10 Levels That Should've Been Cut From Recent Video Games

Nobody buys Spider-Man to play as someone else.

spider-man 2 MJ mission
Insomniac

The perfect video game doesn't exist, and honestly, if a game manages to achieve consistent greatness, that's usually enough for most folk - even in a year as jam-packed with banger releases as 2023.

Yet sometimes it's agonisingly obvious that part of the game just isn't working and should've been cut entirely in the development phase - yet for whatever reason, it made it to the final release.

These levels all bring their respective games - whether beloved or not on the whole - down a peg, ensuring that most everyone found them to be the low-point of the experience.

These levels range from tedious, soul-destroying mini-games to unfairly difficult bosses, unbearably tedious unskippable tutorials, and everything else in-between.

They all represent game design at its most pedestrian and punishing, for one reason or another, enough that you probably asked yourself while playing, "We're still doing this in 2023, huh?"

If these levels were given the chop, not a single solitary soul would've complained, and in a few extreme cases the developers would've probably saved players a small fortune in broken controllers...

10. The Power Collection Mini-Game - Starfield

spider-man 2 MJ mission
Bethesda

Starfield is one of 2023's most disappointing games for many reasons, but right at the top of the list? The head-smackingly dull, repetitive manner in which you unlock powers throughout the sci-fi epic.

During the main story, you'll be periodically directed to anomalies contained within temples where you can acquire unique abilities to enhance both your offensive and defensive capabilities.

Except, the means of unlocking them is the exact freakin' same each and every time.

You enter the temple, find the anomaly, and then participate in a resoundingly lame mini-game where you fly around a room making contact with dust clouds ad nauseum until the game finally decides you've done it enough to receive the power.

If many surely assumed that each power would have its own bespoke mini-game, the fact that it's the exact same nonsense every time really underlines how egregiously Bethesda cut corners while developing Starfield.

Speaking of cut, they could've begun by ditching the mini-game entirely and just instantly giving us the powers the second we found each anomaly. Woeful.

Contributor
Contributor

Stay at home dad who spends as much time teaching his kids the merits of Martin Scorsese as possible (against the missus' wishes). General video game, TV and film nut. Occasional sports fan. Full time loon.