallow, banal, cliche-ridden story drags on, and on, and on...

A boring, dumb, predictable game. You can’t find worse qualities in a game that’s all about choices and consequences.

Amazing storms is probably the only feature of Jurassic World Evolution worthy of a praise — they are always a joy to behold. The rest of the game is a powerful sedative capable of knocking out a T-Rex.

In Warhammer: Chaosbane, there is only dull combat. Use two or three favorite abilities to kill hordes of same-looking enemies, marvel at bad animations and identical corridors, and try not to lose your mind. Even cooperative mode, which usually makes everything better, is a boring chore.

This updated version of Shadowgate is astonishingly close to the original game, but it is not a merit. The developers were high on nostalgia, and they ended up reanimating a decomposed corpse.

IMR is just too short to be enjoyable. It desperately needs online multiplayer and at least a simple level editor.

Stranger of Paradise is a parody of the Final Fantasy series. Problem is, it was not conceived that way, and the more you play, the less funny it gets. At the same time, it’s buggy, ugly and dull through and through.

Neverending Nightmares is a heavily scripted walk through a weird museum rather than a game. Even encountering monsters feels mundane here.

Since the announcement, I was wondering how Frozenbyte would tackle a whole lot of problems that arise with the introduction of a third dimension, and adapt a previously one-plane gameplay to the new reality. The answer drove me into an abyss of desperation: they did nothing.

The difference between playing A Golden Wake and browsing through a screenshots gallery is that screenshots scroll faster.

It does remind of Prey… if you remove mimics, compelling story, freedom of exploration, shrink the station to one module and cut the length to 1/6th. Archaic and primitive, Deliver Us the Moon fails to surprise, and it’s a death knell for any self-respecting sci-fi adventure.

The weakest first-person shooter in the history of DICE. Even, by some miracle, the studio manages to fix the most glaring mistakes and reanimate the abysmal netcode, this game will not become Battlefield at its core.

The ending serves as a bridge to a possible 5th installment, but it’s going to be just as bad unless the developers reinvent the series. The "entertain yourself" approach to the open world ran out of steam a long time ago, campaign missions are going downhill fast, and the amount of bugs has skyrocketed.

Announce as many cool things as possible, then, while everyone is distracted by flashy trailers, swap the actual game with a hardly playable dummy. Looks like The Masterplan itself is a con.

A beautiful, unnecessarily protracted, empty shell of a game.

In an attempt to recapture Studio Ghibli’s magic, the creators of Encodya put a lot of effort in amazing visuals, composed excellent music, hired great voiceover actors, and… botched narrative and game design. Without them, Encodya fails on both counts, as a fairytale and a game.

The soundtrack is the only good thing in the new Rise of the Triad.

There are two sides to one’s experience playing Skyshine’s Bedlam. You either feel bewildered when you lose another character in a seemingly unavoidable catastrophe, or grind away, repeating the same routing over and over again. And there is no gameplay between these sides.

The game quickly loses steam, even though at first it seems fun, and its retro-futuristic design is charming throwback to fan-favorite movies of the 70s and 80s. Unfortunately, the monotony inevitably leads to boredom as the game has nothing to challenge you with except to repeat the same few actions over and over.

The Park feels like a typical soulless tie-in game, only it promotes a MMORPG instead of a summer movie.

This Frankenstein’s monster disguised as an adventure game is a clear example of how its creators do not understand what humor, storytelling or gameplay is. At first, you blame the cultural barrier between Japan and the Western world. Then you think that Access Games is trolling us. Finally, you realize that this is just interactive gibberish created by talentless hacks.

A pointless new edition of a shoddy game. Even if you’re a fan of Remnant: From the Ashes, you’d be better off just watching the ending on YouTube.

The only tangible addition to this iteration is the boring, half-baked Pro Cyclist mode.

I hope that there is a special place in hell for the those who made this train-wreck.

In Sunset, Tale of Tales decided to construct something that looks like a traditional game instead of their usual half-abstract interactive installations, and then it became clear – oh my God, these people have no talent for making games at all.

Different drawing style and monk-like garments of the main villain, which caused a stir among fans before the game’s release, are actually the least of its problems.

An unfinished prototype of a game featuring lots of messed-up gameplay elements and too many ambitions.

An overly ambitious, tedious, shockingly short game.

A potato-based space odyssey with an ever-increasing degree of frustration.

Even the Halo brand can’t save Spartan Strike with its short linear levels, long boring shootouts with dumb enemies and a silly story.

Whatever its original concept was, Albedo fails as both shooter and adventure.

Forge is an orphan of a game, with lonely players stalking its empty servers. It is, in fact, not even a game, but just a prototype of one.

The world of Cradle is huge and beautiful, but oh so ludicrously empty.

In Unrest, the player is just a spectator. The characters you play cannot change a thing about the world, and it is incredibly disappointing.

A good original concept turned into a surprisingly boring adventure with a paper-thin plot and simplistic puzzles.

A completely derivative, mouldy, boring hack job created by a once renowned studio. Looks like the hero of Risen 3 is not the only one who lost his soul.

This is a game for hardcore Star Trek fans who are not afraid of grand strategies and don't know how to play Stellaris with mods.

Introversion Software’s DEFCON is cheaper and way better than this one.

Telltale’s Game of Thrones is a bad-looking, dumb, predictable drama. It has some powerful moments, but compared to the show and the books, this is nothing more than a farce.

If the developers catered less to fans of dumb teen-oriented anime and tried to make their game more PC-friendly, I would have given it a better score. Because the combat system here is excellent.

