8 Amazing Games With Terrible Mechanics
Incredible games brought down a peg by one terrible piece of gameplay...
Delivering an amazing game is nothing short of a miracle, typically requiring an army of committed artists and technicians to pool their skills in harmony, often for many years at a time.
As such, it’s little surprise that the perfect game doesn’t exist, and even the very best ones aren’t without their notable flaws.
But sometimes incredible video games offer up a single loathsome mechanic which, while hardly ruining the entire experience, sticks out enough that you might question how it made it in to the final release at all.
That’s absolutely the case with these widely maligned mechanics, each of which invoked the ire of a substantial portions of the player base.
These mechanics might’ve even proven problematic enough to dissuade players from replaying the game at all, or in the case of the PC crowd, they may have sought out mods to remove these elements entirely.
Again, no game is perfect and it’s silly to expect as much from any project produced by human beings in all of their flawed, squishy loveliness.
But opposed to everything great in these games, you do have to wonder quite what the hell the developers were thinking…
8. Cait Sith's Box Throwing - Final Fantasy VII Rebirth
Near-universally accepted to be the low point of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth's mostly brilliant critical path, the Cait Sith box-throwing mini-game is eight pounds of hot garbage stuffed into a dirty nappy.
In the game's eleventh chapter, you'll be forced to take control of everyone's favourite robotic feline for a lengthy sequence inside Shinra Manor. This includes taking part in an utterly excruciating aside in which you need to pick up and throw a series of boxes to activate switches, break pipes, and manipulate machines.
Between the wonky, unresponsive controls, fiddly aiming, and Cait Sith's molasses-slow movement speed, it's absolutely infuriating to get through, and worse than that, it's the most aggressively dull example of blatant filler content in the entire main game.
While Rebirth's arguably excessive number of mini-games vary wildly in quality, most of them are at least relatively painless to get through. This one, though? It's like pulling digital teeth. Few players would begrudge Square Enix just patching it out entirely, honestly, because in a game that's already wildly overlong, this is one miserable late-stage nadir.