Teardown

Some levels just feel like a grind

• Every JRPG with random battles. All of them. Chrono Trigger. Final Fantasy. Phantasy Star.

• PvEvP Extraction games. I tried Arc Raiders during the closed alpha. I tried Dark and Darker. I tried Dungeon Stalkers. I tried Sea of Thieves. I tried The Cycle. None of them were fun to me.

• MMORPGs. I really want to like this, but I hate how they fall feel like a theme park. Elder Scrolls Online Morrowind is the one I played the most, and being a fan of Morrowind,it was disappointing. I feel like I am waiting in a line for a ride whenever I am around other players doing an activity. I hate to say it, but Destiny 1 was the best feeling MMORPG I played because I didnt feel like I was waiting in a line due to other players. The zoning between solo and shared areas felt the best I guess.

Automation games, such as Factorio and Satisfactory. Idk man I keep seeing people say they're digital crack, but they're just frustrating busywork sims for me. I'm more content just playing something like Terraria, where I feel like my progress is meaningful

Souls like games. I tried, I’m just not built for them.

Final Fantasy IX. I was a religious FF player before IX, and loved VIII so much despite all its flaws, because it really went for it with new ideas and atmosphere and the draw junction system which was hackable and broken but really interesting. In many ways the most Final Fantasy of Final Fantasy, despite the widespread hate.

But the devs got so conservative for IX, might as well have been playing Dragon Quest. And the load times and frequency and lack of variety for random encounters was just insurmountably tedious.

Ark raiders. It was fun first, dropping randomly and going into abandoned buildings to loot stuff and watch out for any machines but after I played the next mission with friends, I died, lost my whole equipment (I was happy for having a nice weapon with some mods), I realized that you lose everything when you die. The other players just immediately shooting at us the next mission didn't help at all. Never touched the game again and uninstalled it right afterwards.

It's just too frustrating. The items I loot can also be collected from a chicken in the base so there's no need to play the game at all.

I really, really tried to like Ancestors: The Humankind Oddysee.

Playing as an ape, swinging from trees, eating fruits and mating. It was a lot of fun.

But there are mandatory mechanics that drag it down. You have to discover everything to progress, and you have to bring your kids and tribe along manually. The cost of failing in combat is too high. You can grind for two hours to learn your area, and then lose your best ape and 2 kids to a panther with one second of quicktime events that you haven't trained for.

Building fortifications is very laborious and I couldn't find a good reason for it.

Training the clan to build weapons eluded me.

The exploration was amazing though, and if it was less grindy, more forgiving in combat (especially with more opportunities to practice, I mean, why not allow apes to initiate play fighting with each other where you could master the quicktime bullshit without such high risk) and a more independent tribe behaviour where they advance without having to be led manually, it could be a great game.

Dark Souls 3…it is a bit hard to jump in after its slower predecessor, for some reason unknown, I just like the legacy combat system better, can’t find the rhythm in the new one…

Minecraft and others like it. I want something to work towards. Because in games where you can do anything and make your own fun, is too much after my days.

The Witcher series, I just really hate the combat system

The Outer Wilds - I get recommended this over and over, I know it's a huge hit, a cult classic, and beloved to many people. I finally got it and gave it a real solid attempt, several times so far. I understand the gameplay loop I guess, the repeating, the weird ship flying. I mean, I appreciate it and love that people are experimenting with new ways to make games that break old molds. I really like the atmosphere and maybe if I were a lot younger it would feel fresh and interesting.

But I never really started having fun, never really connected with the characters or the world, I never got hooked. Everything felt like a janky obstacle instead of progression and reward.

Maybe I'll try it again sometime, but maybe it's possible some games just don't rub me right.

Also, ITT: lots of people arguing with other people why their feelings are wrong.

Rainworld. I've started it twice now and quit a half-hour in both times. I love a good side scroller/Metroidvania, but this one has one mechanic I can't abide: a time limit. You have to rush from shelter to shelter because the world periodically floods and annihilates everything out in the open. I just want to explore at my own pace game, thank you.

Elden Ring and Dark Souls 3 both bored me to sleep. I didn't find anything in their worlds to care about, and the meta-game of endlessly memorizing monsters' attack patterns just doesn't hold my interest for more than a few minutes. I guess soulslike games are not my cup of tea.

I bounced off of Where The Water Tastes Like Wine. I didn't really even get into the gameplay because the narration in the intro just wouldn't shut up. You'd click an option, the caption would pop up, and then it would mail a request for the audio file to the developer. I'd have the caption read by the time the narrator started to speak, and the narrator talked the way old people fuck. I went "I don't have the patience for this right now, I'll come back to it later" I chose the Exit option from the menu, and the narrator started delivering a multi-line "everyone gets a break but you'll come back" dialog, which I ALT+F4'd out of the software and uninstalled it on the spot. Dim Bulb Games is one of many studios on my black list.

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

I don't find my weapon breaking every 10 minutes fun, nor do I find the endless wandering with no context clues very engaging. I swear 90% of the stuff you have to stumble onto by dumb luck. It took me months to accidentally bump into that stupid maraca tree thing and expand my inventory. That's just dumb design.

Red Dead Redemption 2. The cutscenes are too long and boring.

Original Fortnite was garbage lol. Dunno how much its changed since, but I found it to be the worst f2p battle royale game at the time.

The projectile physics were cruddy, the weapons sucked, the building mechanics seemed like an abusable/spammable gimmick more than a proper feature, there weren't any vehicles, the rewards were non existent, the graphics looked pretty lame, the emotes had nothing compared to TF2 taunts.

I had more way more fun on some random Chinese mobile pubg knockoff with touchscreen controls.

