This should still fit under the other review thread, this one is for games you didn't like enough to finish and most likely recommending other people avoid.

BioShock Infinite - Didn't like the fact you could only hold 2 weapons at once and you could never find enough lock picks to open all the locked doors

wat.

finished the game on hard, found all locked doors, still had 30 picks left over.

I just attempted to play System Shock 2, that game is ****ing hard!

BioShock Infinite seconded

It's not that it's a bad game, it's isn't a bad game. It's got some really fantastic level design at points. But even with all the fancy stuff they threw in like the rollercoaster rails and the hook arm and the girl's superpowers it's still got the same dull unsatisfying combat that kept me from finishing the first BioShock. Once you find what works for you there's very little incentive to change it up so you're waltzing through most of the game using the same 2 weapons and plasmid. Whatever happened to having Fort Bragg strapped to your back?

Binding of isaac
4 hours in, had a run with a insta win spell and a card to teleport me to the boss to use it but died to the 2nd last boss. Rage quit

One of the reasons I gave up on the original Bioshock was the stiff combat. Thought the combat in Infinite was faster paced and more fluid. It's still not a great FPS though; not enough enemy variety and it is a little repetitive.

Unfortunately the days of carrying 10 weapons at a time seem to be gone for good.

I might have to second this simply because the game is unplayable for me. Keeps artifacting after a short time playing it, and given that the save points so far are spaced out in 30-45min sections, it's nearly impossible for me to progress without speed running it.

If you're looking for a great looking FPS with awesome gunplay and variety check out RAGE. I'm still confused as to why it didn't do better - it's the best corridor shooter FPS in a long time IMO.

lol rage

Every player review of rage I read is positive, will definitely pick it up for peanuts at some point.

It's a light gun game right?

Been through a whirlwind of video game emotions today. Found Metroid Prime (been lost for a few years) in a Twilight Princess case. Plugged the Wii in completely forgetting it doesn't work anymore. Found the Gamecube in a really unlikely place and am ready to give this game another chance.

Sounds like quite the emotional roller coaster.

Sorry about your rough day. Hope you're okay, Tuma.

Steam

I dunno if you've all ever played it before, but its like a micro-transaction game where you constantly spend money and, in the end, you're not even sure why.

I've been playing this game for a very long time, yet I never seem to reach the end. It just goes on and on and on...

Finally giving up, to the extent that you can, and moving back to another game that never ends, because at least when I spend money on that game, I play it.

Darksiders II | PC

Darksiders is a loot based action RPG that feels a bit like a mix of an empty MMO world, an early Tomb Raider and a spectacle fighter. You play as Death, one of the four Horseman. Apparently all of humanity has been destroyed, and Death is on a quest to bring them back. Maybe you need to have played the first to really understand much of the story, but I felt lost up until the point I gave up about seven hours in. There are some interesting character designs and great voice acting, and the dialogue is funny and interesting without being hammy, but I feel like the game does a poor job of drawing you in to the world if you're new to the series.

I wanted to like the game. The world design is huge and well designed. If you've played Beyond Good and Evil, it feels a bit like that in the sense that you're free to move around the map in a pseudo open world fashion, with large outdoor areas connected by valleys or caves or rivers giving you several options on where to go next. The third person camera and platforming also feels similar to BG&E. It doesn't get in the way too often (outside of combat, more on that later), though it tends to hover a bit too close to the character and makes getting a sense of surroundings hard without panning the camera around with your mouse all the time. There is a lot of platforming to navigate the world, with wall running and climbing pillars and the usual PoP type fare, which felt enjoyable for the most part and gave a lot of verticality to and appreciation for the scale of each area.

The RPG and loot mechanics took away from the game for me. You're always finding items which are slight upgrades or sidegrades, and the menu system is very consoley and a pain in the ass to navigate, making me dread having to hit the O key (unrebindable afaik) and dig through radial menus to change equipment or look at the map. There are two skill trees that you put points in to, one that upgrades or offers new melee abilities, the other that seems like a necromancer type minion tree that I ignored. The end game looks to finish around level 30, but the levels come fairly slowly, about an hour a level. I mostly didn't notice when I hit a new level, or notice much change to my character.

