Popular Games I Just Don't Like
[Opinion Piece] 'I don't get you no more.'- My Audience.
I’d like to think I’ve developed a sympathetic, relatively fair critical lens here on the Journal and write the kind of reviews that don’t belong on IGN. I approach games with as little expectation as possible, try to articulate what I think the developers were going for, whether they succeeded and explain to you why I feel the way I do about the separate parts that make up the whole; to this day I’ve never gotten hate mail, it’s almost disappointing.
All of that being said… there are certain games I just really don’t enjoy. Today’s list isn’t a list of games that are clearly not made for me but I decided to dog on anyway (I don’t think there’s any need for me to play Umamusume or Marvel Rivals to know I can’t stand them) instead, think of it as games with artistic merit that for one reason or another, my own personal taste just won’t allow me to get into.
These aren’t reviews or particularly objective breakdowns, just my honest thoughts: the kind of things I might tell you in casual conversation.
Basically Everything Rockstar Has Ever Made*
The seemingly never-ending wait for GTAVI and its gravitational pull on the rest of the industry’s release plans have made it a pretty popular object of hate lately, however, I want to make it clear that I’ve never enjoyed Rockstar’s games.
I had a lot of fun split-screening San Andreas with my brother on the PS2 as a kid and on the 360, me and my school friends were enamoured with the original Red Dead’s online at one point but otherwise? There’s no love lost. I’ve tried Bully, GTA4, two versions of GTA5, Red Dead 2 and none of them clicked with me, worse, I actively dislike Red Dead 2 and will tell anyone who’s willing to listen how boring I find that game. Listen to hillbilly talk about inane crap, do some lame shooting, chase a guy on a horse then go and put money in a box, 10/10 masterpiece.
Why does everything turn into a damn task too? Arthur tumbles down any slope like a pensioner without a Zimmer frame and watching him skin the 900th carcass was agony. “It’s so detailed! Look how the mud gets on your gun and you have to clean it off.” Oh cool! I get to do tedious busywork!
I didn’t care about the plot, not one bit, about 6 chapters in I gave up trying to like the game. Twice. So, so boring.
If I had to guess why I dislike Rockstar’s games so much then I’d put it down to the unsatisfying shooting, the very clearly film-inspired character tropes and my general lack of interest in most open-world games. The humour also reeks of Adult Swim and South Park: a show that stopped being funny in about 2005.
Elden Ring
That’s right, I’m attacking the internet’s favourite darling.
I was an avid fan of From Software’s Dark Souls trilogy and it’s one of those things I can happily say I liked before it got popular; I got the first game in early 2012 before the word of mouth had really picked up then followed the sequels as they came out. I’d still say the original was my favourite but every entry in that trilogy has something better about it that the other 2 didn’t, I really enjoy that.
It was after Dark Souls 3 that the waters were muddied for me.
Bloodborne was one of the reasons I swapped to PS4 and unfortunately, I just didn’t like the game. Listen, I’m the type of music fan who’s never far from an Alice Cooper, Type-O Negative or Tool album; my favourite film ever is John Carpenter’s The Thing. Camp horror, Gothic horror, Body horror or something a little more existential, I love that kind of thing but Bloodborne didn’t snag me outside of its aesthetic and to be honest, I find the whole Lovecraftian thing to be overdone at this point.
When I think of Cthulhu and Lovecraft my mind first goes to embarrassingly misinformed anti-theists and some of the comments and arguments I’ve heard over the years.
To cut a long story short? Elden Ring gave me nothing as a long time fan of this developer. The game-feel and many of the animations are the same as in Demon Souls on the PS3, the ability to jump adds nothing to the combat, the open world and dungeons didn’t interest me in the slightest and their inclusion hurt the interconnected, Metroid-like feeling that I used to love in Dark Souls. Open worlds extend gametime, not value.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons
The first post that put me on the map here on Substack was an off the cuff attack on a genre I consistently perceive as low-quality and lacking in innovation: the cosy game/farming sim.
Prior to this post, I was seriously considering quitting Substack; I’d spent a few days shy of 4 months barely cracking 30 reads on every post and became convinced I was just pissing my time up the wall; I have zero social media outside Substack and don’t promote my work anywhere, so while the early months were grinding, attritional warfare, I’m pleased to say I’m a genuine grassroots Substack native. This rant on cosy games resonated with some (and annoyed others) so in honour of my breakthrough post, I’m more than happy to roll up my sleeves and throw haymakers at this dead horse.
New Horizons, I’m convinced, is a game for people who live in Japanese shoebox apartments, London studio flats and tiny New York condominiums. It’s a rural/sub-urban fantasy for city folk living in cold, dreary, depressing concrete jungle. Too overworked and tired to enjoy a video game with any real gameplay or artistic merit, too spiritually broken and disassociated to connect with a real community, but with just enough time and energy to balm the burning urban loneliness with a community of anthropomorphic animals.