In 2013, Deconstructeam entered a Ludum Dare competition with a bare bones concept of a game. Now, a year later, this game has a price tag, but it’s bare just as it was back then.

In an attempt to please all kinds of strategy players by adding city building, trading and wars, Grand Ages: Medieval miserably fails on all accounts.

Story is the worst nightmare in Kholat. I expected supernatural stuff, maybe dark sci-fi, or some evil KGB agenda… But the writers took all these three plot ideas, then added parallel worlds, secret objects and cruel science experiments. This is the most absurd and eclectic mishmash of themes I have ever seen in a horror game that tries to look serious.

This awful strategy game is not worthy of even a single playthrough neither on PC, nor on tablets.

Awful game design meets nonsensical story. Oh, and rivers of blood.

Strafe is not even close to the real first-person shooters of the 90s. If it were released in 1996, it would've died a quick death at the hands of its more polished rivals.

A mediocre melodrama, awkwardly written into a shoddy walking simulator, its few bright ideas are poorly fleshed out and ultimately destroyed with a rubbish ending.

Encyclopedia is the only decent thing about Space Program Manager, but the truly best part is not even in the game. The manual appendices have detailed descriptions of both US and USSR space programs, and even an interview with Buzz Aldrin himself. They should have published a book instead of a game, really.

Bladeslinger looks stunning, but the gameplay is just as rotten as the monsters you have to kill.

Warsaw looks nice, but it’s the substance that matters. The developers lifted pretty much everything from Darkest Dungeon, but failed to adapt those mechanics to suit the needs of a completely different story.

Weak story is the worst thing in Neon Struct, complete with two-dimensional characters, huge plot holes, and bad writing.

Morningstar reminded me of the movie Red Planet starring Val Kilmer: a promising beginning, a speck an intrigue in the middle and a devastating disappointment in the end.

The Old City: Leviathan is good only for one thing. Leave it running on your computer and go to sleep. Let your friends think that you’re philosophizing all night long.

It all boils down to this: One Piece is just not a fun beat-‘em-up game.

Even though the game’s weak attempts at humor work better when you play it with friends, compared to Magicka, Legend of Dungeon is still a snoozefest.

Whenever developers turn to surrealism while making a video game, they sometimes forget that their goal is to produce an actual playable game rather than a bunch of psychedelic paintings. Dali Games fell into this trap while working on its debut adventure Lucid Dream.

To some extent, Urban Empire is a game that plays itself. Buildings grow higher and higher, factories crop up on empty plots, citizens open up new shops - all without your input. It could've been a fun zen experience, but everything is artificial and lifeless, and, despite milktoast graphics, the game at times is too sluggish.

Yet again, Rebellion surprised me. I mean, you have to have a very special talent to turn team-based zombie killing into a chore.

Portal was stylish. The Talos Principle let us enjoy its scenery. Magnetic is dark, dull and unfriendly.

As an introduction to old-school classics, Evoland is just too boring, and most veterans are not that nostalgic to blindly forgive its shoddy attempts at game design.

Even the cooperative mode can't smooth out the many bumps of Tempest.

You don’t have to think about tactics in Combat, not really – just shoot to kill and watch your six. Forget territory control, since there are no strategic points except your HQ. Faultline Games also designed 5 new maps, added a couple of assault rifles, reworked the interface a bit… and that’s about it. Since you don’t need to own the original Natural Selection 2 to play Combat, and the two games are actually incompatible, the developers nearly fragmented their tightly-knit community. But fans did not fall for the bait – Combat’s servers have been almost empty since day one.

Conglomerate 451 repeats itself ad nauseum: 75 missions will take you on a journey through 6 small maps filled with murderous women in kilts and goons in sweatpants. The developers did try to randomize levels, but could not hide the lack of variety.

A low budget horror — in all senses of the word.

It’s a good thing that Subject 13 is astonishingly short, otherwise we could have had another Moebius on our hands. The game could have won people over with its story, but the writer had given up halfway through, and the rest is just not worth your time.

Amongst the many sins of Mars: War Logs, the total lack of originality is the worst one.

There is nothing even remotely decent about this game; wherever you look, you’re bound to find only glaring mistakes.

A corny, simplistic zombie shooter, which also doubles as a collection of all the genre clichés.

This Jagged Alliance is bad, but not to the point that it incites rage. Play, uninstall and forget. It’s not rage, more like… apathy.

Aside from (mostly useless) experiments with weaponry, The Weaponographist has nothing going for it.

God Mode feels like a free-to-play game that somehow got released without a trace of microtransactions. If you want to kill tons of monsters in co-op, better get Serious Sam 3: BFE.

1954: Alcatraz is the worst game ever produced by Daedalic Entertainment. Thankfully, unlike professional video games reviewers, you can simply ignore this nightmare.

Kyn seems colorful and promising at first, but in reality it’s unbalanced, derivative and downright boring.

The moment when Space Hulk loses its charm, is two to three missions in, when you suddenly realize that you’ve already seen everything this game has to offer.

Neither Omega Force, nor the series were ready to handle so many changes at once. Dynasty Warriors 9 disappoints wherever you look, from performance issues and dumb stealth to ugly cinematics and boring open world.

Right now, Little Misfortune is at the top of my personal list of bitter disappointments of 2019. I would have overlooked many of its flaws, if it were just a pilot episode in a series. Alas, this is a finished product.

Armikrog copies and pastes itself several times during the game. 25% of content is original, the rest is just repetitions. You will see identical rooms, chains of actions and even puzzles.