In brief: The end of the year not only means a slew of Best of 2025 lists, but it also sees compilations of the worst that the last 12 months have brought. Much like Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 was the unsurprising GOTY winner at the Game Awards, Metacritic's worst title of 2025 is equally predictable: MindsEye.
Metacritic ranks its 10 worst games based on the lowest scores. The site explains that it excludes any titles with fewer than 4 reviews, and that the reviews must come from "professional critics."
For any titles that appear more than once due to being released on multiple platforms, only the lowest-scoring version is included. Also, user scores are not counted – only those from critics.
Here's the top ten:
10. Fast & Furious: Arcade Edition (45 Metascore)
8 (tie). QUByte Classics: Glover (44)
8 (tie). Scar-Lead Salvation (44)
7. Ambulance Life: A Paramedic Simulator (44)
6. Tamagotchi Plaza – Nintendo Switch 2 Edition (43)
5. Gore Doctor (40)
4. Spy Drops (39)
3. Blood of Mehran (38)
2. Fire Emblem Shadows (37)
1. MindsEye (28)
There are certainly plenty of turkeys on the list, many of which most people won't have heard of. But there's one that made plenty of headlines a few months ago. Yes, MindsEye is the worst game of the year based on Metacritic's score – and by a considerable margin.
There was a huge amount of hype surrounding MindsEye prior to its launch. Build A Rocket Boy and publisher IO Interactive promised 2025's biggest blockbuster. Being the brainchild of former Grand Theft Auto producer Leslie Benzies meant expectations that this would be a GTA-killer were high. Then it arrived.
The cascade of bad reviews, issues, bugs, and general erratic awfulness of the game led to refunds and universal mockery. The reason why the studio withheld advance review copies was laid bare.
That wasn't the end of the story. Just a month later, the number of people playing MindsEye fell below 20. The studio made layoffs as a result, and Benzies blamed the struggles on internal and external saboteurs, among other things.
MindsEye may be critics' worst reviewed game of the year, but it's only the second-worst based on Metacritic users' reviews. Players voted Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 as the worst of the bunch with a score of 1.6, making it one of the worst-reviewed games in Metacritic's history. Reviewers disagree: Black Ops 7's Metascore is a much more respectable 67.