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Video games need to balance a lot of aspects in order to deliver a great experience. Story is an important element, with the narrative being one of the main factors that push players to keep going through the game. A bad story will have players bored and ready to put down the controller within minutes.
However, one other vital element to a video game is the gameplay itself. While a story can be a great way to keep players entertained, bad gameplay can lead to players not feeling engaged enough with the game itself. Or it might become too frustrating to play for long periods of time.
Video games with a bad gameplay design might be difficult to get back to, or even harder to recall, as these traumatic memories might get repressed over time. So, as a refresher on which old games to not pick up a second time, here are five video games which players might have forgotten have bad gameplay design.
Note: This article reflects the writer's opinon.
5 times when gameplay was a cumbersome chore in video games
1) Mafia 3
This title is the third installment in the Mafia video game series and was developed by Hangar 13. Published by 2K in October 2016, this game was released for PCs, Xbox One, and PS4. It tells the story of Lincoln Clay, a Vietnamese war veteran and former criminal who is forced to return to a life of crime in the fictional city of New Bordeaux.
Mafia 3 has some great story beats, great voice acting, and performances, as well as some of the best visuals in the series so far. The cinematics do a great job of rolling the story forward. Unfortunately though, that’s as far as Mafia 3 goes in terms of its pros, and when a game’s best feature is its cutscenes, one cannot expect great things from it.
The sheer repetitiveness of its gameplay was an overwhelmingly dull grind, with the same-looking levels and backgrounds, same kill animations, and the same enemies. Most players did not even make it out of the initial prologue because the gameplay was just so mind numbingly boring. There is reusing assets and then there is Mafia 3.
2) Alan Wake
From developer Remedy, Alan Wake launched in 2010 for the Xbox 360, with the eponymous protagonist who goes to a small town known as Bright Falls to break out of his writer’s block. The game is an action-adventure experience as well, and includes psychological thriller elements.
Playing from a third-person perspective, Wake has to deal with various supernatural forces that have seemingly come from the nearby Cauldron Lake. Enemies take the form of various shades or shadows which must first be incapacitated with a bright light, and then shot. And this is where the gameplay takes a sudden dip in quality.
Players need to constantly switch between a source of direct light, such as a flashlight, or a giant spotlight, and a single action pistol or revolver. This needs to be done for every enemy, which makes tackling them a very monotonous and repetitive experience.
3) The Last Guardian
The Last Guardian is a heartbreakingly sweet tale of a giant mystical creature Trico who is a bird-mammal hybrid, and a young boy who remains nameless throughout the game. With beautiful environments, and the very real animal-like AI of Trico, this video game will leave players in tears by the end of ot. That is, of course, if they reach the end.
There are many reports of players getting frustrated with this video game, and this is mostly due to the aforementioned AI of the creature. At the beginning of the game, when the boy and Trico have not bonded enough, it takes the creature a while to understand what is required of him when being directed by the boy.
This leads to many instances during the platforming sequences when players need Trico to go one way, but the lovable doofus will hop a step too low, or high, or just fail to understand the need at fall.
Worst of all is when the boy needs to jump across gaps himself, following which Trico needs to catch him. Many a times, it might be so that Trico just looks on obliviously as players tumble to their deaths.
4) Aliens: Colonial Marines
This is probably an instance that not many will easily forget, as Aliens: Colonial Marines was quite a memorable video game, but not in a good way. Published by SEGA and developed by Gearbox Software, the game was highly anticipated before launch, especially by fans of the Alien franchise.
Unfortunately, it was these fans that took the biggest blow with this game. While people were expecting a horror-based shooter, what they got instead was a horde mode beat ‘em up, only with guns. Since the highly resilient Xenomorphs from the game took so few bullets to kill, it was a wonder why they posed such a threat to Ripley and Co. in the movies at all.
The sheer volume of Xenomorphs thrown at the player is nearly comical, and even then it was nearly impossible to die in this game, despite playing in single-player with AI companions. Speaking of AI, the Xenomorphs were also not the stalking predators fans were used to, having been reduced to less resourceful than imaginable due to a single missing letter in their code.
5) Mass Effect
If one recalls the original Mass Effect video game, they will mostly remember the start of their Commander Shepard’s journey, hunting down Saren and stopping him from calling the Reapers into the Milky Way galaxy, at least for the time being. That is because it is easy to forget just how clunky it really was when players had to move about and fight enemies.
One of the most criticised features of the first Mass Effect video game were its un-intuitive controls and unresponsive combat. With a circular reticule that was never clear where one was actually shooting, and no quick way to change direction, gun fights in close quarters were nearly impossible to win. Shepard handled like a truck, while the squadmates were suicidal.
However, a large number of these issues were fixed going forward, and since the launch of the Legendary Edition, even the first game has become enjoyable. And yet, the M35 Mako still remains a pile of scraps on wheels, with not even the Legendary Edition being able to fix it.
