Drop It Like It’s Hot
There are way too many games out there. You can’t waste your limited time on Earth playing garbage. What’s the solution? Dropping games. Is a game not doing it for you? Make like Elsa and let it go… into the trash! There’s no contract tying you down, making you get through a game you hate, and I’m no stranger to this. Sure, I beat some games I don’t really like, for the sake of reviews, but there are some that are so heinous, I’d rather kick them to the curb instead of trying to make them work for me.
This post was directly inspired by Felix Roth’s article “Games I Can’t Enjoy Anymore”. Go check it out! He listed Darkest Dungeon as one of the games he stopped playing, and it reminded me of my experience with it. I was enjoying it until randomness destroyed too many of my runs. Then I kept thinking of other games I’ve dropped throughout the years, and now I’ll be highlighting some that are kind of interesting.
It’s mostly an excuse to talk about certain games without having to dedicate an entire review to them.
1 Overwatch
Yeah, I’m admitting to playing Overwatch. Even worst than that, I had fun with it at one point.
When the game first released, I got swept up in its wave of marketing. A brand-new IP from one of the biggest studios in gaming? How could I resist? Nevermind the fact that I wasn’t a fan of the Diablo series, and I was disappointed with StarCraft 2, and by this point Blizzard was starting to be known for more missteps, and their best days were behind them and… damn, why did I bother with them, again? Oh, right, marketing. They showed a lot of cool characters with slick animations, and the game I imagined in my head was different than what we got. I thought it would be more like Team Fortress 3.
I did have fun with it at first. The thrill of a new game, and all that. I played it with friends, and we were having fun with the team aspects and learning the game. Then it got stale real quick. To me, at least. I stopped playing, and only dipped back in if my friends really needed a sixth player, but the magic of those first 20 hours with the game had vanished.
That’s not why I’m listing it here. Not yet, at least. The reason why I stopped playing then, momentarily, was because the game wasn’t really doing anything too interesting. To me, everything in the game felt like a less fun version of something I’d already played. I played Roadhog for a while, but he was just a worse version of Pudge from Dota. I know some of you will say “Um, ackshually, Pudge is a worse version of The Butcher from Diablo, so Pudge is the rip-off, not Roadhog”, and that’s a great bit of trivia, but it doesn’t help with the feeling that I was playing store-brand Pudge, with a less versatile kit. I was also a Pharah main, and she was just the rocket launcher from Quake, but soggy. Torbjorn was The Engineer from TF2, but bad, so on and so on. Nothing that was too exciting.
Then Doomfist happened.
I wasn’t playing the game when he dropped. All I knew was that the big, bad villain of Overwatch had released, and he was terrorizing players. I didn’t get the news until months later, when I saw a twitter clip of him decimating an entire team by himself. It was so glorious, that I had to go and try him out, and it was fantastic. He might be based off another archetype, but I had never played anything like him in a shooter. He was all about getting into the enemy’s back line and sending one person flying. He was fast, he hit hard, and the best part, he made the enemy team seethe with rage.
Every time I got a kill with Doomfist, which was pretty often, if I’m free to brag a little, I’d get flooded with salty messages in all chat. The kind of annoying, passive-aggressive trash talk Overwatch players do where they use UwU soft-boy therapy speak to tell you to kill yourself. Me, being the sewer goblin I am, I lapped it up. I didn’t go for kills to help my team win, it was to piss off the enemy team as much as possible. Winning was a secondary objective. I made several people ragequit in ranked matches. It was a legitimate strategy. I had become the villain, I wasn’t playing as Doomfist, I had become him.
I was finally having real fun with the game. I wasn’t playing a watered-down version of a Team Fortress 2 character, or a single Quake gun made into a character. Doomfist was so cool that he had me playing Overwatch even when my friends weren’t online.
Then one day we got Overwatch 2. It took away one tank, which meant the pre-made six man teams had to cut someone. Then they took Doomfist, and made him into a tank. It was a targeted attack at me, personally. They had everyone fighting over the role of tank, and then they took the best damage character, and made him into the worst tank. I was still getting salty messages, but they were all coming from my own team. Every time I picked Doomfist, I got four soft boys telling me to switch off him, because he’s not a real tank. The worst part of this wasn’t that Doomfist was bad -that part was painful- the thing that sucked was that I had to agree with an Overwatch player. I kept playing every now and then when my friends asked me to. I made safe meta picks, stuff that wasn’t Doomfist, so no fun to be had.
