The entire Mass Effect series. Many of the missions were dredging through mostly empty buildings that had copy-pasted boxes and random shit in them. Just generic buildings with generic crap stuffed into them. The world felt purposeless, sterile, and generic to me.
Also, the story just didn’t really grab me that much as I cringe at the romance parts of any story. And lastly, the gameplay was just clunky and awkward to me.
I played through fhe whole series thinking the good part was about to happen since there was hype for the game.
Out of curiosity, who did you romance, and why?
No one. Because it’s incredibly cringy.
So am I to assume there was more to the story that didn’t click with you than the optional narrative sub-branch that you chose not to engage with?
I love the series, but I played the games when they came out. It’s true that the level design of ML2 suffers from it being a cover shooter and ML1 is very dated now.
Which of the three titles did you hate most/represents your dislike best?
I do wish they’d done more with the buildings.
The structures being carbon-copy was lore, they’re built in factories and dropped from ships.
But that doesn’t mean they all need the same boxes in a row layout internally, some personality would have been great and pretty easy to implement.
Hot take alert
Hollow knight silksong.Its such a huge letdown for me as a massive fan of Hk… but they did so many things that are just… mean. They disrespect the player constantly… tc actually TROLLS YOU with trick benches n shit. But mainly waste so much of your time with shitty padded content. Fucking fetch quests, timed ‘flower’ quests by the dozen. Most of the primary content ends up being “just like hollow knight, but worse, and now do 10x more of the worse version.” So its unoriginal AND inferior to the source.
I tried so hard to love it and its nothing but frustration in the end.
I stopped playing it after the credits rolled only for someone to tell me there’s a secret Act 3 if you do some really specific stuff. I don’t really care for games that require guides, especially if they gate a bunch of content behind it, so I never came back to it.
However, I did enjoy the first two acts of Silksong much more than the first game. I was never a big fan of Hollow Knight and considered it among the worst of popular metroidvanias. But Silksong was pretty good outside of the fetch quests. Unlockable alternate move sets was probably my favorite bit
Dispatch.
It goes the old telltale way of presenting fake choices that dont really matter because the optional character are being written out of team scenes mostly, one romance option is completely ignored because the devs clearly favoured the other and put her in every scene and the dispatching minigame they advertised the game with has absolutely 0 impact on anything. You could fail every dispatch, only do the mandatory ones and nothing would change.
Super Tux Party
I’m sorry but we need something more modern
For me, it’s borderlands 2
I thought the gameplay was pretty good, in a “turn your brain off and shoot guys with gradually increasing numbers” kind if way, and I absolutely adored whenever Handsome Jack showed up, but that’s pretty much it
I’ve heard from more than a few sources that the shooting on that game’s peak, but it’s just kind of generic. Outside of Jack, I thought the writing was honestly pretty lacklustre as well, even getting annoying in more than one instance (CATCH A RIIIIIDE FUCK OFF DIPSHIT). The cell-shaded artsyle is quite pretty, I will give it that
At its core, I think it’s just… fine.
I love that game, spent hundreds of hours in it a while back, and don’t remember fuck all about the story.
it’s a shoot 'em up loot game, and it does a great job of it IMO
absolutely a brainded activity though. it and Bioshock are two different frames of mind when you’re playing them
Did you play it solo or with people? I found the game to be fairly dull solo. It was better with people but the loot system still allowed a lot to be desired especially if you played with greedy people.
I get tired pretty quick of games where the multiplayer aspect is considered important to enjoying the game. If your friends are with you, you can enjoy literally sitting in the dirt doing basically nothing, just chatting. If your game requires me to also drag friends into it like some cultist, just to make it pass the bar into ‘fun’ then the game is a failure, plain and simple. They don’t get credit for the fun I brought with me to the show I paid for.
I’d played through about half of it myself years ago, and again fully with a friend recently
The Outer Worlds was so bad I had to put the controller down and abandon it. A fan made song got the feeling of “dystopian capitalism in space” better than the actual game did.