Maybe its just me, but I feel like Fortnite just got lucky by being the first on the PC/console space that was free, so it exploded in popularity. Otherwise there were a ton of much better alternatives.

God of War 2018

I gave it a full playthrough, but since then it has pretty much become my definition of AAA slop.

• The game is littered with "puzzles". The solution is always obvious within seconds and on top of that you get commentary on how to "solve" it. They just waste your time.

• Stats don't matter. Early on you get your first weapon upgrade, I think I tripled my damage. The very next enemy got some commentary about "showcasing" my new weapon. It took the exact same amount of hits as the same enemy type did before ugrading my weapon. Since weapon upgrade materials are fixed drops from bosses, everything just scales alongside you.

• The battle system in general is a slog. 9 out of 10 times throwing your axe feels like the best option. Even the post game bosses are annoying at best.

• Also, why is the camera so darn close. Your "cinematic angles" mean shit when the gameplay suffers from it.

• There are so many "cutscenes" that have you walk at a snails pace. If your "gameplay" can be executed by a rubber band on my joystick, then just give me a proper cutscene. Annoying me isn't immersive.

• You get awesome godly powers - for as long as cutscenes are running. Your super healing and mountain splitting punches mean nothing against any random draugr.

• Probably some more things, but it's been a few years.

The story was fine, but I would have enjoyed watching a cutscene compilation more than playing the game. In fact that's what I did your second entry.

No Mans Sky. I think my biggest turn off is the interface - its so unintuitive and slow, I just can't seem deal with it. I try it once every big update but that part of it doesn't seem to improve. I haven't tried it in a while.

Gran Turismo 7 was the worst offender I've had in a long time. It was very pretty and very well put together but it just wasnt fun.

But a few years later and a YT rabbit hole or two and I decided to give it a go on a very basic simrig setup and... yep, theres the fun.

Doom Eternal.

I like the original trilogy, adored Doom 2016, and I even thought Doom 3 was a decent game in its own right. So a direct sequel to Doom Eternal where Heaven gets involved and everybody says is bigger and better? Sign me the fuck up!

I bought the game and all the DLC. I played through to the end and beat the final boss, and I did not enjoy one second of it (I only finished because I can be a stubborn fool).

Things got off to a bad start when I had to sign into my Slayers Club account before the game would show me the main menu. Then when I was playing, it paused every few seconds to tell me that it couldn't connect to the server, which utterly kills the vaunted flow of combat.

And the combat. Ugh. Doom 2016 is excellently balanced, providing 10 fun weapons for different situations which let people find their own playstyles, and prioritising ammo drops when the player is low on ammo and health drops when low on health. Eternal fans claim that there is no reason to use anything other than the super shotgun, and I have no doubt that strategy worked for them, but I used all the weapons, and I don't think I used the super shotgun very much at all.

Eternal officially gives you nine weapons, but each of them has three different fire modes (except the super shotgun, which just has two fire modes and also a meathook), so there are really 26 guns plus two different grenades. And every single fucking enemy has a hardcoded weakness to two, maybe three attacks, and are barely hurt by anything else. These aren't weaknesses to individual weapons, but to specific weapons in specific modes, and some of those modes have to be unlocked by meeting specific conditions. Every single demon hits like a dump truck and moves like a motorbike, so by the time you have selected the specific weapon that will do more than a papercut, you have a completely different demon in your face. And the guns in this Doom game hold fuck all ammo even when fully upgraded. And getting upgrades often requires playing suboptimally.

Speaking of ammo, the chainsaw has been downgraded from powerful emergency weapon to tool for obtaining ammo. You can find the odd ammo pickup in levels, but 90% of the time, the only way to get more ammo is to chainsaw a weak demon (demons don't drop ammo otherwise). Because you can barely carry enough ammo to kill one heavy demon, I spent the 90% of the arena battles running around, desperately dodging attacks as I waited for the chainsaw to refill so I could get some ammo to shoot at the big demons. And the arena battles don't use waves; as soon as you kill a big demon, another one teleports in to replace it, so there is no respite until you get near the end. This did not make me feel like a berserker-packing man and a half. I felt like a weak, terrified wimp, desperately trying to survive. Fighting hordes of demons isn't epicly badass, it's a long, tiring slog, and at the end of every arena, I didn't feel empowered, I felt exhausted and relieved it was finally over.

To make an analogy, Doom 2016 is like an Italian pasta dish: a small number of high-quality, carefully-chosen ingredients that work well together. Doom Eternal is like making a sandwich of rashers, sausages, fried eggs, strawberry ice cream, venison, raspberries, spaghetti, and chocolate cake. All those things are great on their own, but the sandwich is just too much, and the flavours and textures all clash with each other.

For me, it's Elden Ring. I wanted to love the game so bad but it didn't recapture the magic of Dark Souls 1 for me. I never get past the early areas of the game because I just get bored.

Elden Ring just doesn't make the experimenter part of my brain feel good. I want to try out everything and do everything and constantly adjust to the enemies. But, in ER you are much better off focusing on one thing and getting really good at it. The game is about mechanical skill and pattern recognition, not solving the enemy like a puzzle. So, I just get bored doing the same repetitive attacks and learning when to dodge the enemies. Maybe you get to do a little bit of fun planning by picking the right element or buffs but that's about it.

I was actually really sad about it, but I came to realize that I just want to play games that are very mathy and allow me to test out lots of builds and strategies. I've actually taken an interest in JRPGs as a result and I'm enjoying it so far.

Balatro should just be renamed to Flush, every single time I win it's because I use the "discard until you have a flush" strategy, and augment that with Jupiter, wild cards, steel cards, and jokers that give bonuses for flushes or single suits.