Worst PC game I’ve ever bought was Lost Planet. It was billed as an fps game, and when I got it, I was greeted by the cast of an anime television show, and evil plants to fight on a frozen world. If I were into anime I’d maybe be okay with that, but my sense of fiction is different, and its having been billed as an fps felt misleading. I think most/many fps have some consistent character, at least a kind of maturity behind them, carrying a gun is indeed a serious matter. But this was designed for kids. No less it was an fps only if you wanted to change it to that point of view, and was really designed to be played in the third person. So I felt deceived in that way.
But that wasn’t the worst part. The worst part was the weird, ultra-horrible science attached to it. You’re given, early in the game, a volatile heat capacitor you wear on your arm. What am I talking about? You have this device that can process the chemical energy of organs that heat these mobile plants and convert them into energy with which you shoot laser blasts at them. I’m not usually one to nitpick about sci-fi elements that are unrealistic, but this was bad. First of all, transforming chemical energy is something we all do, by eating. Which means this apparatus is, “digesting” these things on your arm, then storing the heat (and yes, that’s what these organs produce, heat) in a compact form for you to shoot back at them to gather more organs. Now the storage of organic is done via fat for us, and organic energy is going to remain organic, unless your laser blaster can extract inorganic material from it that stores energy and takes a shit every now and again to get rid of the organic matter.
The laser the organic material is turned into something that can be fired off your arm, which means it’s volatile. Something that can store energy, and then dispense it at high power means the storage method which means you’re carrying around something on your arm that’s more or less an explosive. So you’ve got an organic energy processor that isn’t storing the highly volatile energy in a tiny package on your arm.
The science of it is so dubious that it just makes me furious. I don’t mind bending or breaking the rules, even badly, but it needs a little tiny bit of grounding to make it palatable. That and the anime/cartoon style of it in confluence made it into one of the worst games I’d ever played. Also, the controls blew a mule.
also, in it for Alan Wake.
So I guess if I have to pick one and only one (based on the following post) it would be Alan Wake.