What is your biggest gripe about an otherwise great game?

The Evil Within. Currently playing this and think it's a great survival horror game. That's why my biggest gripe with it is when it suddenly wants to be an action game for a little bit midway through.

Not just her design but how her quest resolves. She enters the story seconds away from doing her job and, by most accounts, is portrayed as a legitimate threat. However ... her magic powers conveniently vanish enough for her to be sexually assualted. Two minutes later (after killing several people because that's how victims recover?), she's 'back to her old self' because she's in bra and pants.

It infuriates me. As does the whole end twist. You spend GAMES building up the cult of personality around Big Boss. You could've cashed that in on the twist.

I played through the GTA V campaign four times, three on PS3 (one was technically an ex playing the game while I helped with more demanding story missions) and once in FPS on PS4. Obviously I enjoy that game. But once all the surprise is out of the way, especially on that third campaign, it became exceptionally irritating how aggro every character was. All three of the main characters hate each other, their nicknames for each other are bland (T, Mike, freaking F...who calls their friend F?!), and everyone is almost always yelling. It's super unavoidable once you're familiar with all the conversations, set pieces and plot beats, and it became a real bummer on what was otherwise a gorgeous return to Los Santos on the PS4.

Here’s a multi-game gripe:

EA insisting on taking servers down for their games.

I was going to relive the “magic” of Army of Two (the good one that had no self-awareness and was stupid, but awesome as a result) with a friend, but the servers have been offline since 2011.

It’s especially infuriating since I don’t believe they actually need to do any hosting on their end, as it can be Live-supported on Xbox.

I’m normally quick to...NOT dogpile on EA, but this has been some 15-years-or-so of bullshit on their part.

The final boss fight of Batman Arkham Asylum. It just doesn’t feel like the mutant Joker fits in very well With the rest of the story. Compared to the rest of the bosses in the game the Joker’s just doesn’t hold up.

How lame the loot is in AC Origins. You get so much of it but there are only a few status effects for gold weapons. All the weapons look cool but you get so many duplicates and useless junk.

How much repetitive combat and item-hunting there is in Alan Wake.

I should not have to be exploring while fleeing from a darkness wave that will kill me in moments. It ruins the tone.

That said: I absolutely adore the dialog, characters, setting and story. And the combat's totally serviceable, but there's JUST so MUCH of it.

Blood Vials in Bloodborne

Sex minigames in the God of War series. Fingers crossed they don't do that shit in the new one

"I wonder if anyone has ever done 100 jumps?"

Bite me.

I hesitate to say I would consider the game "great" but the Adaptability stat in Dark Souls 2 almost single-handedly ruins my enjoyment of that game. I hate that dodge-rolls are not standardized.

They shouldn't vary or be loosey-goosey, it should be a baseline pillar of the combat system that is standard across all classes, and making it so you have to dump a bunch of points into the stat just to get a Dark Souls 1-feeling roll, or better, only wastes my time, inflates the leveling of the game (seriously, there's just too many bosses, too much trash the game gives you souls for to level, you just level too much, probably largely due to this extra stupid stat), and makes the early game feel terrible because I'm failing to dodge things I would otherwise be able to.

Phantom Pain released unfinished. You can't be a complete asshole in Fallout 4. Bed of Chaos in Dark Souls 1. And that Destiny 2 can be boiled down to a version of Warframe that I payed for.

Im playing Assassins Creed Origins and i like it alot but i absolutely hate water in that game because it slows you down and takes away your mobility.

Bloodborne - the performance.

Loved that game since it was the closest they got to making a Demon's Souls sequel in terms of mechanics and had an amazing, fresh new art direction, but my lord that game ran pretty poorly at launch and got only slightly better as time went on.

Otherwise it's probably my favorite Souls game.

A lot of my favorite games are very janky, so it's gonna be hard to pull out the biggest ones...I'll just stick to one of my favorites and do the rest from what I'm currently playing...

Silent Hill 2-The combat/puzzle logic

Ghost Recon Wildlands- Lack of decent personality and questionable politics

Test Drive Unlimited 2- The fact that it's broken and can't be played online (fun to drive around tho)

The Cat Lady- The audio and general bugginess of this game is unacceptable for how simple it is, but this game does its themes justice and then some

Burnout Paradise- The option for waypoints would make me happy

Xenoblade Chronicles 2- Commits the sin of modern JRPGS of tutoralizing simple mechanics for hours instead of letting the player experiment

Dead Island- The last 2/3s of the game are garbage, which is why it barely qualifies to be here, but hey...

Prey 2017. Not being able to go 100% stealthy like in Dishonored series. I hate fighting mimics, the fact that I'm an easily scared person also doesn't help. Being able to do the whole game stealthly would've been a blessing. I'm also used to immersive sims (Deus Ex, Dishonored,etc.) giving that option so that was kinda a bummer. Love the game otherwise!

Portal 2, a 10~ second loading screen every 4 minutes kind of ruins the flow. i came to dread the upcoming loading screen because of the cramped leveldesign any loading point became glaringly obvious.

