Zombies are supposed to be scary. The whole notion of nasty, gooey-looking corpses coming after you to bite off your flesh is intended to be a frightening proposition. So when a game like Land of the Dead: Road to Fiddler's Green comes along, a game so completely bereft of thrills and scares that it might as well be a quaalude on a disc, you know you've got yourself a candidate for worst game of the year. But the fun doesn't stop there. Land of the Dead violates just about every golden rule of zombie horror.

It's not like there are an awful lot of those rules, mind you. Zombies are supposed to violently and relentlessly attack you, not stand perfectly still for long periods of time, be unable to circumvent open doorways, and pathetically swipe at you at sporadic intervals. The act of killing a zombie is supposed to be a gory and satisfying experience, not an uninteresting one, like it is here when you poke them with shovels and fire off round after round into a zombie's chest, only to have a stray bullet to the leg magically kill it. And a piece of zombie fiction is supposed to be atmospheric and provide legitimate scares, not clue you in to every single forthcoming zombie attack via a frame rate hitch up and force you to wander around bland, ugly environments that look like they came from a PC shooter circa 1998. In every fundamental way, Land of the Dead fails to grasp even the most base-level concepts of what makes a zombie game good, and that's why it's easily the worst game released this year.