Metacritic has announced its ‘worst video games of 2023’

Review aggregation website Metacritic has revealed the 10 worst games of 2023, according to weighted average review scores from its approved critics.

Its list, which we’ve republished below, includes the lowest-scoring games released for any platform this year, ranked by Metascore prior to rounding, excluding titles with fewer than seven reviews.

A game can only appear on the list once, so if a given title would have made more than one appearance based on its poor reception on different platforms, only the lowest-scoring version has been included.

Topping the list is The Lord of the Rings: Gollum, a fantasy action adventure game developed by Daedalic Entertainment, which co-published the title with Nacon.

Taking place in parallel to the events described in The Fellowship of the Ring, it has an original story in which players embark on a quest to retrieve the One Ring.

The Guardian’s review labelled Gollum “a derivative, uninteresting and fundamentally broken stealth action adventure that fails to capture anything interesting about Tolkien’s fiction.”

“The Lord of the Rings: Gollum is a broken mess of a game… with outrageously dated level design, clunky controls, a severe lack of polish, muddy and unimpressive graphics, and a dull story”, according to Push Square.

And PCGamesN said: “From exhausting, repetitive gameplay to a poorly constructed narrative, this is a piece of Middle-earth you should never explore.”

Shortly after the game’s disastrous release in May, Daedalic announced that it was ending all internal development.

Other notable titles to make this year’s worst games list include Crime Boss: Rockay City, a star-studded co-op FPS set in the seedy underbelly of 90s Florida, and Flashback 2, which is a sequel to 1992’s science fiction classic.

Metacritic’s worst games of 2023

1. The Lord of the Rings: Gollum – 34
2. Flashback 2 – 35
3. Greyhill Incident – 38
4. Quantum Error – 40
5. Testament: The Order of High-Human – 41
6. Crime Boss: Rockay City – 43
7. Hellboy: Web of Wyrd – 47
8. Gangs of Sherwood – 48
9. Loop8: Summer of Gods – 49
10. Gargoyles Remastered – 49

Metacritic’s worst games of 2022 list was topped by Running with Scissors’ Postal 4: No Regerts, ahead of CrossfireX from Smilegate and Remedy, and Babylon’s Fall from Platinum Games and Square Enix.

Sony Interactive Entertainment topped Metacritic’s 13th annual Game Publisher Rankings, which was determined based on the quality of its releases last year.