If you joined us a couple of weeks ago for our “Gaming Respawn’s Games We Love That Other Gamers Don’t” feature, then please join us again for the alternate take on this topic where we discuss games that we aren’t big fans of but that we are still very aware are quite popular with many other gamers (for some reason). Our choices will ruffle some feathers, which is part of the fun, right? Join us for “Gaming Respawn’s Games We Hate That Other Gamers Don’t” and enjoy the read. Once again, Ian will be kicking things off.
Ian Cooper
Final Fantasy VII Rebirth
When I was younger, I adored Final Fantasy VII. The plot, characters, gameplay and the overarching sense of adventure just enthralled me. The graphical capabilities of the PS One, though limited, encouraged a degree of imagination that just added to the game’s beauty. So, as with any fellow OG FF7 fan, I was beyond excited when Square Enix gave us Final Fantasy VII Remake.
Seeing my favourite characters Cloud, Barret, Aerith and the menacingly awesome Sephiroth in 4K definition and brought to life was just jaw-dropping. Their designs were exactly how I’d imagined them when I first played the original all those years ago. Midgar was faithfully recreated and even expanded upon, and each and every enemy and boss just nailed it in design!
Then came Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. Oh my, oh my! What on Earth happened?! Yep, the designs are all here, characters are in all their glory, locations are faithfully recreated. Seeing the Golden Saucer was just something else.
So, I hear you ask why I hate it? One single word, whether it be made up or not……DISNEY-FIED!
Well…Rebirth is crammed to its seams with cheese! Not cheddar or edamame, pure unadulterated cringe! Moments such as following a dog to a gut-churningly bad jingle with lyrics that say, “bow wow wow, bow wow wow”, Red XIII moonwalking, the painfully over-the-top cutesy voice acting, particularly from the female characters and Yuffie….oh god, Yuffie, how I hate you so.
The new multiverse angle doesn’t work for me either. Seeing all the changes made from the original game is disappointing, and they are all excused by a silly Marvel-like multiple universe storyline with the balance keepers being black wraith things. Key pivotal moments have been completely reworked, but they just don’t hit the mark like they did in the original game. Sephiroth impaling the Midgar Zolom on the giant spike is done so in such a generic fashion that it just didn’t do anything for me. This moment isn’t seen in the original, and instead Cloud finds it already done. This left me thinking, “How on Earth has he done that on his own?”.
Rebirth ruined the Final Fantasy VII Remake project for me. The first game was great and barely stepped a foot wrong. Rebirth has just killed it for me. I can’t bring myself to play it through to completion, it is that bad. I have very little hope for the conclusion.
Peter Keen
Call of Duty Series
Hate is such a strong word. I don’t actually like using it much in life, let alone for a game. There are many games and game series I haven’t got on with, but that doesn’t mean I hate them for it. The list of games that I’ve tried and failed to be inspired by that other gamers have raved about is actually pretty long. Assassin’s Creed, Skyrim, The Witcher, Fortnite, Madden, FIFA, Destiny, Borderlands, each popular games and game series, each on my “never going to touch” list.
The only actual things I hate in gaming as of right now are –
They have not made an Alpine Skiing Season Sports game since 2007.
They haven’t made a James Bond game worth playing since Blood Stone.
But the thing I hate the most, as of right now, is the direction Call of Duty has gone since the “good old days!”
The PS3/Xbox 360 days were the halcyon days of gaming, in my opinion. The game that ruled supreme over both consoles was Call of Duty. The Call of Duty that really kicked things off was the daddy of Call of Duty games, CoD4: Modern Warfare. CoD: World at War didn’t grab people as much as CoD4 did, but that was reinstated when CoD: Modern Warfare 2 dropped.
Why was it so good then and not now?
Back then, Call of Duty games were THE primary FPS shooters. Everyone and their gran knew it or had it. Friday nights were always stacked with friends playing it. There wasn’t much in the way of competition aside from Battlefield: Bad Company 1 & 2, as well as Killzone, in the FPS market. We would all get online knowing we wouldn’t have trouble finding a full lobby of friends to play with, random people online to trash talk with, and life was good! The king back then was most definitely Call of Duty.
So, what went wrong? Very simply, Call of Duty changed. CoD 4, World at War, and Modern Warfare 2 were mainly about grunts on the ground taking part in firefights. Yes, each game had their own airstrikes, but the majority of the gameplay and the maps were all about grunts on the ground with guns on fairly level maps. The king of which, for example, was the map Shipment. My friends and I always ended the night with a private lobby of “Shotguns on Shipment” match. Hilarious.
