Look, not all games can be great. In fact, many of them are not good, and some are not even just okay. If you’re looking for all things good and great, check out our list of the best-rated games of 2025. But unfortunately, that’s not where they live. No, it’s my job here to remind you of all the worst games we’ve played this year. Those that didn’t quite live up to expectations and received a rating of five or less from IGN reviewers. You may actually like some of them and that’s why I say, all the power to you. Let us know which games on this list you really enjoy playing in the comments. But before you scroll all the way down, let’s talk about IGN’s worst-rated games of 2025.
5 – Average
What better way to start than with a welcome tour? Or, more specifically, the Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Show. A collection of mini-games and digital museum displays designed to give you a better idea of the technology powering your modern Nintendo console, this one just committed a cardinal sin by Nintendo standards – it just wasn’t fun. Our review described this “interactive booklet” as “a confusing collection of odd technology demonstrations and boring facts.” Not the best way to get everyone excited about a modern generation of hardware, right? And it wasn’t even included with the console. Purchasing it yourself is not the best way to get a modern version of the digital manual.
At least the technology presented in Welcome Tour is impressive, which unfortunately cannot be said about Kaiserpunk. City Builder, which unfortunately suffered from stern performance issues at launch, ranging from “massive save bugs” to an interface lacking “fairly basic functionality,” provided an unreliable foundation for building any metropolis. If a fully-built sci-fi city is more your thing, you might be tempted by Steel Seed, an action platform dripping with neon lights. But when we tell you that it’s actually a “stealth action game cursed with mediocrity,” you might be less interested. Hence the rating of five out of ten, which IGN translates as “average.” Along those lines, if “30 average hours of dodging and sword swinging” sounds appealing, it might be worth checking out AI Limit. Soulless, this one simply lacked the creativity one would hope for in a genre that has become quite overdone these days.
And speaking of souls, Lost Soul Aside was a hotly anticipated PlayStation exclusive release this summer, which unfortunately didn’t quite live up to expectations. While it featured plenty of stimulating fights, unfortunately the “repetitive story, derivative characters, and lackluster level design” couldn’t support it. Another game that suffered from a replayability violation was Full Metal Schoolgirl, which you might not immediately consider a flaw given that it’s an action roguelike – a genre based on constantly striving for the same goals – but when you hear that “after a few games you’ve seen almost everything,” that’s not ideal.
The feeling that we’ve seen it all before is exactly why we gave Battlefield 6 campaign also a five-star result. As our shockingly handsome reviewer said, the single-player offering is “a safe and boring reimagining of what Battlefield used to be, not a bold reinvention of what it could be,” and I, for one, agree with him. It’s a compact string of missions that doesn’t involve the chaos that naturally ensues in Battlefield 6 multiplayer, but rather feels like a relic from a bygone era of FPS gaming. We also gave this year’s Call of Duty Black Ops 7 campaign a less-than-stellar score, but it’s not far off this list because we gave it a 6 because it at least tries to do something modern, even if it’s not very successful.
Now we move on to remastering, rebooting and rethinking some of the proceedings. Yooka-Replayee intended to bring the 2017 original into the state-of-the-art age with some tweaks, but while improvements were made, we felt that “none of the changes made are enough to bring it closer to modern 3D platformer standards.” Double revival of the dragon tried to breathe modern life into the classic side-scrolling fighting game, but ended up feeling “less of a miraculous resurrection and more of an exhumation of a moving corpse.” Similar things can be said about Painkiller, a reboot of 2004 cult favorite People Can Fly that once again fell compact, instead playing like “a mediocre revival of a classic trying to put a new cover on an old book in the hopes that it will still have some relevance 21 years later.” The Shadow Maze at least I tried to take something incredibly aged and do something modern with it. Unfortunately, this abrasive Metroidvania version of Pac-Man was deemed “largely boring” and featured offenses ranging from “annoying checkpoints to one-note fighting.”
There are plenty of checkpoints in racing games. Sorry, this is the best segue I have for this. Car racing project is the latest game we have on our list to receive a rating of five or lower because it failed to excite our reviewer, who stated that “there are certainly flashes of a competent racing sim here, but it is drastically unfinished.” At the other end of the racing spectrum was Wreckreation, not in terms of quality, as it also received an A, but for its very “arcade” approach to four-wheel operation. Unfortunately, it just didn’t reach the heights that Burnout inspired. Instead, “brimmed with ambition but ultimately simple and lacking in style, Wreckreation feels like a supermarket brand paying homage to a series of better arcade games.”
Now let’s move over to the fantasy corner and take a look at the sword swinging games that weren’t keen enough this year. Yasha: Legends of the Demon Blade is another action roguelite that will be released in 2025, but which failed to make much of an impression thanks to “repetitive levels and a poor story.” Blades of Fire took an intriguing approach to third-person action, emphasizing the creation of custom swords through an elaborate blacksmithing process, which was admittedly quite good, but “overly simplistic combat and a mediocre story mean it doesn’t forge a sharp enough edge to put its customizable weapons to good use.” Finally, Game of Thrones: Kingsroad rounds out our list of games that received a five from IGN this year. A micro-transaction-laden interpretation of George RR Martin’s world that recreates HBO’s visual style while impressively done, it’s unfortunately hampered by “an overly tedious pay-to-win live service model, and both combat and house management are too boring to keep things interesting in their own right.”
4 – Bad
Moving on to games that are rated a four, which equates to “bad,” on IGN’s review scale, let’s stick with another beloved work of fantasy literature that struggles to make good video game adaptations. Tales of the Shire: The Lord of the Rings game was an attempt to “cosify” Tolkien’s world and asked the age-old question: “What if Animal Crossing but not Hobbits?” Unfortunately, the answer was a resounding “no” as we described it as “a promising idea that turned out to be terribly boring and incredibly flawed.”
Probably no other game has launched with such a bang as MindsEye in 2025. The brainchild of former GTA creator Leslie Benzies, this third-person action-adventure game was not only incredibly monotonous, but also overstepped. Sure, viewed from a very specific, narrow perspective, it looked like a blockbuster, but overall it didn’t live up to any expectations. “MindsEye’s brilliant graphics and videos cannot hide its serious lack of content and serious performance issues,” reads our review, which tells you everything you need to know.
To summarize, we have several early access games that we have rated four this year. These include Hyper Light Breaker, which we described as “a roguelite that currently feels extremely light in content and the wrong kind of break,” and La Quimera, “an FPS version of the direct-to-video film, with dialogue that is both poorly written and poorly acted, with mediocre combat and an unfinished campaign.” Then there was EA’s reboot of Skate, whom we called “a faithful replica of the amazing atmosphere of the old games, but its advancement in mobile gaming style, unwarped dialogue and charming art style make its Early Access debut drastically inferior to the originals in every other respect.” Unfortunately for Hyper Light Breaker, similar reactions from both other critics and gamers ultimately led to developer Heart Machine ending development of the game. As for the other two, they’re still developing projects, so hopefully these games will fix their issues and be more fun in 2026, in the run-up to their full release.
And that’s it, all the games that got a five or four out of ten on IGN this year. Believe it or not, nothing actually scored worse, so I’m ecstatic to say there are no twos or threes to report this year. Did you really like any of the games mentioned here? Let us know in the comments. For more information, check out the top-rated games of 2025 and our game of the year awards.
Simon Cardy is a senior editor at IGN who can mostly be found hanging around open-world games, watching Korean cinema, or moping about the state of Tottenham Hotspur and the New York Jets. Follow him on Bluesky at @cardy.bsky.social.
