Lowest Rated XBLA Games

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Ask someone what they think the best Xbox Live Arcade game is and you won't be too surprised at the answer.

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Castle Crashers, Trials HD, Peggle or maybe something a little quirker like 'Splosion Man or Braid. The answers should be fairly predictable because the best games on Xbox Live Arcade have received a lot of praise, love and attention and rightly so.

But what about the worst games on Xbox Live Arcade? The 360 community can now rate anything they like on Xbox Live Marketplace out of 5 stars. Now enough time has passed for the ratings to have settled down, we can now reveal the lowest scoring games on Xbox Live Arcade...

10. Military Madness (2.1 stars)

There are some games you sometimes have a feeling won't translate well to Xbox Live Arcade. Military Madness is one of those games - fiddly, heavy and grim, it's everything an Xbox Live Arcade game shouldn't be. The game itself isn't horrendous but it's a bit like playing Marilyn Manson at a dinner party. There's a time and a place for everything and unfortunately, this just ain't it.

9. Bliss Island (2.1 stars)

You want to know why Frogger isn't on this list? So do we! And here's our made-up-on-the-spot-theory - it's been saved by the existence of Bliss Island, a game that takes the stupidly simple concept of Frogger and makes it even... well, stupider. Stupider doesn't work as a word but neither does the Frogger idea, just one bad mini-game out of the nine on offer here adding up to a very poor maxi-game.

8. War Worlds (2.1 stars)

Robots blowing each other up can't be dull. Except it can and as if Chromehounds proving it wasn't enough, here comes War Worlds with its grey slab of metallic monotony to drub you over the head with until you cry mercy and desperately search for the 'Delete from Hard Drive' option. Get Virtual On instead.

7. Rainbow Islands (2.1 stars)

While it's not quite as in the same scoring-an-open-goal league as porting Lemmings or Alex Kidd or something of that ilk, you'd think messing up Rainbow Islands would be pretty hard. Maybe if it had horrible 'modern' graphics, a control method everyone wanted to change but couldn't and a horrendous soundtrack then... oh. Hang on a second.

6. Crazy Mouse (2.1 stars)

Crazy Mouse, so named because HE'S CRAZY AND TOTALLY OFF HIS HEAD, is actually a really slow maze game. And that's it. A slow maze game. It's KERRRAZY, obviously, because it stars CRAZY MOUSE who does KERRRAZY things like walk around collecting food but yeah. It's just a maze game. And it's slow. What else is there to say?

5. Double D Dodgeball (2.1 stars)

It was made by Yukes, of Rumble Roses fame, and it's called Double D Dodgeball. What everyone was expecting was a slightly grubby, somewhat shameless take on dodgeball for pervs like Rumble Roses had done for wrestling. Not a top-down dodgeball games featuring Space Invader style critters. Amazingly, this even had DLC released for it! Why?!

4. Shrek-N-Roll (2.0 stars)

You know that bit in the films where Shrek has to tilt a small line so a ball rolls along it and collect stuff? No? Us neither. It must have been one of the deleted scenes, especially as this whole game is nothing but rolling a ball from left to right collecting stuff using the Vision Cam. Still, there's another game yet to come on this list that does a far worse job of the same trick...

3. Tour De France (2.0 stars)

If not the worst game on XBLA, definitely the strangest. Nearly all cycling games on console see you tap the buttons to some sort of rhythm. This sees you adjust the speed of your bikers, shouting GO every now and then and nodding your head to the hideous Eurotrance in the background.

2. Yo-Ho Kablammo (2.0 stars)

The runner-up in the design contest that saw Dishwasher Samurai hit XBLA to lofty praise, Yo-Ho Kablammo didn't get quite the same reception. A game where a few pirate ships pootle around each other firing cannons until all but one sinks, it's about as exciting as we've just made it sound.

1. Totemball (2.0 stars)

When Microsoft unveiled its Vision Cam, this title came along with it. The idea is you control the onscreen ball by sticking out your arms (like a totem, see?) and tilting left and right. Nice idea in theory. In practice, it controlled horribly, was no fun when it did work and was quickly relegated to unheard of curio. The fact that the Vision Cam got more playtime in UNO says it all.


So there you have it. And the highest scoring XBLA games? Castle Crashers, Battlefield 1943, Portal, Geometry Wars 2, Trials HD, Peggle, Banjo-Kazooie, Worms 2, Shadow Complex and Braid. All worthy of your time and money...

Ryan King