It’seFootball2022
After deleting five instances of “Balan Wonderland,” I squinted at this “top 10 worst games of 2021” list. TheBalan WonderworldMetacritic rating was not #1!
No, that honor goes toeFootball 22on PC, which obtained a 25 Metascore, 10 lower than the lowest-ratedBalan Wonderworldport (Switch). For reference, on PC,eFootball 21obtained a decent 74 ratinglast year. So what went wrong? Free-to-play. Released in 2021, the game’s community and critics rebelled against the move to free-to-play, amid bugsand other issues, to the point where it was alsoone of the lowest-ranked games on Steamas well.
There aren’t too many surprises with the rest of the list outside of the late/recent addition ofGTA: The Trilogy – The Definitive Editiontaking the sixth overall spot late in the year (Switch was the worst-rated platform). The wholeBalan Wonderworldsaga is one of the saddest stories this list tells, as a lot of people were pretty excited for it, andthe dominos just kept falling constantly after launch. The fact that theBalan WonderworldMetacritic ranking isn’t #1 is kind of a shock, but when in doubt, you can always count on free-to-play to create a new bottom.
You can find the entire list below, including their ratings and the platform they were critiqued on. Here is their criteria in case you were curious: “[These are] the lowest-scoring games released for any platform between Jul 27, 2025 and June 20, 2025. Games are ranked by Metascore (as of August 05, 2025) prior to rounding, and any titles with fewer than 7 reviews from professional critics are excluded. 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.”
