You're really getting into a game ... its narrative is engaging, its gameplay is enthralling, and with each new level you find more cause to give it praise. But whether it's in an attempt to diversify the experience or simply a sadistic act on the developer's behalf, you find yourself facing a mission-type so lazily designed and infuriatingly difficult that you begin to question both your own sanity, and that of the developers who put it there. Stale, banal level design sucks. Sadly, the vast majority of games are guilty of committing this cardinal sin at some point over their duration. From the sprawling open-world game desperately trying to inject some variation into its unwieldy environment, to the humble corridor shooter that wants nothing more than to dispel claims that it's repetitive, lazy mission-types have been shoehorned into just about every genre going. Interestingly, there's nothing inherently wrong with any of these mission-types. In the right hands, these shifts in gameplay can provide a welcome change of pace while keeping the game's core mechanics fresh and engaging; this is not often the case. The issue is compounded by the fact that these mission-types are usually intended as mere distractions, and so they never get the attention they deserve from their developers. Either way, these missions rarely ever add anything to the overall experience of any given game, simply because on an individual level they're such a minor part of the final package.
