10 Cheap Boss Fights That Made You Rage Quit

Video game bosses are supposed to be hard. They're purposefully designed to be exceptionally challenging enemies that exist to test if players have mastered the game well enough to progress to the next section. The further players get in a game, the harder each boss becomes.

However, not every boss approaches difficulty in the same way. While some encounters are relatively straightforward, others are much harder.

There are few things that are as satisfying as finally beating a tricky boss after hours of failed attempts, gradually learning its moves and developing a strategy to take it down. Creating such a boss fight requires injecting the right amount of challenge to ensure that the fight always feels winnable.

Some bosses, though, didn't get this memo and took their difficulty to such an extreme that facing them felt like an impossible task. Whether it was unblockable attacks that decimate health bars, irritating mechanics that turned the fight into a headache, or cruel tricks that made an already hard encounter needlessly more difficult, there was nothing fun about fighting these bosses.

There's only so much that "getting good" can do against these cheap opponents.

The Gears Of War games are brimming with terrifying creatures for players to fight. In addition to the hordes of regular enemies, the series is also home to some exhilarating boss fights.

One boss that's memorable for all the wrong reasons, though, is The Matriarch from Gears 5.

This title's version of the Berserker from previous instalments, The Matriarch is a hulking behemoth that's invulnerable to most attacks. It's also completely blind, only able to detect players through sound. Once it does hear players, it charges in their direction, obliterating anything in its path.

The only way to damage this boss is to hit a weak point on its back, which only becomes vulnerable when the boss is exposed to the cold. While this fight sounds simple in theory, it's far more frustrating in practice.

In addition to the arena's tight layout making it all too easy for players to become trapped and unable to avoid the boss's charge attacks, The Matriarch also takes a lot of punishment before going down. Capable of killing players in a single hit (especially on higher difficulties), and with no checkpoint in sight, what should be a straight-forward encounter quickly becomes a painful ordeal.