The first-person shooter genre has always had focuses beyond the narrative of whatever story is being told. It usually comes in second to the mechanics of the actual shooting and fighting. Gameplay should be more important in this type of game, the narrative aspects aren’t usually what gamers come looking for in this genre.
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Nevertheless, many FPS games have started to try and focus a little more on the story aspects as the gaming world continues to develop. This has led to better voice acting in games and makes the older FPS games with egregiously bad voice acting all the more fun to look back at now.
TheHouse of the Deadfranchise has always been pretty tongue-in-cheek, and the massive number of cheesy one-liners and bad voice-acting performances can almost be put down as purposeful. In a first-person view,these rail shooters have become legendaryand spawned a lot of other media, helping inspire cinema with the idea of fast-moving zombies and popularizing the sub-genre again.
Nevertheless, one of the video games in history with the worst voice acting has to beHouse of the Dead 2. There is far too much throughout that isn’t even necessary, and too many laughable lines, to count this as unbearable or any good whatsoever. It is the perfect mix of so-bad-its-good that characterizes pretty much everything about theHouse of the Deadfranchise.
5The History Channel: Civil War – A Nation Divided
The fact that a History Channel-commissioned video game that inserted players into some of the biggest battles throughout the American Civil War didn’t take off and become one of the bigger games of the Xbox 360 era is unsurprising. The History Channel entering video gaming made it feel more like anew “fun” attempt at educating kids.
While the twelve-level campaign wasn’t great in any form, the voice-acting performances given throughout were one of the more terrible elements. Some scenes and moments have gone viral more recently for their memorable level of terribleness.Civil War – A Nation Dividedfelt like aCall of Dutycampaign made by people who didn’t particularly likeCall of Dutyor video games.
4Heavy Fire: Red Shadow
Heavy Fireis, similarly to theHouse of the Deadfranchise, a franchise ofFPS rail shooter gamesthat are reasonably simplistic in style. While there is nothing special about any of the games, there was a particularly harsh reaction from fans and critics to the most recent entry,Heavy Fire: Red Shadow, which was released in 2018.
Related:Best First-Person Shooter GamesAllowing players to take control of a soldier mounted behind a powerful turret gun,Red Shadowhad a lot of capabilities that it just wasn’t very good at making use of. Even worse, the voice-acting budget seems to have gone completely by the wayside and prompted fans to mock how incredibly boring it made much of the game feel in comparison to previous entries in the franchise.
3Warhammer 40K: Fire Warrior
An early FPS game released in 2003,Fire Warriorwas an attempt topopularizeWarhammer 40KUniverse video gamesby trying something quite different for the time. Usually, players take control of Space Marines when they enter games in theWarhammer 40KUniverse. Instead,Fire Warriorput them in the T’au Empire, taking control of a highly advanced warrior species in FPS form.
Fire Warriorwas a great idea, but the futuristic, militarized universe ofWarhammer 40Krequires some solid voice acting or a lot of the lines and characters start to sound downright silly. Unfortunately, the dialogue throughoutFire Warriorsounded more on the ridiculous side and led to the game not performing or helpingWarhammer 40KUniverse games take off in the way they had envisioned. The Universe would later return to the shooter genre with themore successfulSpace Marinein 2011.
2Haze
Hazewas a confusing moment in the history of gaming. Originally designated for release on multiple platforms, it was later announcedto be a PlayStation exclusive. Many suspected PlayStation of trying to find inHazetheir own answer to the hugely successfulHalofranchise. Their problem, in the end, was thatHazejust wasn’t good enough to answerHaloat all.
Players control Shane Carpenter, a soldier in a futuristic world where a company controls the world through their production of a drug that enables soldiers to become stronger and faster, but also puts them into a drug-like haze where they no longer view the battlefield as real. The short campaign and poor design didn’t help, but the voice acting throughout hardly sold the game as being anywhere near the level of theHalofranchise with its excellent history of well-voice-acted stories.
1Battle: Los Angeles
While many licensed games seem doomed from the start, few are dead on arrival more thanBattle: Los Angeles. A film that seemed more like an FPS plot from the get-go,the video game adaptionshould have had something going for it, but when the film flopped at the box office it helped drag the sub-par FPS game that was made to tie in down with it.
Featuring some of the most generic gameplay and voice-acting seen in the genre since its inception,Battle: Los Angeleswas a sad indictment of how copy-and-paste the FPS genre got at one point after the advent of the Call of Duty and Halo games delivered a winning formula time after time that could be copied with ease by many other studios. The voice acting wasn’t even the worst part of the game, but it was certainly laughable at times.