But Call of Duty tried too hard to keep up with making something new for each year’s release and just made things worse with each iteration. Multi-level maps. Ridiculous perks/air support features and movement that got weirder and longer. People stopped playing to the game’s objective because they were playing for killstreaks to get an air support feature they wanted.
Quick scoping snipers became more prevalent. Everything about Call of Duty started to get more and more ridiculous. I remember when playing Call of Duty games, I was more worried about what was coming from above than actually being on the lookout for other players on the ground. Once I realized I was thinking that way, I knew then that it wasn’t for me anymore.
Because of this, like me, other people started to drift away from playing the game too.
Cartoon character skins, an over-complicated UI screen, microtransactions, Snoop Dogg, on and on it went, getting more and more, well, silly.
In short, Call of Duty forgot what made itself a great series, which was being a squad-based, guns on the ground game. All they had to do was keep it simple, but they dropped the ball and went off in a direction that the Old Skool gamers like myself hated. For that, I hate Call of Duty for going in a direction I don’t like or approve of.
I, and I suspect many other gamers out there also, just want things to be simple. The proof that gamers are actually simple folk at heart is in the pudding with the popularity of the Battlefield 6 Beta. Battlefield 6 feels like it’s going in the direction Call of Duty should have gone, but the differences between them now couldn’t be more obvious. Gamers just want things simple, and Battlefield 6 will deliver what we have been wanting from Call of Duty for so long.
The King is dead. Long live the King.
Daniel Garcia-Montes
Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice
Arguably the most difficult of FromSoftware’s games with the Souls formula, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is the only Souls game I’ve played (aside from a brief, one-hour play session of Elden Ring). It made me miserable. I don’t care that Souls fans adored it. I don’t care that it somehow won Game of the Year in 2019. That game is a masochist’s wet dream and a nightmare for more sane individuals like myself. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve played and enjoyed many other games that are considered difficult and brutal. Action games like Ninja Gaiden and Devil May Cry, Souls-like games like Nioh and The First Berserker: Khazan, and others. One thing all those games had in common that Sekiro lacked was that they were fast-paced with buttery smooth combat.
Sekiro had that sluggish, deliberate, slow-paced style of combat that made it feel like I was moving at the pace of an elderly snail compared to how I felt when playing all those other games I mentioned above. Not only that, basically every enemy in Sekiro, even the most basic of grunts, could block damn near every attack I threw at them. This leads into the game’s other main feature: deflecting attacks and breaking enemies’ postures. Landing direct hits on enemies, particularly bosses, is not as easily achieved in this game as in others. Though when your enemies block your attacks, and when you deflect their attacks, their posture gets ever-so closer to breaking, and once that happens, Sekiro can land a deathblow on them. Deathblows outright kill regular enemies and greatly weaken bosses. But given how many deflections you have to perform to lower an enemy’s posture so you can land a deathblow on them, combat against many of this game’s bosses would become one hell of a grind. The timing for deflections is also extremely tight. Meanwhile, most enemies could outright kill you in a handful of hits. The margin for error in this game is razor thin.
Furthermore, Sekiro’s Shinobi Prosthetic is outfitted with a bunch of gadgets and sub-weapons meant to give him an edge in battle, but most of these gadgets are only effective against a small number of specific enemies and deal out very limited damage to most other enemies. Add to this the fact that the gadgets have very limited “ammo” available, and you have a Shinobi Prosthetic that feels largely superfluous in most battles. And don’t get me started on those specific bosses that basically cannot be killed without the use of certain items that are very limited in number.
I’m still glad I managed to beat Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. I take pride in being able to beat what is widely considered to be the most difficult of FromSoftware’s Souls games. And it certainly was satisfying when I defeated many of the asshole bosses in that game who made me miserable. But the many rage-fueled expletives I threw at the screen and stress headaches I developed during that one playthrough still linger in my memory. So life-draining was my time with this game that I felt like I had aged an extra couple of years upon finishing it. I traded that game in without a hint of regret. Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice can very kindly f**k itself with a three-pronged trident.
Tasha Quinn
Civilization Series
There aren’t many games I can truly claim to hate. If I don’t like a game, I tend to just avoid it, but there’s one game, or rather a series of games, that I can’t avoid.
Civilization.
The reason I can’t avoid this particular series of games is that my friends love it. It’s one of the main games they play, so in an attempt to be social, I’ve tried to like it. I really have.
