Metacritic has shared a list of the games with the lowest critic scores in 2024. This year’s “winner” may come as a surprise to most users, especially given that it is a sudden re-release of a little-known first-person shooter from the 2000s.
Utopia City
According to Metacritic, its ranking now takes into account games with at least four reviews instead of the previous seven. Here’s how the company explained the change: “For our best lists, we have a higher cutoff, but we think relaxing the requirements here makes for a more fun worst list. We also opened the list up to mobile and VR releases, DLC, and compilations.”
Below are the 10 worst-rated games of 2024 on Metacritic:
- Utopia City (PC) — 23/100;
- Devil May Cry: Peak of Combat (mobile) — 41/100;
- HappyFunland (PlayStation VR2) — 41/100;
- Food Truck Simulator (Xbox One) — 43/100;
- Jujutsu Kaisen: Cursed Clash (PlayStation 5) — 44/100;
- Stranger Things VR (Meta Quest) — 44/100;
- Transformers: Galactic Trials (PlayStation 5) — 45/100;
- PO’ed: Definitive Edition (PC) — 46/100;
- Looney Tunes: Wacky World of Sports (PlayStation 5) — 47/100;
- Metal Slug Attak Reloaded (Nintendo Switch) — 48/100.
What is Utopia City?
Utopia City is a first-person shooter developed by Russian team Parallax Arts Studio and originally released in December 2005. It was rather a mediocre game in the genre that was popular among Eastern European devs at the time. What’s more interesting is the history of the studio and its funding.
Parallax Arts Studio, whose development team was based in Saint Petersburg, was financed by Russian businessman Mikhail Bazhenov, founder of Adamant Holding Company. Having made a fortune in the commercial real estate sector, he wanted to diversify his portfolio and invest in new areas like video games.
As Russian video game magazine Igromania reported in 2011, Bazhenov actively gave money to Parallax Arts Studio for seven years without really delving into the operations or the feasibility of using funds. The studio’s management, for its part, overstated the costs — for example, they needed $400k just to write a design document.
Between 2005 and 2007, Parallax Arts released three games, Utopia City, Liquidator 2: Welcome to Hell, and Exodus from the Earth. None of them found commercial success, leaving Bazhenov with losses.
In 2008, he thought he had enough and ordered an audit of the company’s operations. It was performed with the help of the late Andrey Kuzmin, a prominent Russian developer best known for his work on games like Vangers and Perimeter. The audit revealed that the studio’s main goal was not to ship projects, but to convince creditors and shareholders that game development should take years.
There was also a leaked video of Bazhenov scolding Parallax Arts’ management before finally closing the studio. It turned out that the leadership had been deceiving investors, and the team itself was largely mismanaged and disorganized despite having some talented developers on it.
It seemed that Utopia City had also sunk into oblivion, but the game suddenly launched on Steam on November 20, 2024. It currently only has two reviews on the platform, and there are just five reviews on Metacritic (most of them are related to the original version). So it appears that publisher Strategy First simply decided to digitally release some older titles from its catalog (Utopia City isn’t the only game from the company to recently appear on Valve’s store).