And an older one that’ll get me burned at the stake: Fallout New Vegas is the worst of the first person fallout games.
I couldn’t connect with Outer Worlds either. I gave it a good shot but it didn’t give me any new feelings or enjoyment.
New Vegas was one of the best games of its type… for the time. It doesn’t hold up well on a technical level, the side quests are largely less immersive and interesting because our expectations have broadly changed. It was by far the best game I had played… in 2010. A lot has changed in the intervening 15 years and now the game feels small, cramped and limited in scope, to say nothing of how dated the graphics are.
What people are really saying when they hype up New Vegas was how much the story mattered. And how you had actual choices that impacted things, something that is dreadfully absent in modern games that have to play it safe and make sure the player has exactly the experience intended. When was the last time you played a game where you could skip right to the last boss and kill him (or join him!) and then the game goes on and people now know what happened or can learn that you did it? It would be AMAZING with today’s technical advances to have that kind of freedom and involvement with a storyline.
I get that people like the story and feel like they have an influence on it, but for me it felt railroaded even from the start. “Oh yeah it’s open world but if you go anywhere other than the path we laid out for you you’ll die by deathclaws” is what it’s known for.
My biggest gripe is that when I play fallout I want post apocalyptic retro futurism. 50s vision of the future gone wrong. I feel like I don’t get that with NV and that’s the whole theme of the franchise. It’s the pizza at the Chinese buffet, like, I’m not here for that, why are you here? This is just Nevada but slightly shittier.
I mean… sure, I guess it bears mentioning my first playthrough I did brave the deathclaws and survived by being sneaky and took a wildly different path than most people at the time.
The idea isn’t that there’s an easier path of least resistance you can take, but that it actually let’s you go off the rails if you give it effort or come up with some logical ideas.
In modern gaming, solving problems with logic is almost dead, and NV had a lot of that.
Ok, but compare that to breath of the wild. The game really is an open world. And you can go right up to the boss and kill him with a stick of you know what you’re doing. You, as a player, decide to go get stronger first. You don’t have characters specifically telling you to avoid an area, and a quest line that specifically takes you down a specific path that gives you a specific narrative.
Plus it’s got all sorts of logic puzzles like, all over the place.
Hell in fo3 you don’t get railroaded until the final mission, first time I played it I didn’t even go to megaton until way later. Fonv starts you off with it. For a game that is supposed to encourage exploration to start off saying not to? C’mon.
For a game that is supposed to encourage exploration to start off saying not to?
It’s an odd point to get hung up on, I can certainly describe a lot of areas the game is lacking by today’s standards and some other open-world type games, but this wasn’t one of them for me. Some people are going to feel challenged by being told “don’t go there” and some people will feel offended and some people won’t think much of it I guess.
Oh really? I did have fun with the Outer Worlds. Nothing too amazing, but it was fun enough to keep me invested. Parvati was also a large reason for that, I loved her character.
With 2 out I thought I’d give the original one more chance. I wish I hadn’t. The story is just as bad as I remember, and the gameplay is somehow worse.
I mean the only way to talk about the story is that you’re better off just running through without thinking about it, because at every level it just fails at its messaging. It simply is what it is. What compounds that suck is that the game isn’t even that well designed of a shooter, or implemented well. The controls are gummy, your character feels weightless, and as someone almost 7 feet tall IRL I still feel like the POV is a foot too high. Guns feel boring, the skill system is unimpactful, dialog is stilted, characters are flat as cardboard, and overall the entire game just feels like you’re meant to squint at it until you forget what you’re doing and just reminisce about playing fallout. All I feel when I play is a distinct fear that I will see the seeds of Outer Worlds in games I loved as a kid before I knew to look for such flaws.
