bryce0lynch

I just finished Crysis and I'm pissed. I'm pissed enough to write this opus, and maybe even to start my very own small game review site. What am I pissed about? The very same stuff that has pissed me off a hundred times before. I'm going to use Crysis and Bioshock as flamebait since they were the last two I played.

Escort Missions
WTF is up with this? It is 2007/2008, right?! Why do they still have these? "Nomad I'm a lose, save me!" "Nomad I'm a big bad dude but can't take care of myself." Jesus, who's idea of fun is playing "protect the Tool"? These things suck. They change the game completely and are absolutely positively an unqualified and brightly labeled ticket to the No Fun Zone. Bioshock lets your escort continually respawn, which is better, but still, this garbage is a crutch. On my magnificent new site I'm going to give any game with an escort mission an F-. I'll upgrade it to a F+ if the idiot you are escorting can respawn.


Take away your stuff
I've spent the entire game carefully rationing my ammo. One shot one kill. I'm searched every nook and cranny for extra supplies & ammo and nice new weapons. I expend my resources carefully ... and then the frigging game takes them away. "Hey, I know you spent a lot of time working on this, but, SUCK IT." WTF? This is fun? I think not. I don't want to hear any rationalizing either "Oooo, you were captured and they took your stuff away." Screw that. What you meant to say is "The lazy ass developers put in a cinematic in which you were captured." If I got captured because I was an idiot then that's fine, but because of a cut-scene? I think not. This happened multiple times in Crysis and at least once in Bioshock. Christ, there must be a better way to add challenge. Oh wait, lazy developers ... right.


Low Ammo
This usually happens right after the Take Away Your Stuff BS. The game purposefully makes ammo low. That's not fun. Now I'm not talking about finding ammo in the normal course of play, oh no, I'm talking about getting all your stuff taken away, running in to an armory and finding 3 bullets. While this is hard to quantify exactly, I KNOW when it is taking place.


Vehicle Mission
I've spent 99.9% of the game on foot shooting people in the head and now suddenly you're putting me in a car? Now, I'm not talking about something sitting on the road that I choose to get in to, like the cars in Crysis & Far Cry. I'm not even talking about the hang gliders & boats in those games. Oh now, I'm referring to stooopid missions like the VTOL garbage in Crysis. Hey! We know you bought a FPS and not a flight/driving/sub sim, but we thought we'd make you do this! Oh, and we didn't spend much on it so the mechanism sucks and you'll be unfamiliar with the controls. Good Luck! Jumping in the car or boat for 5 minutes, or taking a brief hang glide to the other side of the rive is nice, and also my choice. Forcing me in to some screwy thing with crappy control is not.


Rail shooter
If I had wanted a rail shooter then I'd go play House of the Dead or Time Crisis. Once again: forcing me in to a situation I didn't choose is a cardinal sin. These stoopid missions always have infinite ammo and they always suck. Hmm, I'd love to see a game where you had an option to get a driver, but making me? That's a no no.


Respawn
Once again, I carefully expend my carefully collected resources to wipe out the baddies, so I can go in for the final assault ... only to find out that the the POS game has respawned the enemies. This is the game developer punishing you and that is not cool. Bioshock was terrible at this; you'd clear out some space and the game would either respawn or you'd trigger something to make the respawn happen (like the moron honey bee room.) This is a very lazy way to add challenge. You want a bunch of guys to show up in a jeep once the alarm is tripped? That's great ... but the next base up the line had better have that many fewer guys in it.


Boss Fight
These come in two crappy types: puzzle fights and easy fights. Puzzle fights are the bigger offender. You know what I'm talking about: there's some big bad guy on who your super nuke projecting gun doesn't work and you have to figure out that shooting the mud bubbles will stun him to 1/10th of a second and allow you to run up put the fungal spray on his big toe. This is not fun. The second type is silly. They put in a big boss and make him simple to kill. The final ship in Crysis is a good example of this. Shoot the turrets, shoot the cannon, shoot the hatch, Game Over. Why have a boss fight then? Hey, I know, let's just not have one at all! Or ... and I know this is going to be a revelation, make it a straight forward fight in which ... (ready for it) Your guns work! Yeah!



I still hold Far Cry up as the best FPS ever. The story could have been better (in fact I loved the mythology in Bioshock and the story in Crysis was great) but the gameplay was solid. I can't recall any stooopid stuff at all. Is was open, the game-play was not completely linear (Here's a base. Evade or assault, your choice how on both) and it was a fun shooter. Compare to Crysis where many of the bases are up against cliff faces ... you have a very limited ability to choose how you assault.


