What's some of the worst gameplay mechanics you've seen?

Mechanics such as the level up system of a game, or maybe it was a broken turn based system, or maybe the game is heavily based on collectibles that are boring as **** to search for.

First one that comes to my mind.

Silent Hill Book of Shadows.

I got this game for my Vita as I needed something to keep me entertained on a 7 hour bus trip. I'm not doing a full on review of it here, but to sum it up, it has some good ideas, some bad ideas. It's a bit of a dungeon crawl RPG with some character customization elements and a good/bad Karma system, which is the main thing that separates it from other games of it's kind and could of been it's savior, except they screwed it up so bad with some absolutely baffling design decisions.

Karma in the game worked like this... You kill the bright creatures, you get bad karma. when a white creature dies it leaves behind red karma which gives you even more bad karma. You want to collect bad karma if you want to make your character into a little bitch and have the NPC's who's story you are altering life a misery for your own benefit, plus it lets you pull off dark magic type moves. It's pretty much vise versa, bloody creatures drop good karma, you get good karma for killing bloody creature ect.

The problem...

The way it's implemented ruins the whole experience. You pretty much have to kill everything you meet, since certain rooms won't let you pass until all monsters dead, and they mix the pure creatures in with the bloody ones. Your karma meter constantly goes up and down as a result. In order to keep my karma bad (I always go for the evil option due to a rather tragic fetish of mine) means I have to try not to pick up the white karma that ends up on the floor as I'm fighting and dodging about. This was more annoying then anything, it just slows your progress down and often forces you to wait a minute until it de-spawns.

Another thing on the Karma, if you use your special evil Karma move from having max evil karma, it resets the whole karma meter! If you were to use this move near the end of the scenario, your karma goes to neutral, then you end up getting the boring neutral ending to the characters story you were invading. As a result, you learn not to ever use the special moves which makes the combat more bland then it already was.

There is a move in the game that lets you flip a pure creature into a bloody one, but it has a long cooldown. If you want to go about doing that it means you got to aim for all the pure creatures first, flip the remaining bloody ones into pure ones, hope you catch them all, beat them up, wait a while for the cooldowns to reset before entering the next room. I did this.. Trust me, after a while you wish you could just walk into a room and kill everything without all the ridiculous faff between.

If all that sounds like fun to you, give the game a try. You might also enjoy going through your sock draw and mixing the pairs together until they are all odd socks, then throw them on the floor and try to pair them back together again.

Deadly Premonition is a hot mess too. I picked that game up cheap based on "positive reviews", thinking I was getting a great game that went under the radar. There's a reason it never gained the popularity it sought.

The controls are some of the worst I've seen. They're slow, inconsistent and the camera is horrible. If you're going to make a survival/horror game then you best have a good control system. Otherwise, don't even bother.

No one actually liked deadly premonition. But it was one of those games that a certain demographic of gamers liked because they wanted to be cool. They are probably the same people who say "I love dive bars, they are so much better than regular bars. They are old and shitty but that's what makes them so much better, only lame people go to clean bars" and can not have a conversation about a bar or alcohol without bringing up dive bars.

The only people who were interested were ones like me that love twin peaks, but sadly if you watched twin peaks then you already know 95% of deadly premonition since it rips it off pretty much down to a T.

The Last Remnant. No problem with turn-based combat but it just felt like a terrible FF knock off.

Anything that forces the player into stealth or they have to die or restart.

i won't go in specific detail about a game, but long sequences with QTE's where you start all over again if you mess up really irritates me

The utterly unfair mechanics of XCOM: Enemy Unknown, when it comes to attacking. Missing when the chances of hitting someone are high and aliens successfully hitting you way to often, even when you're behind full cover.

I see what you're saying, but I addressed the control scheme specifically. I couldn't get past that to get into the game itself. The horrible controls killed any desire for me to want to play the game.

Any game that contains a stealth element in which, if you get caught, doesn't really matter because you can easily hand to hand combat an army by yourself. I enjoy Assassin's Creed games every once in a while, but they really have to fix this major flaw. More games need to give consequence to failure otherwise success doesn't feel like something you've earned.

Uncharted 3 has the worst shooting mechanics i've played.

I hate games that when you level, everything around you levels.

Lol, yeah. True that.

It's not necessarilly "the worst", but in JRPGs where status moves and other helpful things have a small chance of working. Like, enemies can poison you 100% of the time but when you try to do it, it works less than half the time.

Then with the second part, I'm playing Etrian Odyssey Untold and it's good so far. However, there's a spell that allows you to return back to town but it doesn't work all the time and costs a good amount of MP for being so early in the game. This kind of stuff makes me question why I should even bother with spells/ attacks like this if they're barely guaranteed to work anyway.

I get why these things are like that, but that doesn't make them not annoying.