I don’t know if the story is bad, I just don’t care about any of it. Parvati’s story was cute and I liked helping her but I couldn’t tell you anyone else’s name and I was playing it yesterday.
The loot system just feels like it doesn’t matter. Maybe I screwed myself over by doing an INT based build cause my science hammer just demolishes everything.
I wish I could say you did; almost any build works at almost any difficulty. Int is famous for being the most broken stat, though. All you need to beat the entire game is to start with very high int and dex, then grab a hunting rifle.
You’re right BTW, the loot system doesn’t matter at all. Consumables only matter at supernova difficulty, and even then just because you have to manage hunger and thirst. The drug boosts are nice enough in theory but are completely unnecessary for any strategy. Damage types are pretty unnecessary, and beyond Spacers Choice weapons don’t really upgrade enough to be worth switching. Armor is unnecessary on normal, and is essentially wet paper on anything harder. All said, stims are the only thing that matter unless you’re on supernova; if you are, get ready to fill out your inventory with bread and water.
I didn’t think it was so bad I had to stop playing, but I did stop playing one night once it got late and just never started it again, nor had the desire.
It seemed fine enough, but it just didn’t click with me I guess.
Well just fyi. The end missions are currently, still today, broke. So only one ending available that is regardless of whatever choices you made.
I loved the first one. I like this one but they made some bad changes.
But mostly they need to fix the mission bugs.
First one you could change the armor and weapons on the companions.
Also I really liked the vicar and Parvati. Vicar was like a snarky gay guy and I loved it. I will admit the other 3 were blah. But the new companions on OW2 are kinda bland.
I don’t really like any of them. Niles and inza had potential but wasn’t developed.
And I straight up dislike Tristan’s personality. He’s just awful.
Aza can be entertaining. If they made her more impulsive I think that could have been fun.
For instance if you take too long in negotiations and shes present. She just starts attacking people after some time limit.Or randomly attacks strangers she doesn’t like the look of.
They could have done something interesting with her.
But mostly they need to fix the damn quest bugs so I can finish the game.
Also there was a quest in ow1 where some sketchy dude asks you to do some sketchy thing. And you realize this during the quest. You can go back to him and get the reward. Or sucker punch him.
I wanted more of that in ow2. Didn’t get it.
Life
Graphics are great. Hardware requirements are low, but there are bugs that accumulate with more play time. Learning curve is infinite and permadeath is only option despite a bunch of claims to mod/patch it. PVP is broken, constant spawn camping and pay to play behavior. Microtransactions are a pain. Huge variety of mission types, yet it still ends up feeling like a bunch of fetch quests sometimes. Side quests are the way to go, the main campaign is not super rewarding
Side quests are the way to go, the main campaign is not super rewarding
The worst part is that you’re forced to spend at least 1/3 of your time playing grinding out the main campaign. Then you are highly incentivised to spend another 1/3 of your time in game not playing due to the rest mechanic. That only leaves 1/3 of your time in game for any other tasks, including extra preparation for the main quest. Not to mention the fatigue system which often leaves you unable to do side quests when you have the opportunity.
I’m glad I didn’t roll any of the classes with extra lives, to be honest.
Yeah, mid characters except few…
Nine Sols. Played it right after finishing Silksong to keep the metroidvania kick going.
The parrying was some of the worst feeling parrying I’ve ever felt in any game, the world felt tiny and extremely linear, the narrative was predictable and felt extremely flat, and the final boss is the only time I’ve ever switched to a story mode difficulty in any game just to get it over with, I love difficult games but that difficulty spike is absurd and the game never remotely prepares you for that.
They advertise this game as a Sekiro-like metroidvania, while it feels like they completely miss what made Sekiro work or what a metroidvania is.
I felt that way for the first couple of hours and then the parrying “clicked” with me. Also you get some items/skills that make parrying easier/stronger.