I like games like HL2: linear and nice gameplay. I like games like Painkiller: respawns & run & gun. Those games types are both more action & arcade shooters to me. A good FPS needs strategy to keep me interested. The first R6 games were great at this, as was Far Cry. This new breed of games just does not appeal to me.

The Bus

I do like games where you start out with full power, then get it taken away, then build yourself up.

nemein

Some good criticisms and annoyances there. To add one, my biggest pet-pev is difficulty levels. IMHO on "easy" the game should be more or less in tourist mode. If you do something stupid/screw something up and get killed, you deserve it. If, however, you're killing off the enemy but due to the mechanics of the game or whatever you're replaying the same sequence over and over again that's not "easy", nor is it fun. Jericho is the best/most recent example I can think of this. Even on easy there were several section where I thought I was doing everything right but between running around trying to kill the enemy, and healing your other characters everyone would die and then you're back to the beginning [1]. I never did get through the final boss battle. Unless I was just missing something entirely I knew what needed to be done but the game kept killing all my characters off before I could do it


To add another one, non-skipable cut scenes. I know this doesn't directly effect game play, but IMHO most game stories are not that great and frankly I'd rather get back to the game. Forcing a cut scene to explain a story I don't really care about just slows the game down. The obvious corollary to this is when they make a cut scene skipable but give some info in the cut scene that is needed to complete the mission/part of the game. If it's important to the game it should happen while you're in the game, not in the cut scene.


[1] This brings up another addition to the list... limited saves and check points. On older systems w/ limited memory I can maybe understand why there may not be a save anywhere option. These days though the only reason for not having it is to artificially make the game harder, and to make the programming easier.

MasterofDVD

Some games like that are fun but when it happened in the Metroid Prime games it just pissed me off each and every time. It only served to remind me that each time I got one little upgrade I would have the displeasure of retracing all my steps in the game up to that point to find every area that was either unaccessible or out of reach.

bryce0lynch

Good point about cut scenes. I also forgot the Fetch Quests. Bioshock was terrible at this. What were there, four major multi-part fetch quests? Ug. That's lame, and it's also the major reason I gave on replaying the game to try other plasmid types: I didn't want to screw with the fetch quests. Those, and really all of the issues, are mostly crutches for weak level design and gameplay.

Ocelot

Some good points there, i share some of the pains too... oh well, it's a game and that's pretty much the excuse for everything. My major grip is saving the game. They should allow you to save the game any time you want or at least reasonably space out the check points (i.e. Heavenly Sword or Gears of War).

lordwow

I agree with some of them, but for every complaint, I think I've seen it done effectively elsewhere.

If you take away all of those things, you've got yourself DOOM.

Trout

I liked HL2 also, but it was the driving parts that I hated. I also hated the stealth only parts of No One Lives Forever 1+2.

kakihara1

Does the C-130 mission on COD4 count as a rail shooter? If so I think they can be awesome if done properly. I thought that part was a nice change of pace.

And I don't mind the driving stuff in HL2.

McHawkson

[psst]It's AC-130, not C-130.[/psst]

Panda Phil

Non-skippable cutscenes are the devil if you get stuck and have to replay a section more than once.

The Bus

What about "nice" things the developer can do?

I like games where you've got an automatically recharging weapon at all times. This can be something as simple as the Crowbar in Half-Life or it can be something like the Dispersion Pistol in Unreal, which got stronger as you went through the game.

I'm also a big fan of maps.

Spicollidriver1

I agree with most of what you say. I just finished Timeshift and they had both versions of boss battles an annoying puzzle boss that only got hurt by one gun, and everything else gave simple clues on what to do except this one, and then after you do beat this thing you walk for 30 seconds and you get a ridiculously simple boss. Also I don't like changing the formula at the end. Timeshift is also guilty of this the levels are all long and the final level is very short.

RichC2

Agree with the Escort Missions and Boss Fights comments, disagree with most of the other stuff, and actually prefer the more recent incarnations of R6 (They're just way more fun).


Oh, and your comment at the end "New breed of game doesn't appeal to me" pre-dates Far Cry. The new breed is stuff like STALKER, which thrills you with the prospect of an open world... which in turn is boring as hell.