Movies mostly lived up to the hype for me in 2025 and so, as is often the case, this year’s list is another all-in videogame beat-down. Um, yay?
As per usual, this list is a very personal vent session for all the petty things that let me down about entertainment media over the course of a year. More “serious” stuff rarely makes it on; it’s just a chance to shake the bad vibes off before getting into the accolades.
Let’s kick off another year, then.
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VR BEST OF 2025 DISCLAIMER
This list represents my opinion only. I am not asserting any kind of superiority or self-importance by presenting it as I have. My opinion is not fact. Nobody ever agrees with me 100%. Respectful disagreement is most welcome.
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5. The Sega Hangover
This industry has a regular, almost hum-drum habit of backing up failures with successes, and successes with failures. Though even the hardest-headed of haters would struggle to call 2025 an absolute catastrophe for Sega, hence the #5 placement, the sheer magic of its unprecedented 2024 run (which prompted an entire article by yours truly) makes this past year look like a bit of a rough one by comparison. It started well enough, with left-field Yakuza spin-off Like A Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii scoring good reviews, but even that win came hot off the heels of the announcement that European sales juggernaut Football Manager 25 had been fully cancelled – a stunning slice of mismanagement that put the long-running franchise in an entirely new position. Then months later came the Nintendo Switch 2 reveal, and things really went south.
Sega was the only major company not to offer an upgrade path of any kind for its full-price launch-window titles, most glaringly the anaemic barely-impoved Puyo-Puyo Tetris 2S and Sonic X Shadow Generations – which was barely six months old as a Switch 1 game at the time of announcement. Fast-forward a financial quarter and the Switch 2 port of Persona 3 Reload – easily Atlus’ highest-profile 2025 release after Raidou Remastered largely slipped under the radar – ran with uncomfortably janky frame-pacing and missing visual features at full price, no Episode Aigis expansion included. It felt like a tone-deaf old-school Atlus move over 18 months after the first fan outcry on the issue, with no double-barrelled Game Pass inclusion to soften the blow this time.
Shinobi: Art of Vengeance, Sonic Racing CrossWorlds (plus apologetic late-arriving Switch 2 upgrade pack), and the very on-time Football Manager 26 all arrived late in the year to restore some goodwill and critical praise to the Sega stable, but the bigwigs would probably still love to put this year behind them.
4. A Brand New Batch of Botches
Since this list shrunk from a Top 10 a few years back, it’s become a tradition of sorts to collect all of the year’s videogame launches that upset me into one entry. I’d rather not have to do this, but this year you all get two separate entries with this theme! First up, three games that have almost nothing in common: Freedom Wars, Rematch, and Rugby League 26.
The former, a cult-classic PS Vita title that is now one of several former Sony Japan Studio creations up for re-release under Bandai Namco, became my first-ever Steam refund when it crashed repeatedly on me when it wasn’t running astonishingly poorly. Rematch, one of my favourite games of 2025 despite everything, released an 80mb hotfix patch on the first night of its release that completely broke almost every part of online multiplayer and scattered many of the players who might have saved it through word of mouth – but alas, now the game consists mostly of endless matchmaking screens. Rugby League 26 probably deserves its own list entry the most, but for international readers the quickest way to summarise that mess is that the game was the first new playable form of one of Australia’s premier sports in eight years, yet launched with almost identical gameplay to the last one – when it actually played without an armada of glitches and crashes.
3. Second Switch, Sleek Swindles, Silence
The Nintendo Switch 2 is doing just fine. It’s a robust, if a bit unexciting, improvement over its direct predecessor that is already punching above its considerably elevated weight graphically, and apparently that is exactly what the market wanted: the thing is selling crazy well. Compared to the laundry list of complaints I had about the Switch 1 all the way back in 2017, the sole gripe of the lack of OLED contrast and clarity (especially as TV HDR has improved since launch) hardly makes for a worthy list entry. I even struggle to complain about cost: here in Australia we have the cheapest region-free Switch 2 in the world (for now), and the handheld’s unexpected appearance in end-of-year sales despite its youth only exacerbates the non-issue.
