With a library of more than 4,000 games released worldwide, it’s easy to see why many gamers consider the PlayStation 2 to be the greatest console of all time. This was the system that debuted all-time classics like Grand Theft Auto III, Metal Gear Solid 2, and Final Fantasy X that have shaped the industry for years to come.
But with such a large library, not every game could be a hit. In fact, there were a lot of downright terrible games on the PS2. Alongside the greats, the PS2 saw plenty of shovelware, licensed slop, and games that had the best of intentions but just fell apart during development. With all that in mind, these are the 15 worst PS2 games.
15. Catwoman
Remember the 2004 Catwoman movie starring Halle Berry? Probably not. It was a terrible take on the character with a worse script and forgettable action. You’d think the fact that it started off as a Batman Returns spin-off with Michelle Pfeiffer before years of development hell turned it into a completely different mess should have been a red flag to any potential licensees, but EA saw enough money on the table to work on a game.
The best thing we can say about Catwoman the game is that it stays true to the film because it also sucks. The graphics are barely better than a PS1 game, you’ll spend more time fighting the controls than actual enemies, and the voice acting is somehow even worse than the movie it’s based on, which is really saying something considering that the film earned Halle Berry a Razzie. If you want to actually see what a good Catwoman game could be like, just play Arkham City.
14. The Sopranos: Road to Respect
A game based on The Sopranos certainly had potential, but this was another case where there were plenty of warning signs early on that this wasn’t going to turn out as planned. First, show creator David Chase oversaw the script, but refused to let the game connect to the show beyond that, so the actual plot comes across more like fan fiction, even if most of the cast from The Sopranos voiced their in-game models.
And apparently, that’s where most of the budget went, because everything else is pretty awful. Road to Respect is particularly ugly for a late-gen PS2 game, and the stiff controls and linear level design make it an absolute chore to play. This is one offer that’s easily refused.
13. American Idol
As we saw from the Guitar Hero and Rock Band boom, music games can be fantastic. Unfortunately, American Idol’s peak was just a few years before developers started making really great music games. While essentially a rhythm game, the biggest problem with American Idol is that there’s no rhythm to be found.
Button prompts just randomly cross the screen as your cel-shaded avatar sings subpar versions of popular songs with not even the slightest effort to match any semblance of a beat. And then the judges just blurt out random comments that have little to nothing to do with your performance. There’s also a karaoke mode where you can sing along with the soundtrack, yet your performance isn’t graded in any way. You’re literally going to have the same experience just singing along with something off of Spotify. American Idol is so bad that it barely even registers as an actual interactive video game.
12. 25 to Life
When the Grand Theft Auto series became a phenomenon in the early 2000s, publishers rushed to put out their own gritty urban shooters. Some of these, like True Crime: Streets of LA and Scarface: The World of Yours, were surprisingly fun, and even added some interesting tweaks to the GTA formula. Others were pretty forgettable. And then there was 25 to Life, which was just plain awful.
This is a prime example of everything wrong with this era of gaming, from the confusing level design to the shoddy controls that make it difficult to hit anything. At least 25 to Life did try to mix things up with a 16-player online multiplayer mode, but everything else about the game was so bad that few players even bothered with it.
11. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
If you just look up screenshots of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, you would be led to believe it’s at least a decent game. The graphics are surprisingly good for a licensed title, with a cartoony, dreamlike quality that fits the film well. And it even has a really great soundtrack, similar to the Danny Elfman score of the film. Sounds like an underrated gem, right? Well, no. The problems begin when you actually try to play Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
Charlie can engage in both platforming and directing Oompa Loompas, but regardless of what you’re trying to do, everything is just sluggish and unintuitive, and all inevitably made worse by the terrible camera, which makes the game unnecessarily difficult to play. It’s just a painfully unfun experience, even if it does have a couple good qualities.
10. The Simpsons Skateboarding
The Simpsons Skateboarding is the very definition of a cheap cash-in. Riding on the coattails of the massive popularity of the Tony Hawk franchise at the time, Fox Interactive and EA simply slapped The Simpsons license onto a terrible skateboarding engine and called it a day. You know how Tony Hawk games are lauded for their iconic level design and smooth controls? Well, there’s none of that here!