In most games, cosmetics and customisation are an additional reward for progressing but in Animal Crossing, it’s the whole point. £70 Facebook game, play Stardew Valley instead.
Basically Every Survival-Crafting Game
Do you know what I love to do in my spare time? Tedious busy work.
Survival games take everything mundane and crap about the real world and make it the entire gameplay loop. Needing to eat and drink, needing to sleep, manual labour, the need to maintain equipment, the ravages of the seasons, the dangers of disease: all of it goes in and with the vast majority of these games, the whole point of playing is to last as long as possible. If you’re lucky enough to play one of the tiny handful of good survival games like Project Zomboid or The Long Dark then you might get to enjoy something substantial beyond that but it’s rare.
In the 2010’s survival mechanics, crafting and resource gathering were being snuck into every game in existence and it’s one of the reasons the Wii-U/PS4/XBONE generation is my least favourite in gaming’s history. I’m glad it’s not as widespread now.
The First 2 Witcher Games
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is easily one of the best video games of the past 10 years and belongs among the greats of the medium. It’s an excellently written, great looking, well-playing RPG with a distinctly Slavic flavour and the best DLC I’ve ever played. But the first 2…? Not so much.
Back in 2016 when the buzz about The Witcher 3’s goodness was reaching a fever pitch, I hurriedly played the first 2 games to prepare myself and was left feeling less than enthralled. The first game seemed to crash every other hour, the combat was clunky and I found myself uninvested in the plot despite enjoying the world and of course: Geralt himself; I had similar thoughts on the second game which also felt quite casualised and dumbed down for consoles compared to the original. Being 16, the gratuitous nudity was appreciated but that’s neither here nor there.
Since playing and replaying The Witcher 3 several times over the past decade I’ve felt zero drive to return to those first couple of games, especially since their stories have very little relevance to part 3.
Crusader Kings 3 (Maybe?)
Oh boy, this is a game I'm extremely conflicted on.
You’ll remember that some time ago, I pledged to review all the major Paradox games before Winter and that CK3 was likely to be next but… I just can’t bring myself to play this game for very long. The big Asia expansion has helped and there’s a lot to like here but CK3 just bores me.
Crusader Kings 3 was Paradox Interactive’s first attempt at moving into systems-based Grand Strategy games rather than more railroaded experiences like the earlier Europa Universalis 4, the trouble is that those systems just aren’t every interesting to play with and the game is much easier than its predecessor. CK3 features zero real history beyond a handful of scripted events and situations at this point and it destroys the immersion.
I’ve still put over 1000 hours into this one and I’d still recommend it to the average gamer but it lacks something that Crusader Kings 2 gave me; CK2 was my first Paradox game and I have a lot of nostalgia for it.
Expect a review at some point still.
Half Life 2
A million Steam users and 30+ year old PC FPS fans are quaking in fury that this Halo fan doesn’t like what is supposedly the best FPS ever.
The original Half Life is one of my favourite classic PC games. The pacing is damn perfect, the enemy variety is entertaining, it oozes atmosphere and charm, tells a great story and while not one of my personal favourites, it’s a game I’d happily recommend to anyone but Half Life 2: apparently the better game, just does nothing for me.
The plot has next to nothing to do with the first game, it takes place after a conflict that sounds infinitely more interesting than what we get to play and the shooting just doesn’t feel good; I’ll concede that Half Life 2’s storytelling and physics were incredibly innovative but the former isn’t something I value that highly in an FPS and the latter was mainly used for primary school-level puzzles.
In my opinion, the best part about Half Life 2 is its engine. Valve’s Source engine and the games it spawned: Gmod and Counter Strike: Global Offensive especially, have had an enormous effect on gaming culture and essentially created modern E-Sports.
On its own? HL2 is unsatisfying to play, the plot too disconnected to be a fulfilling sequel and I really hate the vehicle sections.
Guilt Trip Games
There are a few games I’d put under this banner: Spec Ops: The Line, Undertale and I’m sure there are more that I can’t think of at this present moment.
I’m a natural contrarian. If something is popular, I avoid it for as long as possible and I have a bit of a tendency to assume that the majority is wrong; if I feel a game is trying very hard to make me feel a certain emotion, to act a certain way or to guilt me, I will swing hard in the opposite direction.
I distinctly remember my experience of the infamous white phosphorous scene in Spec Ops: The Line as being the moment where I started to dislike the game. Spoilers for those who haven’t played it but are planning to: you use white phosphorous munitions on an enemy outpost but once you move into the ruins following the strike, you discover it was actually a humanitarian aid site and you stumble across the charred remains of civilians, with an especially harrowing shot of a mother covering her daughter’s eyes. “Scanlines you cold bastard, how could you not feel a thing?” The trouble with this scene is that I’d suspected all wasn’t as it seemed and actually tried to avoid using the white phosphorous so we could have an honest to goodness firefight… but you can’t. The game forces you to do war crimes. For that reason, I just felt like the game had landed a cheap shot and tried to gaslight me into thinking I’m a war criminal and a monster.