I own both Civilization V and VI, along with their respective expansion packs. I bought them when they were on offer, but I still don’t feel like I’ve gotten my money’s worth. I just can’t bring myself to put much time into them. According to my Steam profile, I’ve spent less than 30 hours playing Civ, and that’s across both V and VI. My friends, on the other hand, have clocked over a thousand hours.
Every now and then, I give it another go. I’ll start a new campaign with them, but I never last more than one session before I realize just how much I hate the games. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with Civilization — the reviews speak for themselves – even if the latest installment has been less popular with fans. The issue is that it’s just not my type of game. It’s too slow. As a fan of story-heavy action and RPG games, I find turn-based strategy games like Civ painfully slow and, quite frankly, boring.
I don’t have the desire or the patience to wait however many turns to spawn a worker or build a wonder (only for someone else to swoop in and complete it when you’re one turn away). I want to lose myself in a compelling story with rich world-building and engaging characters, all things that Civ lacks.
Part of the reason I dislike Civ so much is that I suck at it. It’s not a game I enjoy, so I’ve never had the interest or patience needed to learn its intricacies. I’ve never played a game to completion, and I’ve never played solo, so I don’t have much practice under my belt. Where my friends have well thought out strategies, I’m just there winging it. Then, I drop out and never actually see how the game ends. The AI that takes over probably does better than me. I mean, it can’t do worse than me.
I think it’s time I admit to myself that no matter how hard I try, Civilization is not and will never be a game I enjoy.
Will Worrall
The Simpsons: Hit & Run
Okay, so I know there are going to be a lot of people out there who are throwing up their eyebrows right now at my choice of game. The Simpsons: Hit & Run has a somewhat legendary status amongst gamers of the PS2 era.
I can still remember the excitement amongst all my friends: “Did you guys hear?!? They did a Simpsons GTA game!!!”.
This was especially enticing to me. Being brought up in a relatively religious household, two things that were off-limits to me were Halloween and Grand Theft Auto. Despite this, I somehow never managed to get my hands on a copy as a kid, though I did get to try the game out with some friends, and boy, were those few minutes of game-time exciting.
I could see the landscape of a full-blown GTA sandbox game staffed by Simpsons characters stretching out before me. I knew that I wanted the game, but all these years later, as a proud owner of not one but two copies of the game (it’s a long story), I can officially say that this game is one of the biggest disappointments of my childhood.
First up, this is barely a GTA clone. This is more like Banjo–Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts, a game that claims to be one thing but is actually a mediocre driving game with a sandbox game stapled on top. Almost every mission you do is some sort of driving challenge or race. There are a few exceptions but nowhere near enough to make it interesting.
On top of that, the controls are clunky and funky but not in the good way. It feels like arse trying to control this damn game, and to make matters worse, rather than a large and cohesive sandbox that you’d typically find in such games, you actually have a bunch of really small, stripped-down sandboxes that are like small, linear levels.
If they had just taken some time to add some more mechanics to the game, then we could have ended up with something beautiful. Just a bit more mission variety, a slightly more interesting world to explore and some work on those controls, and this could have been the game we were all hyping it up to be. With the glory of hindsight, it has become clear to me that this game was all talk and no trousers.
Basically, what I’m saying is that this game had an infinite amount of promise and managed to capitalise on none of it. I’ve literally had more fun playing The Simpsons: Road Rage than this game, and I’m now not sure if I will ever return to it again. At least Road Rage doesn’t pretend to be something it’s not.
Matthew Wojciow
Alien: Isolation
This one might come as a shock if anyone I know reads this, but I just can’t get on board with Alien: Isolation.
It was lauded upon release for the AI they used for the Alien and the way it sticks close to the films with that never-ending sense of dread that you’re one wrong turn away from the Xenomorph.
However, my disdain for Alien: Isolation almost comes from this fact. While I understand there needs to be some form of tension to your actions on the ship, it just gets annoying when you are so close to your millionth go here, and you do this quest to then be stuck with the Xeno, at which point you just have to plop the controller down for around 5 minutes and slowly wait for it to leave so you can carry on.
Also, once you get the flamethrower, the Xeno turns into more of an annoyance than a credible threat.
Lastly, the droids on the ship that make up the combat encounters take way more damage than they should, and the actual thought of fighting them is migraine-inducing.
While it is great to have that nostalgia trip to one of the best horror sci-fi movies ever, I just wish that the actual gameplay made it worthwhile.