The story of how I fell in and out of love with Overwatch is more interesting than how I stopped playing it. I was playing with friends, using a Reddit-approved meta character, being efficient and playing the game as daddy Blizzard intended, and I came to the realization that I was really bored. I wasn’t angry or frustrated. I didn’t lose one match spectacularly, or get stuck in a rank, I didn’t have a huge falling out with my team, or cyberbullied off the game. It wasn’t anything specific. I was playing and thought “I could be doing anything else with my time right now”. It was a cold, quick decision, like when a company decides to lay someone off. Even the way I quit playing was boring and safe.
I don’t care how many cute girls they add, I won’t play it. The game’s boring, Doomfist is no longer a threat, and Blizzard keeps proving they’re coasting on goodwill they built up almost three decades ago. They’re like a washed-up local celebrity who’s still going on radio shows reminding everyone about that one time they were funny back in 1998, but they haven’t done anything since.
2 Marvel Rivals
Why is this game so familiar? Deja vu, I have been in this place before…
Aww hell no! This is just Overwatch in a Spider-Man mask! No! I don’t care how thick your characters are, I WILL NOT PLAY THE HERO SHOOTER.
If you want my opinion on Marvel Rivals, just re-read the Overwatch section, but leave out anything about Doomfist. Rivals doesn’t have anything nearly as fun as him.
On the subject of multiplayer shooters that aren’t fun with friends…
3 Borderlands (The Entire Franchise)
The obvious joke here is “Borderlands? More like BOREDOMlands, am I right?”
Borderlands is a game series people swear up and down is a ton of fun if you play it with your friends. First off, not a great endorsement. Even waiting in line at the DMV is tolerable with friends. Second, this is a filthy lie. Borderlands can’t be salvaged, even when playing with other people. It’s worse than being stuck at the DMV. There’s no way to play this with friends and have a good time.
I think that a good friend game needs to have some specific traits. It has to be engaging, but not so complicated that you need to lock in. If it’s too intense, you can’t goof around, and all your conversation will be reduced to a few short call outs. I play Dota2 with my friends, and while we’re playing, we never talk about anything other than the game. The game has to let you talk, too. If you have to pay attention to things, or listen for sound cues, you can’t have idle chatter. It needs to have some form of co-operative aspect, to make it feel like you’re all working together towards something.
Borderlands breaks all of these rules. Engaging but not too intense? The game isn’t engaging at all. That’s subjective, and I’ll get back to it, but there’s nothing for you to do other than shoot in the general direction of a bullet sponge. It doesn’t let you talk, because the game never shuts up. Every single nano second in this series is packed with some NPC spouting out inane dialogue.
I was playing Borderlands 2 with a friend once, and he was trying to tell me something about his day, and the NPCs kept yammering over each other, I could barely understand what he was saying, and he couldn’t talk because he had Anthony Burch’s horrid dialogue interrupting his thoughts. He yelled out “SHUT THE FUCK UP ALREADY!” And we decided to mute the game entirely.
There is hardly any teamplay in these games. There might be some character classes that have skills to help your buddies, but I didn’t find any. These games are simultaneous single-player experiences where someone else is in the same place as you. You don’t need to interact with the other players, except when they need to be revived. You’re both staring forward, blasting at the same enemies. The only other interaction comes from fighting over who gets the shiny new gun that dropped.
I’ve tried playing the Borderlands series multiple times over the years, with different friend groups. Every single time, we come to the same conclusion: This is boring, not even playing with friends can save it, let’s go play Dota. I completely dropped the entire franchise.
Warframe and The First Descendant are much better to play with friends. I’ve spent hours playing both, grinding for loot and shooting the breeze with friends. Borderlands is just straight booty cheeks.