Levels are boring and straightforward, with not many options for creative combos. The more complicated tricks are difficult to pull off, and even basic moves don’t register much of the time. But perhaps worst of all, aside from the voice clips that quickly grow repetitive, The Simpsons Skateboarding doesn’t even make much use of its license, the franchise mostly feeling like window dressing to trick fans of the show into spending money. Any old IP could have been shoehorned into this mess.
9. Fight Club
First off, given the anti-consumerist message of the book and film, it’s downright embarrassing that this game exists at all. But even if you can put that aside, there’s simply nothing redeeming about the Fight Club video game. The graphics are bland, and the mechanics do nothing to distinguish it from the dozens of other better fighting games out there. It also doesn’t help that all the characters basically play the same.
As for the characters, well, Brad Pitt and Edward Norton wisely stayed away from this adaptation, though Meat Loaf, never one to turn down an easy paycheck, happily participated. The rest of the roster was rounded out by Abraham Lincoln and Limp Bizkit front man Fred Durst (seriously), and you’re honestly way better off just checking out a YouTube video of them fighting than spending the time it actually takes to play through the game and unlock them.
8. Pimp My Ride
Pimp My Ride was an insane “reality” (and we use that word very loosely) show where a lucky person would meet rapper Xzibit, show him their barely running 15-year-old Toyota Corolla, explain they liked movies, and then MTV would spend tens of thousands of dollars putting a home theater setup in the car that probably wasn’t even street legal. Look, we didn’t have YouTube or TikTok at the time. This is what passed for entertainment in the mid-2000s.
While the zany concept could have led to an interesting game, clearly no one working on this title really cared enough to put any effort into it whatsoever. There aren’t even licensed cars to drive around the unfortunately named “Pimp City,” and the ones that are here handle like Hot Wheels with missing pieces. Even the “Ghost Ride the Whip” mini game is pointless and boring. This game is truly an embarrassment to the good name of pimping things out.
7. McFarlane’s Evil Prophecy
McFarlane’s Evil Prophecy was a thinly veiled attempt to sell more McFarlane toys. That alone doesn’t make a game bad. Hell, it worked out pretty well for Skylanders. It’s just that everything else about McFarlane’s Evil Prophecy fails so spectacularly. The story is little more than “mad scientist thinks the end of the world is coming, it’s time to stop the evil prophecy!” And the beat ‘em up gameplay manages to be equal parts mind numbing and frustrating when it tries to mix in poorly designed objectives.
The McFarlane designs should be a high point here at least, but the problem is that they don’t even translate very well to whatever little budget the developers were working with. Everything is just a generic, ugly mess.
6. The Shield: The Game
Much like The Sopranos, The Shield was an excellent crime drama TV show from the 2000s that no one was really begging to experience in video game form. To its credit, the game does try its hardest to emulate the gritty world of the show, but everything about the gameplay is a chore, between short, janky shooting sections, annoying stealth levels, and a broken evidence searching mini game that can be easily failed and then can’t be repeated. Apparently, the evidence just disappears if you can’t find it the first time. Just like in real life!
But what’s really bizarre is that we were almost spared this crap heap. The game’s original publisher went bankrupt while it was still in development, but publisher Aspyr believed in the project enough to release it anyway, for whatever reason. Yes, we live in a hell world where promising games like Scalebound and Star Wars 1313 never see the light of day, but publishers feel the need to go out of their way to inflict games like The Shield on us.
5. Mike Tyson Heavyweight Boxing
Mike Tyson Heavyweight Boxing isn’t just bad, it’s quite possibly the worst boxing video game ever made. While great boxing games like the Fight Night series require strategy and precise timing to duck and weave before hitting the perfect punch, success in Mike Tyson Heavyweight Boxing just comes down to button mashing. Seriously, just pick an attack button and keep hitting it, and you’ll probably win.
