Most Unplayable Action RPGs Of All Time, Ranked

I love a good action RPG. I’ve been an avid soulslike fan since 2009, but even before that, games like Folklore and Kingdoms of Amalur were my jam. Even the questionable ones like Risen I could find some redeeming qualities in, even if I eventually bounced off of them.

So when I say that these next games are the most unplayable action RPGs of all time, I’m not kidding. I’ve played them, and they’re bad. A few occasionally have redeeming qualities, but the further down this list you go, the worse things get. Some of these games you quite literally can not play anymore because they were delisted or shut down, but the rest you should probably just do yourself a favor and avoid. They are ranked from just mostly bad to the absolute worst thing imaginable.

7

Two Worlds 2

An Incredible Magic System, But Everything Else Is Broken

It’s truly a miracle that Two Worlds 2 even exists, because the first game isn’t very good either. That said, where the first game is just bad in a standard, boring sense, Two Worlds 2 is like watching a train leap off the tracks and crash into an airplane. It’s an unhinged kind of bad that can actually be kind of fun if you lean into it, although if I’m being honest, that fun only persists for a few hours. Still, there is some value to be found here, generated entirely by the game’s ridiculously robust magic crafting system. To be clear, don’t pick up Two Worlds 2 for the story, voice acting, open world, visuals, loot, or combat. None of those are good. Melee combat is the worst of all, and basically feels like swinging a pool noodle at an enemy made of Jello.

Rearrange the covers into the correct US release order.

Easy (5)
Medium (7)
Hard (10)

Start

Rearrange the covers into the correct US release order.

Easy (5)Medium (7)Hard (10)Start

The magic crafting is wild, though. It takes some experimentation to know what you’re doing, but eventually, you can create some crazy spells. Calling down a tornado made of anvils or casting a lightning strike that summons demons are just a couple of examples. The thing is, finding the resources (cards) you need to actually craft those spells is extremely tedious, because you need 10 of each card type to use the associated spell, which is a needless restriction when you already have level restrictions in place. It’s a cool system, though, if you’re willing to put up with a really bad game to experience it.

6

The Witcher

Nothing Like The Sequels

Let me preface this by saying that I love The Witcher universe. I love the second and third games, I love the books, I even love the Netflix adaptation after Henry Cavill was replaced by Liam Hemsworth. It is truly one of the best fantasy worlds ever created, a gritty, brutal setting with terribly monstrous people being preyed on by terribly monstrous monsters. But man, CD Projekt Red’s first game in the series, simply called The Witcher, is not good. That really just boils down to the gameplay, because the atmosphere, writing, and world design are all fantastic. Actually playing the game, though, is painful.

Combat is kind of like a rhythm game, with sword swings that respond to each click of your mouse. That said, Geralt stuns really easily, takes forever to recover, and is often surrounded by ten or more enemies. It feels like playing as someone trapped in a pinball machine. Exploration is also a chore. Despite the world itself being well-designed, you spend a lot of time backtracking through the same swamps and fields. Bugs and crashes are the rotten cherry on top, practically mandating save spamming just to ensure you don’t lose progress to a game-breaking issue. I am, however, really looking forward to CDPR’s remake of The Witcher, which will hopefully iron some things out and let the brilliant writing and atmosphere shine.

5

Too Human

Too Hype, Man

Watching Too Human fail was akin to watching Denethor needlessly light himself on fire and leap off the peak of Minas Tirith in Return of the King. This game not only flopped spectacularly, but it took a legendary game developer down with it. Silicon Knights was the studio behind Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes, Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem, and Blood Omen, Legacy of Kain, a trio of massive hits stretching from the mid-90s to the mid-2000s. Then, the studio took 10 years to develop Too Human, tried to sue Epic Games over faulty Unreal Engine 3 code, lost in court, and ultimately had to recall all unsold copies of the game before closing down in 2014. What a ride.

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Too Human’s selling point of a Norse-inspired sci-fi action RPG is a good one, certainly enough to get people in the door, but the final product really has nothing to offer beyond that. Combat boils down to one thing: pushing the right stick. That’s it. You can unlock a couple of combat enhancements, but that’s as much variety as you’ll get. There’s also a 15-second unskippable respawn animation that’s just torture after the third or fourth time you watch it. The writing is bad, the story is boring (and kind of weird in what it chooses to focus on versus what could have actually been interesting), and the visuals are dull and uninspired. Too Human is mediocrity manifest, and while that sucks for such a storied developer, it also explains a lot of what happened after its release.

