Ask Lemmy

Elden Ring. The game is just too obnoxiously hard. I don't mind difficulty, I finished Doom Eternal and all its DLC on nightmare. But Elden Ring seemingly makes very little effort to teach me its mechanics, whereas Doom Eternal's mechanics felt pretty intuitive after just a little bit of trial and error.

As far as FromSoft games go, I had a much better time with Sekrio. That game had a good tutorial, and that ghost dude who would help you practice the more difficult aspects of the combat.

Jedi Survivor. It's not a bad game, I just suck at it. Can't get past the first boss on easy mode. Getting old is annoying. I struggle with a lot of PC games now.

Recent? None right now, but I also rarely buy games nowadays.

If we’re able to go outside of recent times, I’m still pretty salty about buying fuckin RPG Maker 2 & 3 on the PS2 without having a way to connect my PS2 to the internet.

Everything AAA not on sale.

Squad. Looking for a more serious FPS game other than the popular shooters like CoD or Battlefield. Got a rec for it, so why not. Went to buy it and it’s $50. Well, the reviews looked mostly ok, and so did the screenshots… so I bit.

Man, the game plays like it’s 10-15 years old. Slow, clunky and the graphics leave room for improvement. Very dated. I don’t think I’d mind this game for the $15-25 range, but not $50. I returned it. I think probably the second game ever I returned.

The last time I had video game buyer’s remorse was getting RAGE on launch day.

What a technically interesting, but utterly underwhelming game.

Warhammer 40k: Mechanicus

I thought it was gonna be like an XCom or Divinity Original Sin kinda combat game.

Maybe it is? I don’t think so, but the UI and controls are so bad that I never really figured out how to play, and there’s no tutorial, so I can’t say for sure what kind of game it actually is.

All I figured out in my 2ish hours is that it’s not a game for me.

Idk if this counts as recent but breath of the wild. Idk the last time I spent $60 on a game, let alone the $100 I spent on botw + DLC, because "how can literally everyone be wrong about this game".

The combat was fun for a decent amount of time but at a certain point I asked myself "wtf am I doing". I didn't care about the story because it was awful and the voice acting was embarrassing. Exploring the world felt incredibly shallow, with the most exciting thing to randomly run into being recycled mini bosses that rewarded me with weapons that I didn't need. Any challenge the combat or exploration presented could be bypassed by grinding for potions.

By far the most bafflingly over hyped game I've ever played.

Red Dead Redemption 2 only because I bought it for full price a month ago.

Hogwarts Legacy on Switch. I should have known better, but my local Walmart had it on sale for $29.99 a few weeks ago and I bought on impulse after reading a few posts about how it's gotten better after updates. I've had glitches galore. Mad pop-in, falling through geometry, crashes, and two save game corruptions, all in the most up-to-date version available. If this is better, I can't imagine how broken it was at launch. I feel like I got $5 of content out of this. If the glitches were at least amusing, I might be ok with it, but the save corruption is just unacceptable.

Mafia. The story is good, but you are basically watching a movie with driving and shooting in-between cut scenes. The player has zero choice or influence over the game.

Enshrouded. I'm on a 5600X and a 6800XT and no matter the settings or reported FPS I feel like I'm running on 30-40fps. Also for some reason the distant LODs look like garbage, nothing like the gameplay I've seen in review videos.

Devs confirmed it was a bug with the camera but they did not know what caused it. Engine is entirely in-house so hopefully they fix it soon.

The only thing I managed to care about so far was building a nice cave home with a huge great hall and ruining the scenery by building a giant Peter Griffin pixel art outside.

Recent? None so far.

Somewhat old? Civilization III. I ordered it like 5 years ago and was trying to scratch the itch left by Call to Power II, but the multiplayer is flaky at best on LAN and the tech tree just isn't interesting to me. Later entries also have the "tech tree doesn't interest me" thing and also don't scratch the Call to Power itch (they don't have the wacky future tech like hover tanks and eco-warfare) but they also look a lot more visually interesting at least.

I miss when stacking was a thing in Civ. Sure it was relatively unbalanced, but that's part of the fun in my experience.

/end grandpa rant

Monster Hunter.

Start the game with 2 hours of unskippable tutorials, endless dialogue and the explanation of a million game systems that should not come into play until later.

Then you're set out into the wilderness to track a monster, and all you do is pick up mucus... Eventually found the monster and hit it a bunch, then it ran away... and I chased it around for 10 more minutes.

Said what the fuck is this, and just uninstalled and never looked back.

Forza Motorsport. Years and years of development for a bug ridden mess that’s shockingly light on content.

Between this and Starfall my expectations for anything coming from Microsoft game studios has plummeted.

Escape from Tarkov

Maybe I just didn't spend enough time researching how to actually play the game but it didn't live up to the hype.

Honorable mentions: Squad and The Division 2

AC Valhalla.

I played though all the other ones but that one felt so soulless and bland. I expected it to not be great but nothing this bad.

Then again I finally realized recently that I don't actually enjoy open world games (with some exceptions).