RainbowSix Siege. havent played it, never gonna....it seems to be great, people love it, good game and all that BUT the stupid dumb remote controlled drone things kills it for me..why the wig wom wag wag do they have to be in the game. i unreasonably hated them on first sight and i cant bring myself to even try.

Getting one-shotted by enemies/bosses in Path of Exile and being utterly unable to do anything about it.

Kojima's tone-deaf handling certainly didn't help, nor did her LITERALLY "presenting" in first-person on the chopper if you got her star rating up high enough.

If he'd taken the Yoko Taro tact of "I like looking at pretty women," I would have at LEAST respected his honesty.

Fractured But Whole and Saints Row IV: Re-Elected.

Love them both, but I suffered a glitch in both at games end which prevented trophies from popping costing me a plat.

Had to replay Saints, and I may have replay at least a portion of South Park.

Shit's lame.

How impenetrable Nioh is outside of the actual gameplay. Everything is more complicated than it should be, from forging to learning techniques. Hell, even comparing two pieces of gear and figuring out which one is the best is hard.

I'm currently actually really enjoying Shadow of War but I find everything regarding the story to vacillate between lame (Shelob being a sexy goth chick) and boring (everything else). And this is before I have even gotten to the end-game stuff that basically tanked the score in Brad's review.

It's a genuinely fun game to play though.

I just finished Assassin’s Creed Origins last night. It’s not just my favorite AC game; it’s one of my favorite games, period. That said, the final three hours of the story is baffling in how janky, underexplained and rushed it is. Feels like they ran out of budget and slapped together a bunch of half-written scraps to tie things up.

Thanks to backwards compatibility, I've been plating some Crackdown. I still adore a lot about that game but - there no reload. You have to empty your magazine, which is usually fine since you're shooting bullet sponges or nailing headshots, but it's a bummer when you're between encounters and have like 2 bullets left.

I hated everything related to the space travel stuff in Mass Effect 2 and 3. The fuel management, the scanning, the reaper attacks, you name it. Not nearly enough to sour the experience, but come on.

As for a current game, I find myself skipping an increasing amount of side mission dialog in AC:Origins, simply because the NPCs never seem to get to the fucking point before my patience runs out. Also, the banality of some of these side missions is rubbing me the wrong way, given that the dude is a friggin' Medjay.

So I think my issue with Dark Souls III is that they tried too hard to balance all of the weapons and spells down to the same level. Everything else about the game I love, though.

It's hard for me to quantify my assertion, but all of the weapons and spells feel watered down compared to previous games. Like they looked at the swords and said, "Let's make a baseline dps in try and hit that with all weapons." They kinda missed the mark with straight swords but they only feel like 10% better than other weapons. With spells I want to feel as powerful as I did at the end of Dark Souls 1. I want to kill bosses in a few spell casts if I set up my gear and stats correctly. I also miss hybrid classes, something that doesn't feel possible in 3.

A big part of the fun that I find in RPG's is discovering the broken builds or spells that can trivialize the game, because then I can set limits for future play throughs if I want to but I can still dabble in broken mechanics. In Dark Souls III, fighting bosses feels like some sterilized experience where I'm always going to beat the boss at roughly the same speed no matter what.

I am positive this is not true. It's just on a weird button. Left bumper, I think?

DOOM - great game, but is too long and by the credits had wore out it's welcome for me.

Ark is a in some aspects a fun game with many fantastic concepts EXCEPT waiting around for things to happen. I have to wonder if this was done originally because they didn't have enough content and wanted to keep the players engaged. It should be past that now. This very unfortunate aspect of Ark would make it a vastly improved game.

Nioh was my favorite game of last year, but the way that game expects you to grind once you reach the later DLC missions and New Game Plus stuff (Way of the Strong) was enough for me to eventually summon help, finish the final DLC level, and put the game down. Because of the way damage scaling works if you aren't around the "recommended" level for a mission, you do noticeably less damage to enemies, and they do significantly more to you. To some extent this can be mitigated, since they're still a lot of the same enemies you were fighting 20 hours ago with the same attack patterns, but that logic doesn't apply to some of the crazier bosses they throw at you by the end.

Also, Heroes of Might and Magic III is one of my favorite games of all time, but I think the Conflux faction added in the first expansion is both incredibly boring from a stylistic perspective (It's pretty much nothing but elementals) and vaguely problematic from a balance perspective (While I can't comment on the particulars of balance in serious PVP, they're absolutely the "easy mode" town when you feel like stomping the computer into the dirt.) There's also some weird old developer drama behind it that would take several more paragraphs to explain, but basically Conflux was shoved in at the last minute for the expansion after the neat sci-fi "Forge" town was cut thanks to angry internet people.

Horizon Zero Dawn and it’s combat. It’s a really bad Witcher clone. It doesn’t help that I suck at it too.

Would you say if I enjoyed Horizon's combat I would enjoy Witcher 3's?

Horizon's combat and Enemy A.I. is easily the best thing about that game (outside its visuals), Witcher 3's combat and general controls were so bad I quit after a day of trying to play it (swimming was a nightmare).