The Ten Most Polarizing Games of the 2010s
The second decade of the 21st century was the era when gaming went everywhere. Smartphones put games in every pocket, indie developers found huge audiences through digital storefronts, and free-to-play and games-as-a-service models changed how (and how long) we played. Meanwhile, the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch pushed open-world design and cinematic storytelling further than ever before.
It was a decade full of modern classics like The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (2015), Dark Souls (2011), The Last of Us (2013), Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018), and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (2017). But bigger budgets and bolder ideas also meant bigger swings, and not every one connected with everyone. We've run the numbers at Criticker, and have found the ten most polarizing games of the 2010s, from cult oddities to blockbuster franchise entries. Do you remember any of these? Or, perhaps still play them?
How was this calculated?
For every film with at a certain number of ratings, we calculate the percentage of people who loved it (percentle greater than 75%) and hated it (less than 25%). The "contentiousness" score is the lower of those two percentiles.
Consider the most contentious possible scenario -- an equal number love and hate it, with nobody in between. That would be 50% - 0% - 50%, for a score of "50". Let's say another film has a "love/ambivalence/hate" ratio of "38/30/32". That gets a score of 32: still extremely polarizing!
But a movie that almost everyone hates? Let's say a breakdown of 4/35/61. That's a score of just 4, which means it's not very contentious at all.
#10.
Days Gone
22.12% High
"It's not perfect but I got the platinum trophy. So I kinda really liked this game." - shotten25
25.96% Low
"sony bend tries to be "naughty rockstar dog" with a daryl dixon simulator nobody wants anymore, because TWD has become about as interesting as this tonally messed up, plothole ridden, badly directed mashup of not even subtle callbacks to superior material. and EVERYONE rides bikes? the noisiest and most vulnerable form of transportation?...sociopath that i am, the only thing worthwile was mowing down hordes. "days gone" may just refer to the time you spent playing this and will never get back." - Guy Piranha
22.13% High
"it's only an 85 if you only do as many side quests as necessary, so barely any. i love the graphics, dialogue wheel, both sera and cass had great romances. cool mechanics like how the party likes you, can leave you, who becomes the priestess thing lol, the judgment+war table was kinda cool and could be great, love the online keep, combat is trash, kinda tedious crafting helped, i love the story and where it's going. my morrigan and my son < 3 and flemeth bruh" - War Machine
25% Low
"One of the most boring games that I've ever played. Can only recommend this to someone who thinks that MMO questing and harvesting is the pinnacle of gaming." - Zaltys
#8.
Metro Exodus
23.15% High
"This connected with me more than I thought it would. I like that it's non-linear but not exactly open world. I don't love having to clean guns but once I started just knifing dudes it got more bearable. But I enjoyed all the components here: the scavenging, the world, the gunplay. I know others don't like that it isn't like the others, but I kind of enjoyed how it mixed the above ground stuff and underground because it made the underground more menacing, but gave a reprieve from it when above." - Obdurate
22.22% Low
"Some of the creative choices are decently interesting, incl. maintaining the series' commitment to narratively and mechanically punishing the player for wantonly decimating the sparse remnants of human civilisation, but for a production this lavish and grandly advertised there's just too much that's plain amateurish—the writing, for one thing, is verbose and repetitious to a degree that actually made me chuckle a few times, and even the "enhanced" edition is rife with basic technical issues." - MCProust
#7.
Death Stranding
31.05% High
"This would have been an easy top 10 games of all time if only the story was written better. I'm flabbergasted at how KojiPro managed to gamify such mundane-ass looking tasks. It truly is a walking simulator in every sense of the word, so it blows my mind how a simple game about delivering packages can be so addictive. The writing is confusing and just flat out cringeworthy most of the time, but the cinematography is often beautiful and weird as shit in a way like no other game is." - Errol246
22.83% Low
"Like my ex: gorgeous, self-important, convoluted and confusing." - Timmie Nimrod
#6.
Control
24.76% High
"Control is a surreal action game blending sci-fi, horror, and mystery. As Jesse Faden, you explore a shifting brutalist building overtaken by a force called the Hiss. With powers like telekinesis and levitation, you fight enemies and uncover secrets. The game combines shooter combat with metroidvania design and rich environmental storytelling. Control delivers a visually stunning, atmospheric, and deeply original experience." - Temptershell
22.86% Low
"Decent atmosphere but chock-full of baffling, backward design choices imported from modern online chaff. It makes no sense to have timed repeating missions and a random, incremental modulation system in a linear single player action game. The story didn't offer enough to keep me interested, burying its lore in a mess of menus I couldn't be bothered to sift through." - Actionberg
#5.
Life Is Strange
25% High
"A perfect emotional hurricane—where Max’s rewind power, Chloe’s ”hella” angst, and Arcadia Bay’s looming storm make every choice hurt. The soundtrack? Indie dream. The ending? Soul-crushing" - Zaeba
22.96% Low
"Quite possibly one of the dumbest games I've ever encountered. If not for Adum Plaze's walkthrough of the game, I'd find this title unbearable. The time travel mechanics are never used in an interesting way, and the plot is written in the most moronic and juvenile way imaginable. I struggle to think of a protagonist more unlikable than Chloe, or a game that pulls off so many insulting ass pulls while acting like it's brilliant. It gets points for a solid atmosphere, but otherwise it's awful." - Velvet Crowe
23.08% High
"Despite changing the gameplay mechanics each time a massive update came. (I got to v3), SWTOR's strength is the engaging storylines it present across its 8 classes, though some are better than others (Imperial Agent). The graphics are great, there's only a limited need to carry out group missions with strangers, and it's a convincing return to Star Wars' Old Republic since KOTOR. For a F2P game, it's pretty great." - amazedemon
36.54% Low
"It's alright, the starter planets are really annoying/boring though. Tarris is just following tradition I guess. Pay to win is annoying." - BurstBubble
#3.
Terraria
30.33% High
"Terraria is a great and full experience." - Scuffed
24.67% Low
"Oh dear God, the hours I lost in this game. And I don't really say that in a negative sense, they were hours well-spent, but I didn't even scratch the surface of what you can do and explore in this game, and I'll be honest, that kind of turned me off. There's a lot to love here and IMO it's a superior version of Minecraft, but maybe this style of game just isn't for me. Still, it's addicting as all Hell to build and mine and build and mine and build and mine and build and mine and build..." - TheRealJ-Ro
25% High
"I skipped Modern Warfare the first time and this was a surprisingly fun challenge on the hard difficulties" - JSchlansky
25% Low
"Boring and frustrating." - favery
25.49% High
"It's observing some idiots interpretation of Twin Peaks but you get to play around in it." - BillyShears
43.14% Low
"Arguably one, if not the worst best game ever made. If you don't know or like Twin Peaks, the game is probably even worse. Because even if it's bad, you can still smile because you recognize the references. If this is not the case I think everything goes down the drain" - rayout