Luigi’s Mansion 3. At least if you consider 6 years ago recent. It got some really good reviews at the time, and it honestly makes me wonder if we were playing the same game. I loved the first one, by the way - I got an A rank while also getting golden frames on all the portraits (on the PAL version where you need more money).
I only persisted with the game because it was a birthday gift (and due to the sunk cost fallacy, I suppose), but I think it might be the game I’ve completed that I enjoyed the least. It looks nice, and some of the boss ghost encounters were charming, but the gameplay itself was fairly monotonous since they simplified the ghost catching mechanics from LM1 (I didn’t really play LM2, since it was on 3DS). Gooigi would have been a decent addition, but his puzzles generally just didn’t feel very fleshed out. It felt like they were either “I need two vacuums” or “I can’t fit through this grate”.
Also, I think Nintendo took the criticism that the first game was too short well and truly to heart, because LM3 might be the most filler-stuffed game I’ve ever played. Half the time when you get an elevator button, you get screwed over in some way and have to find it again. And don’t get me started on fucking Poulterkitty, when that little bastard showed up for the second time I legitimately thought about quitting the game there and then. The final boss was awful, too, which left an even more bitter taste in my mouth.
Luigi’s Mansion 3 might be the only game I’ve ever played where I thought “Thank god I don’t have to play that anymore” once I finished it.
any game that is very short for its cost. plus i saw re6 and its just dragging on the boss battles(like making them very hard to kill) to prolong the game. SWSH to recent pokemon game, knew the slop in the beginning never bought into the future switch games, and it turns it gets worst every game. by the way the gamefreaks ceo said it was going to be SLOP after slop, but people bought it anyways.
Paradise Killer.
Amazing soundtrack that is on repeat with the greatest in my playlist, but terrible character design and condescending to the player character.
Too bad.
Condescending in what way?
The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy - the disrespect for player’s time is actually insane, never seen anything like that before or since. Hundred endings which should have been like 30 tops with a decent quality control. 100 days which should also be 30 tops for each ending.
I really wanted to get to that one cool ending, but you have to play through who knows how many stupid filler routes to unlock it - I just couldn’t do it.
Don’t get me started on the day-to-day in the game: the repetitive slow-ass animations for every day, you having to go through motions to skip every day. And battles… Even when “skipping” them you spend literal minutes. Like why… And so many times you can’t even skip them.
But what really soured everything for me is the final battle in that one ending.
spoiler
That one super climactic battle, where your entire team stands together against the strongest foe yet, without the respawn ability or the healer.
By juggling my squad, I avoided any deaths before accomplishing the goal for the battle. I thought that I would get a cool ending due to me trying hard to keep everyone alive. But then enemies (which constantly respawn) receive a power-up which makes them one shot my guys. Well, ok, I thought, maybe I can save some of them. By using placeable tools and overpowered protagonist, I kept some of my team alive while the timer for the battle went down steadily. Enemies kept spawning, but I kept some of my guys alive. The timer went down to zero, I was relieved, but then apparently that was a lose timer? Apparently, to win you HAVE to get your entire team dead? If you struggle as hard as you can to keep even some of them alive - you insta lose? But then if you win like you were supposed to (by killing your entire squad), the place blows up anyway killing everyone including the protagonist? That is actually insane. How did anyone come up with something like that…
Final Fantasy X.
Lots of people hype the game up, but boy is the gameplay boring to me. I love a good turn-based game, but not turn-based battles.
Especially didnt like Blitz ball. And the story wasn’t good enough for me to keep playing to find out. I played about 20 hours and got to the Seymour Wedding scene, after the desert area. That’s about where I dropped the game.
To be fair, I don’t really like JRPGs that require grinding, especially turn-based games with no tactical movement which require grinding, so I was already not going to like the game. But I had read that the story was one of the best among Final Fantasy. Also super hate random battles, especially when I am just trying to explore somewhere I already feel like I “cleared” out with battles. Also, gigachad Lulu was carrying like the entire time I played. L bozo Waka, your brother hated you bro. Ject would have been a better protagonist than Titus. Better design too.