Undertale isn’t quite as blatant but similarly didn’t land because I missed out on the best ending from an accidental one hit kill on an enemy, maybe I’ll replay it someday but I thought the game was okay, nothing special, don’t get the fuss.
Gears Of War
I’d go as far as to say I might be the biggest Xbox fan in Substack’s gaming community. While I fled that sinking ship long ago I’ve been quick to defend the legacy of Xbox and to point out how much quality the brand put out in the 2000’s and I consider the Xbox 360 to be my favourite video game console ever… but I don’t like Gears Of War: one of its defining IP’s.
Let me get the positives out of the way first because there are plenty. Gears Of War’s Horde mode is amazing, the entire series is CO-OP friendly, the gory combat feels great and I enjoy the art style but everything else just fails to entertain me. Gears Of War features WWE-level dialogue from a cast of characters led by a knock-off Rich Piana, graphics so grey you’ll think you’ve gone colour-blind and gameplay too repetitive to carry the whole campaign; by the end I was always bored of the game.
I should mention I’ve never sat down to play the sequels or any of the multiplayer, I tried brief bits of Gears Of War 3 around a friend’s house once but I couldn’t feel that much difference.
Immersive Sims
The Immersive Sim is a bit of a difficult genre to define but it’s typically an FPS game with a highly reactive world and immense player freedom, think of games like Bioshock, Deus Ex or Dishonoured: these are immersive sims. I’ve tried all of the above plus 2017’s Prey but was never grabbed by any of these experiences.
Something I notice about my own tastes in video games is that I’m not really impressed by minutia or small details… which is what this genre is known for: detailed, reactive, lived-in feeling worlds. Yes, I could enter this locked room in 5 different ways because you can manipulate physics or think about the problem laterally but if 4 of them are boring and tedious then the variety is meaningless; they went as far as to put a whole inbox full of readable Emails on this non-essential PC? That’s cool, maybe instead of writing 10 pointless Emails in every PC they could’ve made an extra weapon, one that actually feels good to use.
That brings me on to my next point: the shooting never feels any good in an immersive sim, at least not in the ones I’ve played. Fans of the genre will probably make some point about treating every enemy as a puzzle and that I’ve been spoiled by instant gratification and twitch shooters but that’s not an excuse to have combat that feels crap.
I love the Metro series if you want to count those as immersive sims but I personally d not.
Thank you very much for reading to the end, I hope you enjoyed today’s post, as always I’ll be happy to chat in the comments below and please like and subscribe to the Journal for more.
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Man, I'm glad someone said things that are stuck inside me for years, although some of my reasoning differs from yours.
Despite graduating in game design thanks to the first GTA, I agree that most Rockstar games are filled with busy work, so I always get bored in most of them. Even so, I still have Vice City among my favorite games of all time.
I played Elden Ring to completion, spending 130 hours to get the Age of the Stars ending only to discover that I don't have patience for a second playthrough or to tackle the Nightrein DLC. I agree with your perception of some elements being dated, but for me the biggest problem is that this game is too long to its own good. Even with different weapoins, stats and classes, it basically evolves around the same mechanics from start to finish, and after dozens of hours spend on it, it becomes stale. That's why I'm a huge fan of Yakuza games: there's such a huge variety on them that I rarely feel that I wasted my time even if most of it is spent on minigames.
I spent a lot of time in Animal Crossing New Leaf. At first, it was nice to see my city evolve little by little every day and characters like Isabelle and K.K. have an unique charm, but having to log in every single day to make things happen in a sluggish pace is definetely not for me. Needless to say, I didn't give New Horizons a chance. But hey, at least my fiancée enjoys it, so that's something...
And finally, I respect Half Life 2 for its technical achievements, but its most glaring issue for me is that this game is a nightmare to play for those who suffer from 3D camera sickness like me. Games like Bioshock Infinte or Portal have better FOV options that make me enjoy them without making me feel sick every 5 minutes.
I think I agree with you on Rockstar games. I can only play GTA sandbox style, just mowing down pedestrians and crashing. I am usually a “finish all the side quests” girl but I cannot bring myself to do any of the missions.
I downloaded RDR2 from the playstation catalog, got bored during the introduction and pretty much deleted it straight away.
It’s not that I can’t sit through a story; currently 60+ hours into Ghost of Yotei (so, so good!), I think the story has to be entertaining. The characters also matter. Everyone in a Rockstar game seems to be a flat caricature, especially the female ones, oof.