We’ve already taken a look back at some of the better game offerings brought to us by the year 2025 (check out our GOTY feature here). But now, it’s time for us to delve into the dark and icy depths of the “reject pile” of games that took it upon themselves to disgrace our consoles and PCs. Join us in this year’s “Gaming Repsawn’s Flop of the Year”.
Jack Shaw
FBC: Firebreak
I’m nominating FBC: Firebreak as my Flop of the Year for 2025, and the reason it stings so badly is because of the name attached to it. Remedy Entertainment gave us Control, a personal favorite where you could rip up the environment with your mind and one of the best examples of blending sci-fi with surreal humor we’ve ever seen in gaming. Then, they followed it up with Alan Wake II, a genuinely innovative, genre-bending horror game that set a new standard for survival-horror. So, when they announced FBC: Firebreak, a co-op shooter set in the Control universe launching free on PlayStation Plus, I was immediately hyped.
As it turns out, live-service will ruin every single game you love, and Remedy isn’t immune to that. Firebreak throws away everything that made the connected universe so compelling. Instead of the atmospheric, story-driven madness I expected, I got a bland, repetitive grind dressed up in FBC lore. You play as generic agents doing tedious jobs in the Oldest House. When Control tasks you with a weird, janitorial task, it’s always a misdirect into some bizarre new aspect of the game’s hidden corners. Here, it’s exactly as tedious as it’s made out to be. The action is stripped down, replacing the reality-shifting weapons and powers with weak firearms and enemies that are just miserable to fight.
That’s not even getting to the launch state. The game launched fundamentally broken. Matchmaking failed for many users, PS5 players got stuck in endless login loops, and the whole thing was riddled with crashes. It’s astonishing how a developer that mastered physics-based combat and complex narratives so recently could pivot to this generic loot-shooter loop that didn’t even work when it came out. Or, it would be astonishing, if we hadn’t just seen Rocksteady do the exact same thing last year with Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League. Is it enough to kill my interest in the real successor, Control: Resonant? Well, no, but it does waver my faith a bit that the team actually knows what makes their games good.
Peter Keen
Call of Duty: Black Ops 7
It seems far too easy and far too lazy to have Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 as my entry for Flop of the Year 2025. The irony, however, is that the developers have appeared to take a far too easy and far too lazy approach with this game, which has resulted in the mess it actually is. In years gone by, CoD has reigned supreme as the go-to FPS multiplayer shooter of choice. There has been little in the way of a challenge to its throne apart from the Battlefield series and Ubisoft’s Rainbow Six series. Because of that lack of competition, it bred complacency in innovation, ideas, and performance. As the years trundled by, the arrogance of “that’ll do” quite obviously crept into the CoD franchise.
2025 has been different, though. This year has been the turning point for many. Not only have we had the excellent FPS games Ready or Not and ARC Raiders, but there was also the absolutely fantastic Battlefield 6. In the same year Battlefield 6 dropped, the development team behind CoD have had their true colours shown. The difference in effort for the development of the two games couldn’t be starker!
BLOPS 7 has produced such a boring, uninventive campaign that it defies belief. After running any good ideas they may have had over the years into the ground, we now have drug-induced CoD. Space CoD was one thing back in the day, but now there’s this. Boss fights so drab and uninspired against not tanks, weapons, or anything you would expect. No, here you have boss fights against giant monsters. It’s like something a child would come up with. Then the multiplayer. Oh boy. Forgetting that it’s rife with players who are quite clearly “bending the rules”, shall we say, but we also have very few new maps. So, all in all, even if you like the multiplayer, you still, for the most part, play the same maps you had before in previous games.
The new maps aren’t very good either and are just variations on the “three ways to the middle area” idea, much like the old maps. The game runs terribly. Lag is a persistent threat. The new movement system of double jumps off walls means you have no idea on what level the enemy may be approaching you. It’s all so unrealistic, fake, boring, repetitive, and just dull. There are no in-game atmospherics, and it’s devoid of any sense of excitement or fun. When you compare this effort to what DICE have delivered with the raw, visceral, exciting, atmospheric and fun gunplay of Battlefield 6, you then realize just how pathetic the BLOPS7 effort really is.
Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 will forever be known as the Call of Duty game that finished off the franchise.
Will Worrall
Alchemist: The Potion Monger
It’s a good thing that this is called “flop of the year” and not “disappointment of the year”, because I think you have to expect something decent from a game to actually end up disappointed in it, which isn’t really the case with Alchemist: The Potion Monger.
If you’ve not heard of the game (and who could blame you?), it’s a super janky first-person sim that tasks you with running your own little alchemy store in a quaint settlement mostly inhabited by anthropomorphic animals. If you’re into cozy games, or you’re just a bit of a furry, you might think that the game sounds great, but then you’d probably end up regretting your optimism.
There was almost nothing redeemable about this game. The animations were crap. The combat was crap. Hell, even the potion-making, which is the main point of the game, is both utter crap and completely broken to the point that the game is basically unplayable (or at least it was when I was playing the game for review back in January).
Combine this all with the most pedestrian visuals and audio, as well as the lack of anything actually interesting going on from a narrative perspective, and this basically feels like the perfect encapsulation of the Switch store’s shovelware issues. Unless you have a fetish for boredom, do not play this game.
Matthew Wojciow
FBC: Firebreak
Unfortunately, this entry will throw a lot of hate at one of my favourite developers, but they have to take the hit for what is the biggest dumpster fire of 2025, and that is FBC: Firebreak. When I reviewed this game back in July, I called it unnecessary, and even now writing this, I can’t think of a better word to describe it.
It tries to take the world of Control and sort of Rainbow Six: Siege it with disastrous results. Bland maps, repetitive missions, braindead enemy AI, the list is honestly endless as to what is wrong with this game. I’ve never known a developer to go from the massive high that is the original Control and Alan Wake II to a game as devoid of enjoyment as FBC: Firebreak.
