There are tons of beat-em-up games out there. The Uncanny X-Men is just one of many of them. One of developer LJN’s infamous licensed games, this game features the X-Men going on adventures. However, none of the characters feel designed to match their comic counterparts.

The game does a poor job conveying the mutant abilities. Nightcrawler walks through walls. On top of that, the game just...isn’t very good from the level design standpoint.

Silver Surfer is essentially a top-down/side-scroller shooter with Silver Surfer flying around, blasting adversaries out of the sky. And in theory, that isn’t bad. However, what makes this game infamous is its incredible difficulty. Get hit? Hit a wall? Hit an enemy? You’re down. Get used to the image of Silver Surfer crying on his surfboard.

Superman 64 is just a mess. The game is infamously known as the game where Superman has to fly through hoops with boring, clumsy controls to get from Point A to Point B. It’s a bland-looking game that never fails to frustrate its players. To the game’s credit, this was made at the start of the 3D era and restricted by executive mandates. On the other hand, it’s also just a terrible game.

Most people remember The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction, but, for good reason, have forgotten The Pantheon Saga. The Pantheon Saga is a clumsy game with awkward controls and simplistic-level designs. The game did little to stand out or make being a rage monster fun.

The Crow: City of Angels is based on the sequel of the same name, infamously ruined during the editing process by its producers, the Weinsteins. The original cut's brilliant reinvention of The Crow lore was hacked to pieces into something generic and simple. It seems unsurprising that the game based on it was a cheap cash grab with any possibility of innovation or creativity zapped from it.

Spawn: The Eternal came when Spawn fever was at its peak. In many ways, the game plays like an awkward, generic fighting/adventure game. Few of Spawn's imaginative abilities are realized at all, let alone well-realized. Levels are drab. Puzzles are absurdly easy. For a game that brings you one step closer to Hell, it feels oddly dull.

Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker is one of the best films in the DCAU. It is also one of the worst superhero games inspired by it. While the Gameboy Color version had some fans, the beat-em-up sidescroller felt like a cheap, cookie-cutter cash grab on PS1 and N64. It felt like a bad game with Batman overlayed on it. Dull, repetitive, and uninspired.

Batman: Gotham City Racer is Mario Kart with Batman. Only, like many generic racing games of this time, the controls felt clunky and dull. The characters don't feel distinct. The roster and locations are restricted and narrow. For a game where you ride the Batmobile, it's...again, very bland.

Catwoman had a movie cash-in game. While the game is a step-up from the Razzie Winning disaster, that is hardly much consolation. The game is clunky, glitchy, and impossible to enjoy. It does little to justify its existence as a movie tie-in.

Aquaman: Battle for Atlantis is infamous for being one of the glitchiest, most poorly designed games for the GameCube. Fighting is stiff, clunky, and slow. The environment is genetic and walled off by invisible walls. Despite being relatively repetitive and simple, it is sometimes hard to even know what to do in the game. It is by all accounts a failure.

Batman: Dark Tomorrow is an infamously broken game that fails to ever leave an impression on the player due to its bland, clumsy gameplay and dull... everything. The game had a troubled production that resulted in the final product being a boring beat-em-up that often felt repetitive to the point of absurdity.

Marvel Nemesis: Rise of the Imperfects was a Marvel fighting game that divided its cast into iconic Marvel characters and...new characters. The new characters were incredibly bland. The gameplay proved simple and repetitive, with very little replay value or even distinction between the characters. But at least you could play as Venom.

Watchmen: The End is Nigh is a Watchmen game. That already sounds somewhat blasphemous, considering the gritty world of Alan Moore's comic demonizes violence and focuses on the broken psyches of its heroes. The worst thing about this game is that it makes a mockery of its original comic by prioritizing (badly) programmed combat over emotional depth.

X-Men: Destiny killed its developer Silicon Knights. The game is a clunky RPG with sluggish gameplay, a loose grasp on its plot, and just stale, dated graphics that looked bad on release. It was a game so forgettable it left no impression upon release, failing to even ripple the pond of the gaming world.

The Avengers is the biggest financial failure in the gaming landscape of 2020. It is a subscription-based game without a compelling single or multiplayer mode. It is repetitive in its level design, slow to update, rushed through production, and disappointed players before even the first trailer dropped. Few games are as public about their failure as this one. Truly a disappointment in an era of increasingly solid superhero games.