What does grind my gears – and always has, as this annual list often reflects – is the poor messaging from videogame companies on potentially confusing elements that enable the rampant spread of misinformation online, and the apparent inability for said companies to correct that messaging in anywhere close to a timely manner. We saw just about this exact phenomenon at the beginning of 2024 with Xbox’s botched multi-platform revelations, and Nintendo decided to get in on the act this year by burying their Switch 2 console and game pricing outside that relentlessly exciting April Direct, announcing the concept of Game Key Cards without widely-understandable reasoning and right after dropping the announcement of the totally-unrelated “virtual game card” system, then sitting there with their hands in the air as early sensationalist headlines powered by factual inaccuracies snowballed on them.
Yes, some of these new Switch 2-related initiatives are annoying to have to deal with. But much worse versions of them are still floating around as gospel online. Hey, at least it’s made me a de facto bearer of good news to any of my friends on the topic, so there’s that.
2. Unpleasant, Unwelcome, Unreal
Ah, apparently alliteration is an appropriate approach again and again this annum. Anyway, I really don’t like Unreal Engine 5 at the moment.
The ubiquitous game engine has clearly evolved from its early days as a pie-in-the-sky graphics showcase, and nowadays offers developers so many handy tools that the amount of major releases built on it has skyrocketed. But something has clearly gone wrong, because multiple 2025 Unreal titles launched with clear optimisation problems that have still not fully gone away after varying degrees of dev attention. Borderlands 4, Sword of the Sea, Silent Hill f, Keeper, Metal Gear Solid Delta, and yes, the awards-dominant Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 are the major cases that I encountered, although I’m sure there were more.
Whether it was lighting glitches, UI bugs, much lower frame-rate targets than should reasonably be expected, or most commonly that dreaded shader stutter after a location change – or even a simple camera shift, in some cases – the pattern was plainly evident. I’m now at the stage where an exciting new game reveal is followed by a quick scan of the title card for that ominous “U”. I’m sure things will improve for the popular toolset, but for now it’s a real concern.
Rematch also technically counts as it also runs on UE5, but that game performs just fine most of the time and its issues lie elsewhere, so it didn’t seem fair to hit it twice on this page.
1. Just An Even Worse Year for Xbox
For the fourth consecutive time an Xbox-related entry makes the top 2 of my disappointments list, which means for almost half a decade I’ve let myself get my hopes up about the green team enough to have them dashed year after year. Statistically speaking, if you’re reading this you’re probably not primarily an Xbox player and you’re shaking your head at your screen right now. But they really do produce good hardware, software and services, which makes it an easier prospect to raise those hopes than it really should be.
The cancellation of the new Perfect Dark may have made the top spot all by itself: based on the game’s last showing, it looked like Crystal Dynamics had rescued a fun little sci-fi spy caper out of the years of dead silence from The Initiative. The simultaneous cancellation of the mysterious Everwild in July made more sense, as did a second price bump across the board for Xbox hardware following the announcement of global tariffs into the US, as well as yet another price increase for Xbox Game Pass; much more shocking was the sheer extent of the latter. While all tiers saw a noticeable cost increase, the top-of-the-line Ultimate sub that actually gives you all the Day One games the service is known for went from $23 to $36 in one day, shocking many players into a tier drop or even outright cancellation. Even Microsoft Rewards sickos like me were hit, as the traditionally generous currency can no longer be used to redeem Game Pass months. On top of everything else, Microsoft no longer offers a TV and Movies store, and their streaming quality has dropped significantly.
And yet after all this, I’ve been so dialled-in to the Xbox ecosystem for so long now that I have a suite of legacy purchases and a Game Pass subscription good until the middle of 2027; I will likely be entrenched right up to the launch of that next platform – whatever shape it takes. So we’ll see how things look around then, I guess.
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Honourable Mentions
–Mickey is a Miss
While not a clear enough drop to make the main list by any means, it’s hard to argue that Bong Joon Ho’s first film after Parasite doesn’t hit its elegant heights. Mickey 17 has cool ideas, but it just seems to have too many ideas in general, which all end up fighting on screen to the detriment of almost everything bar Robert Pattinson’s riotous performance.
–Those Prices!
Inevitable it may have been, but 2025 saw the return of the $130 AUD videogame price point – for the first time since the overambitious Godfall at the PS5 launch in 2020. Multiple PS5 and Xbox models also raised their prices yet again, and Nintendo brought their game RRPs in line with the other consoles after more than a decade sitting at the magic $80 mark. It sucks.
Vagrant Rant 