Here is a list of 5 games that I think sucked. Coming up with a list of 5 games that sucked is hard for me. I am not going to just search the internet and echo what others have said, I am actually giving my opinions based on personal experience and so if I haven’t played that many sucky games, then making a list of them is hard. Some of these games (No Man’s Sky) are not bad games in my opinion, but sucked for other reasons. Some games may have been competent mechanically, but just not fun and engaging, or some others may be fun but required a large player base to work properly.
So, first is an easy one.
Duke Nukem Forever
You could argue, that I had years to know this game was going to suck. Changing hands so many times, and undergoing several technology and engine overhauls should have been nails in the coffin, and I imagine for many people they were. But I am nothing if not stubborn, plus I had some nostalgia for the ol’ Duke. It was a PC game my much older cousin gave me, and that I got to play at a young age, hiding it from my mom who only let me play wholesome games like Doom and Hexen. So I had a ton of curiosity for Duke Nukem Forever. But it quickly outstayed its welcome. Perhaps I had matured since my youth. Perhaps political correctness and a hatred of all things fun had ruined this game for me, but I just could not get past the dude-bro frat boy nature of this game. Sure those things existed to some degree in Duke Nukem 3d, but they weren’t the entire point of the game, just kind of tossed in to flesh out the character as an anti-hero, but Forever is devoted entirely to setting up jokes and one liners. First hint that the game was going to suck is that the reflection in the bathroom mirror makes absolutely no sense at all. Here are some graphics to demonstrate what I mean:
On the left you’ll see an impossible reflection of the wall with only the shadows of the lit letters in “Detonators”.
Middle you’ll notice there is no sink or counter, then far right you’ll see that there is no towel on the wall opposite. Just sloppy. This was my first sign, but I stuck around for the twin blowjob, and stripper sexy time item find mission out of morbid curiosity. Where the originals were parodies of 80’s action films, this one is a parody of those games and simply feels forced and cringe-worthy. Also, it wasn’t fun. And while I was a little bothered by it in the original Duke Nukem 3d, the alien hive in this one is even worse.
Seriously? Why would face hugger aliens strip them naked exactly?
No Man’s Sky
Next a controversial one, No Man’s Sky. Now let me start by saying that I am a HUGE space and sci fi game fan. The expanse of the stars so open ended and full of possibilities is an impossible lure to ignore, so I hungrily bought this game and dove straight into it. The first two hours were awesome: mining for materials on alien worlds, discovering alien lifeforms and scanning them to add to my encyclopedia/pokedex, flying straight up and out of the planet’s atmosphere to an orbiting space station, all great stuff! But then, I fixed my hyperdrive, jumped further “in”, landed on the next set of world’s and did the same thing. Then a sinking feeling formed in my gut, and my legs became numb. It was a nightmare; I was bored! Say it ain’t so captain! The game of infinite possibilities, turned out to be deterministic and boring. I was disappointed to say the least. The art design was cool, and a lot of the ideas in this game were great, but I just think Hello Games! fell down in the execution of their grand opus. I am glad I own it on the off chance that they make it something actually fun. It sucked for me personally, because I was so looking forward to it, and because I had been longing for a space exploration game since Mass Effect 3, and this game just didn’t add up to what I was hoping for. Every now and again, I mindlessly shoot lasers at rocks, but I have absolutely no desire to finish this game.
UPDATE: The base building patch called Foundation is out as of 11/27/2016 so this might change my mind on this game, however when I played the 1.3Gb patch on its day of release, it took me 5 hours to actually find a base that I could inhabit and start building out, and of course there were no tutorials or explanations about how to build the stuff or what to do to get to the level where you can build resource extractors etc. Freighters do seem to be abundant, but I don’t have 7 million needed to buy one, so it looks like I need to figure out the base-building/resource extraction aspect before I get enough cash for that. Pirate encounters are also more numerous in the form of distress beacons and random encounters, so if you like the rudimentary space combat then you will get more of it.
