These Were The Worst PS4 Games Of 2020

With the PS5 dropping last month, 2020 was the last hurrah for the PS4. And based on this year's releases, the console got a worthy send-off. Titles like The Last of Us Part 2, Ghosts of Tsushima, and Assassin's Creed: Valhalla gave us plenty of ways to kill time while we've been cooped up indoors. 

But as with every year, PS4 saw its share of duds in 2020. And not all video game duds are created equal. Some games are too ambitious for their own good and fail to live up to their ideas. With other duds, it's like they didn't even try to give the player a one-of-a-kind experience. This year's PS4 duds are definitely in the latter category.

There are still plenty of great PS4 games available to make it easier to hold off on dropping five hundos on the next-gen console. But these games are not among them. Here are three 2020 PS4 releases you'll want to avoid, based on their Metacritic scores.

Dawn of Fear is the rare modern console release that didn't get its own Wikipedia page, and that should tell you something. Its developer, the Spanish studio Brok3nsite, tried to make a survival horror game that harkens back to the roots of the genre and games like Resident Evil or Alone in the Dark. It has all the necessary ingredients: zombie shootin', scare ammunition, fixed camera angles that make the player feel trapped, and plenty of puzzle solving. Dawn of Fear didn't try to reinvent the wheel, but if you already love old-school horror, sometimes you just want more of the same.

So, if a game is going to return to the roots of a genre that's been successful for decades without adding anything new, it really has no excuse to screw up the basics. But Dawn of Fear just couldn't execute. Critics complained about numerous immersion-breaking bugs. Rooms are full of levitating texture chunks, the interface is unwieldy, the guns don't shoot where you aim them, and so on. That wouldn't fly on PS2, much less PS4.

Video games based on the Fast & Furious movie franchise don't have the strongest, uh, track record, (sorry), so expectations were low when this title dropped in May 2020. On paper, Fast & Furious Crossroads had a chance to be at least solid. It featured a star voice-acting cast led by franchise mainstays Vin Diesel, Michelle Rodriguez, and Tyrese Gibson, as well as Sonequa Martin-Green and Peter Stormare. It was also developed by racing game specialist Slightly Mad Studio, which is responsible for the Project CARS racing sim franchise.

But this game can't quite figure out which genre it's in. It's partly a racing game, but it involves hardly any actual racing. Instead, the player mostly completes a series of repetitive scripted stunt sequences. It's partly an action RPG, but it offers no open world and limited opportunities to customize the character or their stats. Fast & Furious fans might be willing to forgive those sins if the story were killer, but the plot is tepid and mainly focuses on newcomer Sonequa Martin-Green's character. It's now clear why this game had almost no marketing campaign and why no advance copies were sent out to reviewers.

If a game company remakes a 2003 title in 2020, the 2020 version should be at least as good as the original. But the XIII remake on PS4 failed to clear even this very low bar. The original XIII was more of a cult classic than a hall-of-famer. But if you were willing to overlook the straightforward fps gameplay and awkward controls, you could at least enjoy the game's unique art style. Based on a 1984 Belgian graphic novel of the same name, the original XIII used saturated colors and cel-shaded textures to make it feel like you were playing a 3D comic book. Visually, it's not unlike a Telltale Games choose-your-own adventure title. Plus, the lead voice actor was David Duchovny.

But while the 2020 remake from publisher Microids kept the good from the original, it also kept the bad. The guns still feel clumsy and awkward and don't even include an auto-reload feature when the player runs out of bullets. There's still a lack of variety in available weapons. The A.I. is still hilariously inept. At this point, you'd be better off with the original, or even the graphic novel.