Honorable Mention: XenoSaga.
My experience with XenoSaga can be summed up with: “When I am in a Designing Horrendous Boss Battles and my competition is The Developers of XenoSaga:”
turn-based game, but not turn-based battles.
What does this mean?
I can understand the blitzball distaste though, it was polarising even then.
I dont hate turn-based games as a whole. I do enjoy turn-based games like XCOM, Tuned Heart, Vagrant Story (its combat is somewhat turn-based), Galactic Civilization, and Mega Man Battle Network, for example.
I do not enjoy turn-based games where the only thing the player does is select an action from a list, with static party members and the same music/cutscene/background etc. For example: Wizardry, Octopath Traveler (I liked the art though), Pokemon, and XenoSaga. I also didn’t like Slay the Spire because of this. I didn’t like the autocombat in the XenoBlade games either.
Its hard for me to pinpoint exactly why I might like one game and dislike another even if they are similar in gameplay. Legend of Dragoon held my attention because at least I had the QTE during battles that gave me something that would directly impact my actions, but my save was corrupted and I haven’t got around to restarting the game.
The only time I actually enjoyed a game with this kind of gameplay was ironically the mobile game NieR Reincarnation (RIP). It wasn’t exactly turn-based, but it was similar in that all the player does in combat is select when to fire a character’s skill. Everything else is automatic. But I really like all of Yoko Taro’s works, and I liked the story and felt it was worth going through the combat for the story. Also, combat was over pretty fast, usually ending under 60-90 seconds.
Blitzball was interesting but I felt like it was an undercooked gamemode. It wasn’t explained super well and was frustrating occasionally. It didn’t really add to the story and just felt like filler, so except for the ones time I was forced to play it, I never touched it.
Final Fantasy X is probably my favorite Final Fantasy of all time. Just don’t play X-2, assume the story ends immediately.
The HD remaster has some “cheats” to smoothen your experience, if you ever want to give it another shot:
- No random battles
- Infinite gil
- All non key items
- invencibily (to make up for low levels)
This way you can enjoy the story and move quickly through the game.
If you don’t enjoy turn based battles nor grinding I think this IP is just not for you. Definitely nothing before Final Fantasy 12. Maybe Final Fantasy 12 is ok, though I thought the story was on the weak side.
Ha, yes I heard X2 was pretty universally disliked.
I have really tried to like Final Fantasy. Over the years I have tried plyaing a few of them, like the FF 13 - 2 Lightning (?) demo, whichever game had “Lightning” in the title. I didn’t really like it. I suppose the only Final Fantasy I will ever like is FF Tactics.
IMO, if I am going to use that many cheats just for the story, I might as well just watch the game “movie” or whatever on YouTube.
13-2 is one of the worst ones, to be honest.
It was “Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII.”
I tried it whenever it was like brand new. I think I tried the demo before the game even launched on Xbox 360, though I can’t be certain. I don’t really remember much about what I played except the main character had pink hair I think and there was a lot of blue or like, ice on the screen.
Also tried FF 7 (the original on PSX) and FF 4 on SNES. I haven’t tried Crisis Core, but I did have it on the list of games to try, even though its not a mainline game.
Lightning Returns was boring AF. I tried to play it like 4 times but I just can’t. It’s awful.
Skyrim, it’s so damn mundane.
I recently tried Fallout 4 based off of the same expectations. Probably didn’t even make it a quarter of the way through the main story. I was having absolutely no fun. The thing that finally killed it for me was spending 5 minutes calculating which items needed to be sold at a shop and which I should keep, then getting blown up a block later, then respawning right before I did all that inventory management.
That’s because you’re playing it wrong. You see, at it’s core Skyrim is actually a puzzle game you play on the Nexus Mods website. You spend 30+ hours carefully researching, building, and tweaking the perfect pack of mods, only to immediately run out of interest in playing Skyrim once you’re finally done. The actual Skyrim installation only exists to check if you solved the puzzle correctly and it runs.