I could overlook that if the combat was interesting, but it's incredibly painful. Usually you're fighting 3-4 big monsters at a time. There's a lock-on button that lets you dodge roll backwards and forwards and side to side, which works until you get boxed in by one of the enemies behind you. I learned to avoid using the lock on, but even then, the camera is always getting obstructed by the huge models and it's hard to tell what's going on unless you run in and swing a few times, then roll back out. It makes all the fights tedious, and the enemies have a ton of HP relative to my damage. There's a combo system like a dumbed down version of that in DmC or the Arkham games, with an in game combo guide you can pull up if you feel like braving the awful menu system, but they mostly seem to give names to the successive levels of spamming a single button and at least early feels fairly superflous. Each dungeon has a few minibosses and a main boss fight, and they're decently varied with some unique mechanics thrown in, but this is what finally made me uninstall the game.

You have a free aim first person mode that you enter by hitting Q, but on the PC, if you're not running at the default resolution of 720p (I believe) and the default mouse sensitivity which is really low, the free aim camera is nearly impossible to aim. It's nearly as janky as Dark Souls with unmodded M&K. A lot of fights involve you aiming at exploding cystals or trying to hit specific things with the revolver, or throwing bombs at certain spots. The fight that made me uninstall the game has you dodging around a huge arena trying to pick up fallen bombs and throw them at the boss while things are exploding around you and you're dodging waves of enemies and the boss who does a huge ground slam and the camera which is usually doing it's damndest to piss you off. If you manage to successfully throw the bomb on to the boss, it opens him up for throwing another bomb at a vulnerable area - but again, you've also got the janky aiming system and enemies obscuring your camera and trying to hit you, and about a 5 second time window to do so.

**** this game.

EDIT: also I kept hearing this game was like Zelda. It's not. It has dungeons. That doesn't make it like Zelda.

Currently playing this game on ps3 and rather enjoying it. Regarding the boss fight that made you tilt uninstall the game, you don't need to enter the aiming mode to throw the bombs. Just pick it up, use lock on, and throw. The bomb goes right to the desired spot. Lol.

To me it's a pretty well rounded game. It's not particularly great at anything but good or very good at many things. Agree with you about the menu system though, not very smooth and the inventory is weak, I have yet to get anything very exciting or powerful.

Beyond Two Souls


Was looking forward to this game for a long time, somewhat disappointed in myself that I can't even bring myself to finish it as it's relatively short but it's just that boring.

BTS is an "interactive drama" game, meaning that it's gameplay is based on a little exploration and Quick Time Events where you have to push the buttons displayed on the screen in various short time frames.

The most interesting thing about it is that it stars Ellen Page and Willem Defoe, and they look great and it's really neat.

The story is supernatural and not my cup of tea but somewhat interesting, and at times the story brings out satisfying emotional reactions. But the gameplay is just so thoroughly boring it makes it hard to slug through.

A large amount of gameplay will simply be walking around a room, entering your spirit buddy form and searching the room for an object to focus on and move two thumbsticks together. The meatier parts of gameplay consist of some pretty fun moments, pulling off QTEs to beat the hell out of a group of attackers or barreling down a hill in an escape attempt barely avoiding treacherous branches and rocks.

But these moments are few in far in between, and what's much worse, you start to figure out after a while that there is no consequence to failing the QTE's. The developer Quantic Dream's last game for PS3, Heavy Rain, used a similar setup, but the QTE's were intense, and failure would result in main characters dying, the story thread changing, less than some would have liked, but enough for some truly heart pounding moments.

After a while in BTS, you start to feel like you could put the controller down, let the cinematic just play and miss every button and the end result is the same, and the game becomes what detractors of this style often call them, a barely interactive flipbook.

Even the awesome talent, great looks, and a decent story aren't enough to same this game.

