I'm going to list some of my least favourite games of all time, then save the worst one 'til last. So:
Assassins Creed 3. I loved the Ezio trilogy so much, and then Connor came along. I played through the entire game, looking for a reason to like it, and couldn't find one. Haytham was the only decent character, and he was the bad guy. The story was dull; it was just Connor shouting "Where's Charles Lee" for twelve hours. And I tried out the naval combat, hated it. That meant I refused to play AC4 because it was so heavily naval, and to sum it up, AC3 ruined the entire franchise for me.
The Bureau: XCOM Declassified. I'll be honest, I was pretty late to the XCOM franchise, having only played the recent Enemy Unknown and the expansion, Enemy Within. However, I LOVED them. They had plenty of variety; the contrast between the micro-management of XCOM HQ and the turn-based battles against the aliens kept it interesting for a huge amount of time. So, when I put time into the Bureau, I was expecting a lot; having enjoyed other third-person shooters like Mass Effect and Gears of War. However, although the squad commands were fairly unique and a little interesting, that wasn't the same for the rest of the game. It was boring, repetitive, and I felt no sense of motion or progression; in Enemy Unknown, the R&D departments kept your weapons and armour top of the line, enough to fight off technologically advanced invaders. The Bureau had nothing of that feeling whatsoever.
Mirror's Edge. As much as everybody loves this game, I can't say the same. I got it as part of a Humble Bundle deal months ago, and honestly; it's very pretty, but the gameplay is the polar opposite to me. The free-running can be smooth at times, but most of the time I found it fiddly, irritating and generally not enjoyable. The combat didn't make up for it either; it wasn't fun, it wasn't anything other than mind-numbingly annoying.
Dead Island. I was one of the many that saw the trailer and thought "I must have this game", and I was one of the droves that thought the game was a pile of toss. Admittedly, it's fairly fun for the first few minutes. But once you realise that it's not going to change from that for the rest of the game, you get bored very quickly. Not to mention that the majority of the quests in the game are generic "go here, get this, bring it back" quests. Skyrim might well have had a lot of those, but it balanced them out with a lot of interesting quests such as the Dark Brotherhood storyline; Dead Island does not.
And (fanfare please) now for my vote for the worst game of all time.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. I'll admit; as much as I knew CoD was the same, year in year out, I enjoyed Modern Warfare and Modern Warfare 2. All Ghillied Up (the mission in MW1 where you sneak through Pripyat and watch an army roll right past you) in particular was a fantastic mission; different from the usual CoD "shoot, shoot and more shoot", more restrained and subtle. The trailer for Modern Warfare 3 looked the usual, but still entertaining; fighting through the London Underground, the streets of New York, everywhere; seemed like fun. Not so. In reality, every single mission was the same with a different skin over the top. The ending; lets not forget, the ending to the
series we're talking about here; was just atrocious. People say Mass Effect 3's ending fails to wrap things up; I say Modern Warfare 3's ending puts it to shame. In case you forget, or just didn't play it;
<spoiler warning, if you care> you, playing as Price, put on what is basically a suit of armour, and do even more shooting than is usual in a CoD game. Your one remaining teammate dies along the way, and you finally manage to take down Makarov, the man you've been hunting since "No Russian" in MW2. And there's no epic boss battle here, no; just a cutscene lasting thirty seconds showing Price killing Makarov without even any last words, then Price smoking a cigar. Aaaand, roll credits! Seriously, nothing about that is good. No resolution, no explanation, nothing. This was the game that made me stop playing the general military FPS game; I still play Left 4 Dead, Borderlands and Bioshock, simply because they're unique; Bioshock in particular is more complex than some RPGs I've played. To me, Call of Duty sums up everything wrong with the world; small, arrogant kids playing games designed for adults, shouting obscenities down a microphone to another arrogant kid about how their mother gave them a blowjob last night. The first Black Ops made it up to me by having a relatively decent single-player experience. Modern Warfare 3
cannot do that.
And there's my speech on the matter