I’m in this comment and I hate it
Damn. I feel so seen suddenly.
Actually. I tried Skyrim so many times and never got into it, then I decided to give it the best shot and play with a cavalcade of QoL mods. I went from a hater to a true Skyrim enjoyer. At this point, with how pessimistic I was about the game, I think with the right setup ANYONE can enjoy it.
If you manage to install the mods
The end-game lasts about 30 seconds after boot.
“Oooh, pretty sky. Ooh, wavy plants. Ooh, god rays. Alt+F4.”
anyway, back to minecraft
minecraftminesweeperFTFY.
Real. Without my 800 mods I would‘ve never bothered finishing it. Playing/modding was probably 50/50 in terms of time spent.
Skyrim came out 14 years ago.
Thanks for the tip
The title of this post was, “What’s a recent game you’ve tried playing that isn’t worth the hype?”
14 years is hardly ‘recent’
I started gaming in the 80’s my first game was doom on a 286. Skyrim release date was recent for me and I only recently played skyrim for the first time.
The question is “What’s a recent game you’ve tried playing…?”
Not ‘What’s a recently released game you’ve tried playing…?’
Depends entirely on how you interpret the question. It could be read as “What’s a recent game you’ve tried…” (as in, a recently released game that you tried), as you’ve done, or “What’s a recent game you’ve tried…” (as in, a game you’ve tried recently) as the person you’re responding to did.
I think either interpretation is fine since the title doesn’t actually clarify either way.
can it correctly be interpreted both ways grammatically though? I think only the former is actually correct.
idk. not my area. but I think they have a point, recent can only refer to the game itself, not when you played it
ah fuck you’re absolutely right, it’s ambiguous 🤦
It is when you’re over 40.
I have the opposite opinion. I avoided it for years because of the hype (and not having proper hardware to run it).
Now I have almost 900 hours in it, and sometimes I jump in just to walk around and revisit some places.
Just get openmw and play a real elder scrolls game before Bethesda got got
Or spin up TES3MP with some friends and experience it together!
Just played through Doom: Eternal cause it was on sale for 4€ a bit back. The entire time I was wishing I was playing Doom 2016…
Yeah, I enjoyed a bit of 2016, but got bored a didn’t finish it. I think Doom Eternal I had from Steam Family Sharing (or other source I didn’t pay for) and just couldn’t get into it. I hate both of them forcing the melee kill thing that takes you out of the action to watch a cutscene, but Eternal just didn’t feel like it worked for some reason.
The new Doom games are all very different from each other. I liked what Doom 2016 was doing (even if it got repetitive) but really didn’t enjoy Eternal because the constant juggling didn’t sit with me. I haven’t tried Dark Ages but it seems like it’s doing something between 2016 and Eternal (not quite use what you want and not quite always juggle) while also adding its own dimension with the mix of melee and guns.
I would never recommend each Doom title based on the last title. But it doesn’t mean I don’t like what they’re doing. I think it’s brave to do its own thing instead of doing what is expected.
Both of your comments are a testament to why I love the new Doom games – they’re different and don’t seem to be meant to be enjoyed by every fan, every release, every time.
Apart from the first two games (and Doom 64 for that matter), each offers different gameplay and feel and it’s so, so beautiful.
I feel lucky having a blast in each one. Doom 3 is my favorite, actually, especially with the vanilla flashlight (for the uninitiated: where you can either have your weapon out or the flashlight).
Yeah. I didn’t really enjoy it, but I got into it and finished it. Once I realized that you’re expected to die and respawn frequently, and you don’t lose anything when you do, playing went a lot better.
I still don’t get that decision, because Doom has never been like that. Even arcade games don’t do that. It just felt trivially cheap at that point.