Great idea for a thread. Makes me wonder, am I the only one who intentionally tries to avoid finishing games because they're so enjoyable but then gets tired after doing all the side quests and junk and ends up never finishing them? Hundreds of hours of gaming sounds great until the elements get stale or you stop leveling up and lose your incentives to keep doing cool things.

With that said, the last three games I played and enjoyed but didn't finish were some of the ones I got off of Games with Gold.

Sleeping Dogs

This was probably the first free game that I was genuinely excited about (not including Halo 3, as I was maybe the last 360 owner left who had never played it). I downloaded it almost immediately after it became available and immersed myself in it. The story kept my interest - though you hardly feel like a cop - the driving sequences are actually fun and generally not frustrating, and to me the hand-to-hand combat was the key to differentiating it (and somewhat improving upon one of the weak points IMO) from games like GTA which focus way more on shooting. Even the gun sequences weren't bad, though, thanks to the slowing of time when you slid over a barrier and some of the ways you could disarm people.

Eventually, though, this game succumbed to the phenomenon described above. I was so busy completing drug busts and side missions that I kind of lost focus on the main storyline and things began to feel repetitive. There was more shooting and fewer objects to throw people into. On the other hand, I could see going back to it because I still had a good amount of room to progress.

Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Vegas

If that's not the right name, you should at least know what game I'm referring to. It's old but I was excited to try it out because at one time it was basically the premier shooter on the 360. I played about 5 minutes and decided it was too complex for me to enjoy and that was probably all I'll ever play.

Ni No Kuni

I tried to get through the first hour on 4 separate occasions. All 4 times ended in me taking a nap. I don't normally take naps, but for whatever reason, the beginning of this game induces me into a coma. The game starts off really slow. I remember walking through a forest and getting random battles. Then I remember walking through a town. The town is what always gets me to the nap zone. I used to grind JRPGs all day erreyday but since I hit my 20's i haven't been able to muster the motivation to sit down and get into one. I thought Ni No Kuni would be different, but I was mistaken. A more appropriate title would be something like Nappy No Kuni.

DmC: Devil May Cry | PC

I thought I'd give one of these action (spectacle?) fighting games a try, can't recall ever really playing one before. I put about five hours in before calling it quits. The PC port was ok, though for the texture work was really poor. The controls were pretty intuitive and it was fairly easy to pick up the mechanics as a newcomer. The story kept me around long past my interest in actually playing the game, even though the main character, Dante, is a bit of a douche. He has to stop some super demon that killed his demon father (angel mother, herp derp) from taking over the human world by keeping everyone hooked on some soft drink that's crapped out by a huge demon thing - basically that episode of Futurama with the Wormulon Queen - and through a Christian cable news network actually run by a demon.

If I'd read a review that would probably have kept me from picking it up in the first place, but the story and set piece levels and bosses are pretty cool and sandwhiched between story cutscenes that do a good job of keeping your interest in moving on. Not well enough to make up for how boring and tedious I felt the gameplay was, though if that's your thing I would recommend the game.

Another World - 20th Anniversary Edition | PC

I bought Another World on sale for a few bucks after reading a lot of positive things about the game, and as a lover of difficult platformers, this game is awful. Really poor controls and super difficult and trolly with long distances between reload checkpoints. I can see the original appeal -it has great atmosphere and a few clever puzzles - but I couldn't slog through more than an hour.

I remember playing Another World when it first come out and I had similar frustration as Bioshock. They both have great graphics and atmosphere but playing the game is boring and frustrating.

People that talk about Bioshock like it's boring and frustrating give me the impression they're boring and frustrating. Bioshock 1 is so HOF.

You ever play System Shock 2, from the same devs? You probably haven't because it's an old game that for some reason sold poorly when released despite excellent reviews. The gameplay, story and narrative devices in Bioshock are practically carbon copies of SS2, although the older game had stronger RPG elements and was much scarier.

The shooting in Bioshock was also a bit crap. It felt very stiff, lacking in fluidity and responsiveness. Maybe that was less noticeable for the console crowd but for someone used to playing PC shooters, the combat was really unsatisfying. At the very least, Bioshock Infinite improved on the original with faster-paced, more fluid shooting.