4

Dawn Of Mana

Clunky Is As Clunky Does

The horror stories around Dawn of Mana are widespread and pretty wild. It was marketed as a revolution in gaming physics, and was a showpiece for the Havok physics engine, but the reality was that the gameplay was so focused on using those physics that it forgot to make the game fun. The game was so poorly received that it very nearly killed the Mana series. It only re-emerged seven years later with a mobile card-collector called Circle of Mana, before a series of remakes restored its reputation enough to produce the very successful Visions of Mana in 2024.

The main gameplay concept of using vines to pick up environmental objects and toss them into enemies isn’t a bad one, but between an inoperable targeting system and a terrible camera, getting this system to actually work is a nightmare. Even when it does work, half the time the game bugs out and doesn’t actually connect to what you’re targeting. Then there are the platforming sections. Despite imprecise controls, Dawn of Mana expects precise movement from its players, which is liable to make you heave your controller across the room. It’s also barely an RPG, with leveling systems seemingly tacked on for posterity, and you’re reset back to level 1 at the start of every chapter. It is a nice looking game though, and it has a great theme song. Are those redeeming qualities? Not really.

3

Magus

The Room Of Action RPGs

Just take a moment and look at those images above. Magus, despite looking like a PS2 game, was actually a late-gen PS3 game, so late that it was released 4 months after the PS4. But a celebratory swan song for Sony’s 7th-gen console it is not. It is by far the worst-looking game on the PS3. That would be damning enough if the issues stopped there, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Bugs, framerate drops (down to 10FPS at times), and crashes plague every inch of the game. Unfortunately, even when it’s running properly, Magus just isn’t any fun.

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It’s sort of a third-person shooter action RPG hybrid where you absorb colors from rocks and shoot corresponding colored orbs at enemies. The orbs don’t seem to do anything differently from one another, so despite each color having its own upgrade path, there’s no point in diversifying. Every level involves spawning in, shooting waves of enemies, and progressing through the unlocked door to the next level. That’s it. It would help if the story or dialogue were interesting, but they aren’t. If there’s one good thing to say about Magus, it’s that the writing is so bad that it’s hilarious. Therefore, if you want to suffer through this trainwreck of a game, at least you’ll get some laughs out of it.

2

Babylon’s Fall

Platinum’s Misguided Distraction

There have been a few major live-service disasters in the 2020s, and while it’s a bit more interesting than Concord (which I still maintain would have been a great free-to-play game) and Highguard, Babylon’s Fall is absolutely in that category. The sad part is that it was developed by PlatinumGames, a studio that made its name on exceptional character action games and has delivered more often than not. In this case, it did not. Babylon’s Fall crashed and burned almost instantly, with a peak concurrent player count of less than 1,200. Babylon’s Fall didn’t even last a year before Square Enix shut it down.

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Much like Concord, one of Babylon’s Fall’s biggest issues is that it released as a full-price triple-A game, despite clearly being designed as a live-service title. That barrier to entry was an immediate no-go for a lot of gamers, but they were the lucky ones, because those who actually played the game didn’t have much to write home about. Babylon’s Fall isn’t even fun to make fun of. It’s just depressing. The game is made up of uninspired button-mashing combat against repetitive enemies in repetitive environments with virtually nothing to keep you engaged. Yet somehow it was stuffed full of microtransactions, which was the final nail in the coffin.

1

Hydlide

Infamous For All The Wrong Reasons

This is going back a way, but Hydlide is arguably the first worst action RPG ever made. In some ways, Hydlide was one of the first action RPGs ever made, period, and was developed specifically to combine elements from the action and RPG genres. It was released in 1984 in Japan and then, for some reason, five years later in the U.S. That five-year gap might not make a huge difference in 2026, but in the 80s when gameplay innovations were coming a mile a minute, it meant that Hydlide already felt dated by the time it made it to the West. That’s not why it’s bad though, but it certainly didn’t help its reputation.

Your character, Jim (yes, that’s his name), moves very quickly, which is nice given how much grinding is involved, but is bad in that you’ll often speed right into an enemy. You have to press a button to switch between attacking and defending, but if you don’t press it in time, you’ll die. If you touch an enemy, you’ll die. You’ll die a lot, is the point. You have to grind to level up enough to complete objectives, but if you level up too much, Hydlide will halt your progress entirely until you complete an objective. Once you do, it’s back to grinding. Hydlide also features one of the dumbest spells I’ve ever seen in a game. It’s called “Turn”, and it makes an enemy turn in a different direction. That’s it. It’s especially dumb because enemy movement is random, so you don’t even know if they’ll turn away from you, or towards you. Oh, and its theme song is a clear ripoff of the Indiana Jones theme. Somehow, Hydlide sold over 2 million copies in Japan, which was a massive success in the 80s. As such, it got a sequel. Several, actually, starting with Hydlide 2, which is . . . better, but still not good.