4 Lightning Round: Dropped games I reviewed
I think getting through a game is a minimum requirement for reviewing it, but these were so putrid that they made me puke everywhere, and I had to review them anyways.
Uppers: A terrible, tedious brawler with horrific controls and repetitive fights. Every enemy behaves the same, there are different playable characters but they all have the same move sets, bosses had two billion hit points so they took forever to defeat, and it was overall a terrible time. The game is the exact same from the first level, all the way to the end. Even the side content is exactly the same. A true waste of everyone’s time. Oh, and you could collect panties from chicks because it was a cool, manly game for hetero dudes.
Slave Zero X and Evil West: Imagine for a moment that you’re at a restaurant. You order your food, and as an appetizer, they bring you some bread. The bread is stale, moldy, and the butter it came with smells faintly of paint thinner. After seeing this, would you stick around for the main course, or would you run out of the restaurant? That’s what these two games did for me. They failed so catastrophically at their most basic, obvious parts, that I felt comfortable writing them off in the first few hours of gameplay.
The Ascent: Walk for 15 minutes to get to a mission that lasts two minutes. Then walk another 15 back to the quest giver. It was so boring that I almost lost consciousness playing it. I tried to finish it, but the thought of having to run a 10k between each mission filled me with the same kind of dread I used to feel back in school when report cards were due.
Urban Reign: This one’s a lot like Uppers. It’s a brawler that plays the same from the first level. I made it up to level FIFTY. Level FIVE ZERO, then I checked a walkthrough thinking I only had like what, five more levels to go? Nope. Not even close. I was halfway through the game. There are 100 levels to this shit. ONE HUNDRED. I wasn’t going to sit through fifty more. That’d be like eating fifty shrimp, having an allergic reaction to them and thinking “hmm… maybe if I eat fifty more, I’ll stop going into anaphylactic shock”. The review is back from when I was first starting, so it’s more experimental.
5 FTL: Faster Than Light
Here FTL Stands for Filter This Loser.
Getting filtered by a game is different than dropping it. Dropping it is when you stop playing it at some point. Getting filtered is when you can’t really say you started, and that’s exactly what happened to me with FTL.
I was there when the hype around FTL was fresh, back in 2012. It’s one of the biggest indie games of the time, and it’s still considered a classic to this day. Everyone around me kept singing its praises, so I tried it out. I got into my ship, did a few jumps and landed in one area with a space pirate that immediately decimated my crew. That’s fine, I’ll do better in the next run, I thought. Try again, run goes better, suddenly go up against an advanced fighter, it sets my ship on fire and we all die. Next run, get boarded by space mantises (manti?) and my crew gets eaten. I stop playing.
Years later, I decide to give the game a second shot. I approach it with a different mind set, and manage to get pretty far into a run. Then I jump into a node with an aggressive space pirate, and they kill me. No problem, I’m a more patient man now, and I can handle this. I start up another run and in my second jump I land on a sun, with a space pirate. The sun blasts a solar flare directly at my oxygen bay, I try to extinguish the fire, but my crew starts to suffocate before it’s out, and the pirate bombarded my med bay with a rocket, now it’s also on fire. Then I used my wits to turn it around and I emerged victorious. Of course I didn’t. I died.
Then I looked up forums and Reddit posts to see if I was missing something. Everyone kept saying “Yeaaahhh sometimes you’ll get into a random encounter with the literal grim reaper and he takes your entire crew and puts them into a coffin and you can’t do anything about it but that’s just how the game is ahahaha you just gotta love it lololol sometimes you get put in checkmate and you just bend over and take it kekekeke it’s all part of the fun”.
No, that’s not part of the fun for me. That sounds awful, actually. I was expecting people to give that wonderful piece of advice they always give, “get good”, but no. Here they sometimes said “yeah you can do this and that to avoid it”, but there was an air of acceptance around it. As if it were more like a casino game than anything. Yeah sometimes you just lose lol get used to it. Nah, if I want to gamble, I’ll do it somewhere where I could potentially lose my mortgage.