I want to love this game guys, I do, but I am still having a hard time justifying dropping several hours into it when there are so many good games coming out which are more worth the time investment.
Super Dungeon Bros
Super Dungeon Bros was a free game on xboxlive gold, so I didn’t pay anything for it. My friend and I were looking for a game to play co-op and since this one was free we decided to give it a shot. So we both fired up our copy, and went to the multiplayer co-op menu, only to find that you have to play it with a full team of four for online. Ok, I thought. We’ll just wait for some randos to join, not ideal but it will do in a pinch. So we waited…and waited….and waited….then someone joined, and now we needed a fourth…..so we waited…..and waited…..then a fourth guy joined and my friend and I readied up! But the other two guys didn’t…..and so we, yup you guessed it, we waited. Then the third guy disconnected. My friend and I quit the game and played Van Helsing instead. For kicks I went back the next day and tried playing single player and found it to be exactly as bad as our review of it is on this site. Ultimately I don’t see why it exists, it doesn’t do anything new or interesting, and without any players it doesn’t even work as a mindless thing for you and your friends to do while chatting.
WWE 2K16
Thanks to xbox live’s free games with gold, I find myself playing a variety of games I otherwise would not have spent money on. One such game was WWE 2K16, a free game in June 2016. Disclaimers first; I am not a huge wrestling fan. I know many of the wrestlers from conversations overheard or from people in other outlets that I follow (Giant Bomb guys, I’m blaming you) talking about it. That being said, I don’t dislike wrestling. There is something fun in watching muscle bound warriors throwing each other around and smashing thing, even if it is mostly choreographed. The last wrestling game I played was Wrestlemania 2000 for the N64. I made myself in the character creator, and genuinely had a good time playing it with my friends. Sadly, WWE 2K16 plays horribly. Matches were simply not fun, with weird and hard to understand grappling mechanics and submission moves which require you to rotate the sticks and overlap an opponent’s resistance.
I must have played the tutorial match 15 times before finally being able to beat my sparring partner in a submission, and I hated every second of it. On top of that, while the character models are way better than the N64 days, the animations and movement of them seemed the same or worse. Characters spinning on a dime while trying to line up animations looks terrible, and while the fast paced movement in a Madden game probably helps disguise similar issues, the slow sloth like movement of the wrestlers makes it all the more apparent.
I understand that the submission mini-game is probably more realistic in terms of an actual wrestling match, but I prefer the button mashy frantic nature of the old games. Playing this game definitely made me realize that I want more arcade-like controls and action in a wrestling game over the more realistic. Because wrestling to me is about huge slams, big hits and the frantic struggle between two titans.
That Dragon Cancer
Now to end on a hard one. A very hard one. That Dragon Cancer is an amazing thing….and a terrible thing. It is profound, and deeply sad. I 100% appreciate the developer for having made it, and am sort of sorry that it has not sold well, but I can also very adamantly say that playing it made me incredibly depressed. Does that mean it sucks? Well, because the definition of sucky is “disagreeable or unpleasant” then yes I will have to say it is very unpleasant. I have mentioned before how sensitive I am to seeing harm come to children. It is because I cannot hear or see something happening to another kid without imagining the thing happening to my own children. They love everyone, are kind to everyone and are so innocent. This is why I am deeply troubled by the thought of something happening to them, and why I could not play That Dragon Cancer. I’m not fool enough to think that there won’t be a day when something bad happens to them, but that doesn’t mean I want to live through someone else’s pain. Maybe that makes me weak, but I like to think it is because I am too empathetic. The developers did not create this game to show how bad cancer is, but rather to honor the life and struggle of their son Joel and his 4 year battle with cancer. If you can stomach it, it is a poetic, beautiful and impactful game, and worth every penny they ask for. I love and hate it, and even writing this makes me want to weep over their loss. Playing it really, really sucked.
