10 Times Video Games Found A Way To Be Even Worse

Is there any video game franchise more maddeningly inconsistent than Sonic the Hedgehog? As beloved as the original three games are, the last 30 years of Sonic have pinballed between unmitigated dreck and only occasional flashes of inspiration.

The most infamous missteps include 2006's ill-advised Sonic the Hedgehog, which saw basically every aspect of its conception criticised, and 2014's Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric, which was somehow received even more poorly.

Though the series finally seemed to rebound with 2017's 2D homage Sonic Mania - which netted the franchise's best reviews in literally decades - mere months later it was back to business as usual with the indifferently reviewed Sonic Forces.

Rather than get to work on Sonic Mania 2, Sega bafflingly scrapped plans for a sequel and instead forged ahead with the recently released Sonic Frontiers.

Frontiers marked the series' first foray into true open-world gameplay... which is exactly what the millions of fans who loved Sonic Mania were asking for.

Unsurprisingly despite scoring not-bad reviews, Frontiers was basically a low-effort imitation of the Ubisoft open-world formula, packed to the gills with stamina-drainingly tedious busy-work that made playing soon enough feel like a second job.

Sure, Frontiers was more mechanically refined than its more maligned predecessors, but it marked such a soulless direction for the franchise, demonstrating Sega at their most cravenly lazy and cynical.