On top of that I didn’t like how the game drip fed upgrades to your ship, meaning I was flying around space in the equivalent of a Ford Pinto with airsoft guns taped to it, going up against fully armored death bots. I hated how expensive all the upgrades were, how you had a measly salary that could barely afford anything, and when you got to a store you had to decide between repairing your ship, refueling, or buying a new weapon to defend yourself with. Most of the time, if you had the money for a new weapon, it would be incompatible with your ship, or you wouldn’t have enough slots for it. You also had to buy ammo for them, so you were screwed there, too.
I hated how the game had two time limits: fuel and the encroaching federation ships. They made it so you don’t spend too much time in one sector, and had to pick your route carefully, but I ended up running low on fuel constantly, and that was enough to keep me moving forward in a panic. I didn’t need the ships at my ass to keep reminding me to move to the right. If I ever dared to explore a sector, I’d run out of gas. Exploring wasn’t worth it, either. Every node you visit is another chance at getting killed by some angry aliens. You risk death for a few scraps and maybe some ammo. It was a miserable time all around.
There’s a good chance someone might defend this game in the comments, and I’m willing to hear them out, but it’ll be very hard to convince me to even try this one again. I was filtered by FTL, and I don’t mind.
6 TERA Online
TERA was a korean grindfest MMO. Grind for gear so you can do high-level dungeons, where you grind for more gear. Pure skinner box gear treadmill nonsense. It also ran poorly and had a ton of micro transactions.
I stopped playing the game… because it was shut down. If it were still around, I’d be playing it. I had a blast with it, and it was the perfect game to play with friends, but it’s gone now. There’s no way to play it anymore, so it’s impossible for me to revisit it. I didn’t drop it, technically, someone slapped it out of my hands.
This has happened to a ton of games. Rise of Incarnates was a crappy Gundam VS game where you fought 2v2 using people who represented mythological deities. It wasn’t anywhere near as deep as Gundam VS, but it was a good time with friends. Its servers were shut down six months after it launched. Supervive was an alright MOBA Battle Royale. It got shut down around four months after release. I never played Rumbleverse, but it looked like a fun wrestling battle royale. I never played it because when I found out about it six months after launch, it had already shut down. Multiversus, the Warner Brothers Smash clone where you could play as Bugs Bunny and beat the shit out of Rick Sanchez, was also shut down. Highguard, a first person shooter, was also shut down- okay that one can stay shut down, actually. I don’t mind that one. Still, there might be one or two people out there who want to play Highguard, but it’s unavailable now. Some people want to inhale asbestos but THE MAN is trying to keep it from us.
I’ll use this opportunity to bring up an even more unknown, irrelevant game: Rocket Arena. It was a 3v3 third person arena shooter where you shot at each other with rockets. It was like smash brothers with some Quake thrown in. Your goal was to send the other team flying out of the arena. Every time you hit someone, they took damage, and each shot would send them flying further, like in Smash Bros. It was a lot of fun. You could juggle people in the air with rockets, if you were skilled. It was easy to understand, but it had a good skill ceiling. The game released in July of 2020, and by September of that year it had been completely abandoned. No one knew it existed, no one played it, it sold poorly and it was shut down. Surprisingly, it lasted until November 2023, before being delisted, but it was dead long before that. I bought a copy of it in 2020 for $5, and had fun with it for a few hours, until the game completely died and finding a match became impossible.
Yes this was a real game, and it was published by EA.
I’m sick of these live service games getting shut down instantly because they don’t make billions. If you’re going unplug the game, at least give me some way to play it offline.
Positive Note: La-Mulana
La-Mulana is a metroidvania that has a reputation for being an extremely difficult, unfriendly game. It doesn’t ease the player in, it throws a bunch of tough platforming challenges at them, and then expects them to solve cryptic riddles to progress. It’s a nightmare, and everyone who’s heard of the game knows it.
That kind of buzz got me interested in it, so I checked it out. I spent a few minutes figuring out the opening area, jumping around, exploring, until I finally made it into the first area. I solved some puzzles, and got killed by a few random traps. It was tough, but it wasn’t anything too bad. Then I found the switches.
For some reason, La-Mulana has a system where you interact with switches by dropping little weights on them, like Indiana Jones. These weights are limited. You need to buy them if you want to use them, so you need ammo to activate switches.
