It is very rare for a game to be so disastrous that it gets a single-digit rating on Steam. As evidenced by last week's release of O2Jam Online (opens in new tab). The rhythm game currently sits at a 4% rating, with only about 41 of the more than 1,000 reviews recommending it.

That's also a pretty fair assessment. The series has been largely defunct for some time. Originally introduced as a PC game in the 2000s, all public servers were shut down by 2012. Then a dedicated fan set up a private server, and a few years later an attempt was made to revive the series in a mobile version. So it was a pleasant surprise when the announcement of O2Jam Online came relatively suddenly. My friends and I were eagerly awaiting the return of the classic rhythm game, and our expectations were high.

Unfortunately, the launch of O2Jam Online has been plagued by some terribly questionable decisions and countless bugs. The game is currently free for basic play, but players must purchase songs that can only be kept for 7 or 30 days. There is no option to unlock songs permanently, and all aspects of the game, including note skins, are only offered for a week or a month.

Outside of shady business practices, reviews have lamented the game's trashy look; it appears that the majority of the UI has been appropriated from the mobile version; the game's graphics are not as good as the mobile version; and the game's graphics are not as good as the mobile version. The resolution is less than 1920x1080 and looks painfully blurry on a 1440p monitor. Everything is stretched out, and the notes are comically large, making the whole thing quite hard to read; I won't even go into the fact that BPM is misspelled as BMP.

There is also the issue of track audio asynchrony, which makes playing a song incredibly annoying. In the short time I've been using the game, I've noticed that trying to use key bindings similar to those used in the rhythm game DJMax doesn't work. Even if I could bind, trying to use it would automatically result in a miss, and since O2Jam is traditionally a 7-button game, the different colors of the middle button would go a long way toward determining which way the notes were coming in. However, the lack of a third color on the middle button makes the table of notes unnecessarily difficult to read.

Perhaps most odd is the fact that O2Jam Online has no online features. The whole thing is single-player-only, which is the crappy icing on an already pretty crappy cake: according to Steam250 scores, the game ranks 18th worst on Steam. Still, its percentage rating remains considerably worse than the 17 above. It is also, as far as I know, the only game on Steam with an overall rating below 10%.

In recent memory, the only game I can think of that was similarly poorly received was last year's eFootball. The game originally launched on Steam with a rating of only 8% and quickly became one of the platform's all-time worst rated games (open in new tab). It has since managed to creep up to 32%; will O2Jam Online be able to achieve the same kind of improvement? That would be very disappointing.