Games We Went From Loving To Hating

Kotaku recently published a discussion about games their writers went from loving to hating.  The games those gamers mentioned (Skyrim, Destiny 2, and ) were all interesting choices.  We actually don’t hate any of those games yet but maybe we will down the road.  We loved the question though and got to thinking about games we played that we started out loving but wound up hating.  To be clear, we never finished some of these games so if they had a third act twist that saved the title, we never found it.  Still, if you ask us for games we went from loving to hating, here are four titles:

Oh Brutal Legend! We wanted to love you!

Brutal Legend

I really loved everything about Brutal Legend at the start.  I love Jack Black, I love Tim Shafer and Double Fine, and I loved the premise of the game.  You play as a roadie for heavy metal bands who finds himself trapped in a world seemingly inspired by heavy metal album covers.  You meet some lively characters and discover that your guitar has magical powers in this world.  It’s a very cool premise.  HOWEVER, about midway through the game, the gameplay transitions from brawling to real time strategy, which is much less fun.  Ugh, building armies and directing resources is not nearly as fun as the battling gameplay that preceded it.  I gave the game several more hours before dropping out and leaving the game behind.  Brutal Legend starts strong and has a lot going for it, but that gameplay kills it.  It remains one of the few Tim Shafer/Double Fine games that I don’t enjoy.

This game is 95% awesome but that last 5% is brutal. Kinda like skydiving if your parachute doesn’t work.

A Way Out

As cooperative gaming enthusiasts, we were excited to play through a cooperative game that gave us two fully formed characters in a tightly-plotted game with a variety of gameplay.  The game puts you and a friend in the roles of two convicts looking to escape prison and seek revenge on the uber-criminal who put them there.  The game follows you as you create your plan, escape the jail, make your way through the countryside, and finally find the bad guys who put you in jail.  90% of the game is smart, fun, interesting, and very much worth your time.   HOWEVER, the ending of the game really burned us.  (SPOILERS COMING) At the very end of the game, the game suddenly reveals that one of your characters was an undercover officer the entire time (which raises a LOT of questions about the game’s story).  The game then switches and asks you to battle your partner with whichever player lives becoming the one survivor.  There’s no peaceful option: one of your characters must kill the other.  The whole thing feels much less plot driven and more like the ending of a Saw movie.

Even Kevin Conroy can’t save this mess. What is it about the third episode in Bat-trilogies that goes so horribly wrong?

Arkham Knight

The Arkham series was the most interesting take on Batman since The Dark Knight (though there’s been a lot of interesting stuff lately!).  Arkham City is still one of the best games out there and a fun game to play.  Arkham Knight introduced a new story of a mysterious villain taking over Gotham City that, once again, pitted Batman against his rogues’ gallery (both living and dead) with the same excellent combat, writing, and graphics we’d come to expect from the series.  HOWEVER, the game decided to include the Batmobile, which must have seemed like a good idea at the time.  The Batmobile was a large part of Batman’s mythology and the Batman movies, so it made sense that the car would appear in the games.  Unfortunately, the Batmobile wasn’t nearly as fun as grappling around the city.  Both the puzzles and the battles (specifically the endless tank battles) were not nearly as entertaining as they needed to be.  The plot and performances kept us going through the game, but these Batmobile levels became the reason this was the first Arkham title we didn’t play through twice.

Uhm, I’m not saying it’s a racist game…..but I do think it’s a game racists would like.

Resident Evil 5

Resident Evil 4 was such an amazing game that the thought of a cooperative adventure with the same gameplay seemed like a lot of fun, and it kind of was.  Sure, the game feels a little racist as most every dark skinned character you meet in this African adventure is a crazed zombie that your decidedly lighter-skinned heroes needs to kill.  There’s also the horrible ending, in which one character must battle the evil uber Boss Wesker while your other character dangles off a cliff for a ridiculously long time.  But overall it’s the lack of horror that kills it.  The game abandons any pretense of being a Resident Evil game and instead becomes a cooperative shooter.  This might work, except that the game maintains the rigid control scheme that the previous titles used.  In a single player horror experience, this might make sense.  Here, though, it just makes every level frustrating to play.  It took another sequel and Dead Space 3 for designers to start to rethink the idea of cooperative horror.  We’re not saying it can’t be done, but it definitely has never been done.