After hours of playing, I found myself in a tiny room that you needed to use a weight to get into. There was nothing there, so I was going to leave. I went to drop another weight and nothing happened. I was out of weights. I had soft-locked myself in a tiny room, losing about two hours’ worth of progress. I grit my teeth, sighed, and uninstalled the game. I couldn’t believe the game had such a stupid, nonsensical mechanic. No wonder people thought La-Mulana was hard, this game was made by a fool with a screwdriver.
Months later, I decided to re-install it and give it a second try. I don’t know why I did it, but I did. I replayed the part I had done before, but this time I made sure to stock up on as many weights as I could. I kept going, clearing challenges, solving bizarre puzzles and finding secrets. I wrestled with the weird controls, did some awkward platforming, got killed by countless random traps and kept going until I unlocked the first boss and beat it. When I did all that, I felt a strange feeling in my gut. It was the sense of accomplishment.
I’m glad I gave La-Mulana a second shot, because it turned out to be one of my favorite games of all time. It was insanely hard, full of confusing puzzles. I had to use a hint-based guide to get through a lot of the riddles, but I managed to figure out a good number of them on my own, and it was amazing.
I saw someone say this in a post somewhere, and it explains why I like this game so much: This game gives me the same feeling I got from games I played when I was a kid. A lot of games try to be nostalgic, by imitating sounds and sights from the past, but very few succeed at replicating how the games felt. La-Mulana does this perfectly. It’s incredibly hard. If you played games as a kid, you’d remember that everything seemed like a huge challenge, even if you replay the same game now as an adult, you’ll see it was nothing, but as a kid even Super Mario Bros seemed impossible. It’s confusing and cryptic in a way that encourages exploration. I used to check every corner in a game, hoping to find some secret, and La-Mulana rewards you for that. It brought me back to a time when games were these mysterious things of endless possibilities, that rewarded you for persevering and exploring.
I would have missed out on all that, if I had dropped the game, but I’m glad I gave it another try.
Conclusion
I recommend dropping games. If a game sucks, you don’t have to play it. Simple as. If you’re not having fun with a game, throw it in the trash. Is it possible that you might miss out on a cool game? Probably, but there’s also a chance that you waste hours trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.
When I drop a game, I like to make damn sure I’m ready to do it. This is why I waste so much time playing games I don’t like. I’ve had friends ask me “hey, I saw you’ve been playing this game for like four hours today. Is it any good?” and I answer with “No. It stinks”. I’m not hate-playing it, I’m just trying to make 100% sure that I can throw the game out of a window and feel no regret.
I wrote this whole thing just to say that I hate the Borderlands series without having to review any of them.
I don't play many games but FTL is one of my favourites, one of the few games I've 100%ed, along with the studio's other game Into The Breach. I suppose there may be some unwinnable runs, but most of the time there's something you can do. The key is to pause and think about the situation, and to get a feel for what might be a winnable strategy for any given ship/crew.
But I think ultimately, not all games are for all people. Playing any amount of Dota is my idea of hell. If I wanted to be rushed off my feet and have people be mad at me, I'd go become a line cook.
I had a friend get me a copy of Borderlands 2 so we could play together and it almost ended the friendship. I didn't even get out of the first area before muting the voice volume so I didn't have to hear a dozen different NPCs talking over us the whole time, it is unbelievably dull, and might literally have the spongiest bullet sponges in any FPS I've played. Utterly miserable.
I also realized at some point that I didn't feel like putting in the hours required to win a run of FTL, because, as everyone knows but some people still refuse to admit, it is just luck, and one bad encounter can negate everything you've done even if you're well prepared, know all the odds, and are merely pretty good at the technical aspect of playing the game. That said, I've clicked a lot more with Void War, which is basically FTL but 40K but with none of the licenses to make that official. But Void War has balls, and it doesn't care. It also has way more going on with your own ship and crew that makes it a little more fair and a lot more fun than FTL, then you can start going up in difficulty layers if you still need more challenge. Not a single run of FTL had near as much entertaining stuff going on as even the blandest, dullest run of Void War.
But I can't believe you admitted to playing Overwatch. lol