Really?

In all fairness, I have not played Mass Effect 3, but I have played the first two which hadawful shooting and level design.

@ Bigboi500

Leveling isn't really a mechanic...... Is it ?

Leveling isn't really a mechanic...... Is it ?

Play resident evil revelations.

@ RageQuitter69

Actually Mass Effect 2's Mechanics were more avarage than bad, same with Uncharted's gunplay. However Uncharted's platforming is soooooo frustrating.

It isn't a survival horror game and thankfully the game is so easy bad controls aren't much of an issue. The controls are greatly improved in the Director's Cut as well.

I loved it and nothing in your posts applies to me, so you're wrong.

Full Spectrum Warrior: Ten Hammers. Both the AR and the M1203 grenadier are rendered useless in corner cover.

Not a bad mechanic but an utterly broken one.

I would say skill tree.

@RageQuitter69 said:

@ristactionjakso said:

Uncharted 3 has the worst shooting mechanics i've played.

Really?

In all fairness, I have not played Mass Effect 3, but I have played the first two which hadawful shooting and level design.

Yes really. Mass Effect had manageable shooting. The developers changed the shooting from Uncharted 2 for some reason. Uncharted 3 has terrible shooting mechanics.

I agree, although I didn't feel like it was the worst. However, it marked the beginning of the awful trend in later FF games of taking control of your party away from the player. It started with Last Remnant's occasional random menu options in combat, then it continued with FF12's real time combat system where you could only directly control one character, until finally you get FF13 and up where you basically keep hitting "auto" over and over while occasionally changing jobs from offense to healing and back again.

So my vote goes to FF13's combat system. I wanted to like that game so badly that I played it for 20 hours before I realized how much I hated it.

-Byshop

Shadow of the Colossus - I despise everything about its gameplay. Even riding the stupid horse is a chore and a half.

Metroid Other M - Flipping between first and third person, and using a d-pad for movement is super annoying.

Turning Point: Fall Of Liberty - this game has such broken gameplay, I can't believe they actually released it this way, lunkheads controls, wonky AI, seriously flawed graphics. For a game that had so much promise, it lasted 20 minutes in my machine, good thing a co-worker loaned it to me, I would've been pissed if I paid full price for this dog.

- Planet scanning in Mass Effect 2, I absolutely hated that thing.

- Covering your face in Hitman Absolution. The whole game is a disaster, but this specific mechanic was just dumb.

I liked the game because it's hilariously bad. The cut-scenes are too funny. :D

I don't like QTEs , I want to shoot the devs when I am forced to go through series of QTEs in big event . I also hate dumbed down gameplay of Assassin's Creed where you counter one enemy and then kill everyone with kill streak . I love AC1 and AC2 trilogy after that it's COD of sword fighting games . AC lovers rage about any sword fighting game that require some tactics .

Or Operation Raccoon City.

I really didn't like the fog of war in that game and the abysmally low hit chance that some characters had.

Diablo 3s loot system is horrible.

I really don't like open world games that have you running around collecting things for no apparent reason. I also despise the fact that there is an experience system with just about every game for every genre coming out now (especially in AAA titles).

Deus Ex, Borderlands did it right with the xp mechanic. Tomb Raider did not. Neither do games like Battlefield and CoD.

@ dethtrain

The only problem with Tomb Raider's collectables is they were just lying there, hidden out of sight. Not like Arkham City's trophies, most of those requirde some effort, in plain sight, just gotta solve the puzzle to get it. The trophies were completely worthless, the fun was in the challenge and the trophies are just a symbol of your awesomeness, waiting to be reclaimed !

Hiding these things, Tomb Raider, is just wrong.

@RageQuitter69 said:

@ristactionjakso said:

Uncharted 3 has the worst shooting mechanics i've played.

Really?

In all fairness, I have not played Mass Effect 3, but I have played the first two which hadawful shooting and level design.

I love the first Mass Effect, and I thought that it had good shooting mechanics, myself anyway, although I would absolutely agree with you on Mass effect 2, it not only had poor shooting mechanics, but was in my opinion an all out disappointment. Tried to play Mass Effect 3, but stopped because of the absolutely annoying and terrible combat.

@ BlackGenjii

Uhm..... Just to clarify.... In your oppinion, the 1st Mass Effect had the best shooting mechanics ?

Are you absolutely sure ?

I feel the same way. It did not even matter where you shot someone in the first Mass Effect because damage was based on stats. In the second and third games headshots actually mattered.

Yep. And taking cover mattered too. The RPG Elements in the 1st game ruined many basic Mechanics.

Just bad games like Vampire Rain, Bullet Witch and Ride to Hell.

The game I just deleted out of frustration: Contrast. The game is full of bugs and the jumping mechanics are terrible and broken.