Well, that’s if you play as one of the handful of famous boxers included on the disc. If you try and create your own boxer, a feature that was much touted by the developers at the time, you’ll find yourself hopelessly outclassed in the grindy career mode, losing fight after fight to boost your stats just a little. If you ever so much as think about trying this game out, just do yourself a favor and go play the infinitely superior Mike Tyson’s Punch Out!! instead.
4. Celebrity Deathmatch
Celebrity Deathmatch was a fun little claymation show on MTV in the late ‘90s where vaguely famous people of the era (or soundalikes) would crack jokes while beating the ever loving hell out of each other. It was never the biggest hit, but it was good enough to leave on while channel surfing at least, and that seemed to be how most people who watched it viewed the show. Not exactly a ringing endorsement, but for some reason that was good enough to push out a game years after MTV stopped producing new episodes.
Perhaps the biggest failing of Celebrity Deathmatch is that it doesn’t even look like the characters are made out of clay, which is incredibly disappointing given that this was a huge part of the show’s gimmick, and even the terrible ClayFighter games accomplished this years beforehand. The roster of “celebrities” wasn’t great at release and has somehow gotten worse over time. Most younger gamers probably don’t even know who Miss Cleo or Cindy Margolis are, and we’re sure the developers now regret including Marilyn Manson and Ron Jeremy. Somehow, all five members of NSYNC did end up in the game, though. Still, it’s not really worth playing as any of these people since the AI is so idiotic you can just breeze through any fight in about one minute.
3. Women’s Volleyball Championship
Women’s Volleyball Championship is a game that exhibits all the hallmarks of shovelware: released well past the lifecycle of its console, generic name, and awful stock photo cover. You know how in nature, animals are brightly colored to warn everyone that they’re poisonous? This is the video game equivalent, desperately telling you to save your money and avoid it at all costs.
There’s literally nothing redeeming here. Character models look like those knock off dollar store toys and move about as well. The announcers have maybe 10 terrible lines of commentary that they repeat ad nauseum. And the actual gameplay is a confusing, uneven mess with AI that randomly alternates between braindead and overpowered mind readers who can counter anything you throw at them. There’s not a single enjoyable thing about this game.
2. Gravity Games Bike: Street. Vert. Dirt.
Say what you will about modern gaming, but at least when a buggy, unfinished game is released, developers can (and often do) fix it. Some of these titles, like Cyberpunk 2077 and Final Fantasy XIV even end up being truly great games after updates. Had it been released in a different era, Gravity Games Bike: Street. Vert. Dirt. might have had a similar comeback story. Unfortunately, it came out in 2002 when the vast majority of PS2 games didn’t even have online connectivity, and so it will always be known as a broken, incomplete mess.
Nothing really works in this game. Trying to get your rider to actually do anything is a crap shoot. Hit a button, and maybe you’ll do a trick, maybe you won’t. Grinding is similarly iffy, but you’ll also randomly get stuck on objects in each level. The whole time, the camera points at whatever it wants, which usually isn’t your bike. Even playing this game for just a few minutes, it’s painfully obvious that it needed a lot more development time to even be average.
1. Beverly Hills Cop
The year is 2006. It’s been 12 years since the release of the disappointing Beverly Hills Cop III. The surprisingly decent fourth movie is still 18 years away. For some reason, little known British developer Atomic Planet Entertainment Ltd. figures that this is the perfect time to release a European exclusive Beverly Hills Cop game that features a random bald guy as Axel Foley. And that’s just the start of this game’s problems.
At least it’s a first-person shooter, so you don’t see Faux-el for most of the game. But this is without a doubt one of the worst first-person shooters ever made. The developers didn’t even program the AI to be able to aim up or down, so getting through the game is a breeze if you just crouch. Unless you just randomly fail the stealth sections that never really explain what you’re supposed to do. The game is padded by pointless, lengthy cutscenes to drag out its paltry six missions. All these cutscenes do is emphasize the game’s horrifically chunky graphics that feature the bare minimum in PS2 texture work. If it didn’t say Beverly Hills Cop on the cover, you wouldn’t even know it had any connection to the franchise. This is without a doubt, one of the worst, laziest pieces of video game software ever dumped onto a disc.