With all the amazing releases 2017 brought us, there were bound to be some Xbox One titles that failed to hit the mark – and were unlucky enough to be deemed some of the worst games of 2017. Sorry to the following games and their developers – but why don’t we all take this list of the very worst Xbox One games of 2017 as some good-natured constructive criticism, yeah?
Firefighters – The Simulation
We are starting off with a bang! A bang of glitches and bugs that are so game-breaking they ruin your childhood fantasy of being a firefighter – and you have to admit that you did have such a fantasy. We all did.
But fighting invisible fires doesn’t really appeal to Xbox One gamers, nor do the graphics that would only just be tolerable a few console generations ago. It speaks so much of the truth of the poorness of Firefighters – The Simulation that fighting an invisible fire was one of the highlights in the extremely monotonous, repetitive gameplay found within.
Sometimes you would be left to investigate chemical spills, or given the chance to control a robot. Surely that is fun? A robot! But alas, the robot handled terribly and overall Firefighters – The Simulation crashed into our ‘worst games’ pile on Xbox One, banished to the back of our minds. At least, we are trying to forget it, but playing a game with the equivalent of N64 graphics on Xbox One is mentally scarring, to say the least.
At least it couldn’t get any worse, right?
Firefighters: Airport Fire Department
Well, the similarly disappointing Firefighters: Airport Fire Department certainly makes a good shout for being worse.
This time round you are living the high life of an airport fireman, patiently waiting for a call-out and heroically taking your vehicle out to save the day, putting out plane fires and smaller scale incidents. I say patiently, because out of your 24 hour shift, just four hours of which is allocated to sleep, you will receive about five to six callouts, spending the rest of your time filling up your vehicles with petrol, checking for holes in the perimeter fence and wondering why on Earth you are playing this and not something better.
Again, proceedings look like they have come straight from the N64, and the gameplay is far from stellar – think non-existent and self-extinguishing fires and you are close to Firefighters: Airport Fire Department. The only positive is the surprisingly satisfying siren, but this speaks volumes of the actual quality of the game.
You have to hand it to them, the developers at United Independent Entertainment have realistically recreated the tedious life of an airport firefighter… but something tells me that wasn’t quite their intentions.
Deer Hunter Reloaded
Any person who has actually gone hunting will, in short, be pretty disappointed with the hunting experience Deer Hunter Reloaded brings.
For starters, upon booting up the game you might be surprised to be playing on an Xbox One and not an earlier console, given the poor and almost laughable graphics. When you are exploring one of the small hunting areas you are given, you are only allowed to stick to the path, and straying from the track results in a ten second timer forcing you to go back. I’m no hunting expert, but I would think limited movement would not allow your hunting prowess to be at its best.
When it actually comes to pulling that trigger on an animal it appears your character has had one too many in the pub prior to the hunt, swaying back and forth and holding your breath for only a second or two. This all makes it an unnecessary struggle to get a good shot, but sometimes you may shoot and the game deems the shot to impact somewhere completely different to where you think it went. At times you could even shoot a deer through the heart and it won’t go down. Again I’m no expert, but I think deer need their heart intact to live.
On every hunting trip it is also good to take a shotgun with you, as many predators will be attempting to accost you, such as Mountain Lions and Wolves, but minimal noise is made from any animal, and the only positive from the audio department is in the firing of the guns – but then again this is only decent at best.
If you are looking for a hunting experience on Xbox One, then I wholeheartedly recommend theHunter: Call of the Wild over Deer Hunter Reloaded, as it is better in pretty much every way.
Road Rage
The name of the game in Road Rage is to drive and kill, amid multiple races and challenges – all played out across a bleak and empty open-world.
Whilst the various bikes are fun to drive, and customizing and upgrading them is also quite in depth, the main problem lies in the way the weak storyline is told via cellphone text messages or phone calls, constantly popping up whenever you complete a mission. Having strangely narrated messages and subtitled calls quickly becomes a confusing hindrance more than a unique way of adding depth and meaning to your violent explosion-fuelled racing.
The number of glitches are also much of an annoyance. And we are not talking just simple glitches here either – we are talking game breakers which will get you extremely frustrated. You might well find the game forcing you to redo a mission, due to failure – even though you have finished in first place. The loading screens are also far from great, adding to the frustrations.
One of the main draws of Road Rage is the ability to engage in combat while racing, attacking and throwing off other motorcyclists during the event. However doing this usually results in your bike going up in a plume of smoke!
So what has Road Rage got going for it? Well, good driving and good bikes are about it – with nearly everything else coming across as unnecessary. The open-world draws away from the story, the cellphone messages and calls are plain annoying, and the combat is null and void. Charging £20 for this game is nothing short of a crime.
Tango Fiesta
When I first got my hands on Tango Fiesta at a games show a few years ago, I have to say it was a pretty fun experience. Sure, it had a few major kinks to iron out, but this is normal with an unreleased game.
Fast-forward to May 2017 and the premise of merging absurd 1980s action movies into one game seemed exciting, seeing a range of characters and weapons letting you blast your enemies into the next decade. The problem? Developers Spilt Milk and Merge Games hadn’t got over their glitch related problems, making Tango Fiesta more frustrating than frantic fun.
On numerous occasions the visuals just gave up and we were left staring at a black hole on the screen, whilst at other times the waves of enemies just didn’t turn up for work. It’s all well and good having grenades and machine guns, but if there is nobody to use them on there is no point in bringing them along. The story was also quite complicated, but thankfully some of the many jokes managed to land – which is a plus. Just.
And even if Tango Fiesta wasn’t bug ridden, the basic graphics, low difficulty, dumb randomly shooting AI, unreliable weapon swapping and simple eight-direction shooting mechanic still leaves us wondering what could have been. At least we had some decent multiplayer action (when no glitches were lurking around), a range of weapons, fun audio and Arnie references to enjoy. There isn’t much else to enjoy in Tango Fiesta though.
2017 has been a great year for gaming, but the five titles listed above are certainly not that. If you’re wanting to buy yourself a new game, then check out our favourite games from 2017 (or indeed our most prized Indie titles) – just make sure you keep away from the ones listed in this article, yeah?
Don’t forget to let us know your thoughts and views by posting in the comments below. Have we missed some utter rubbish out? We’d love to hear from you.
