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.

9 of 11 photo by Smilegate

38 #2: CrossfireX (Xbox Series X)

The latest entry in the globally popular 15-year-old shooter franchise, the Xbox-exclusive Crossfire X found publisher Smilegate enlisting Remedy Entertainment (of Alan Wake fame) to deepen Crossfire's story and create a single-player campaign alongside Smilegate's own multiplayer portion, released as a free-to-play title like its predecessors. And how did that go? (Checks Metascore ...) Oh my. PlayStation owners: You're not missing much.

“CrossFireX gets little to nothing right, and I don’t take pleasure in saying that. On a technical level, yeah the graphics and framerate and such aren’t bad, but you won’t get to enjoy them because I think you’ll be too distracted with all of the other problems in the game. Voice-acting, the script, the AI, controls, story-telling, the intensely lazy and generic feel of it all, the push for microtransactions — the game is asking players to overlook or otherwise deal with too much. Now, I am an optimistic and forgiving person by nature, but what SmileGate, Remedy, and Microsoft have done here is absolutely regrettable. This game has issues that even patching cannot fix, and I’m typically the first one to point out that games can often be much improved by patching. CrossFireX, though, has problems that run too deep and too broad — and I can’t recommend this game to anyone." —Digital Chumps

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