10 Levels That Stopped Video Games Being Perfect

There's nothing quite like playing a video game that's not merely good, or even great, but basically flat-out perfection.

Knowing that you're playing the work of masters at the top of their game is exhilarating, because sustaining such a high level of quality across potentially dozens of hours of gameplay is an insanely hard ask.

But just then, that level arrives.

Perfection is a tall order to strive for, and so it's little surprise that so many games get so incredibly close to the mark, only for one section of gameplay to let the whole thing down.

In the case of these 10 games, all of which received rave reviews from critics and are ranked among the greatest entries into their respective genres, they offered up a single level that just put a slight dampener on the entire experience.

These levels presented a ridiculous difficulty spike, delivered a tedious diversion from the main campaign, or simply weren't fun to play through, resulting in an otherwise magnificent piece of work getting a little bit tarnished.

Again, these games are all still awesome, albeit with one unfortunate caveat...

God of War Ragnarök is an absolutely mesmerising masterpiece of a AAA blockbuster, though there's one section in the game that splits fans straight down the middle - Ironwood.

Roughly one-third of the way through the story, players are again given control of Atreus, for what they surely assume will be another brief detour from the main campaign.

But Atreus' sortie in Ironwood, where he meets Angrboda, drags on for around two hours of stamina-sapping fetch quests, repetitive combat, and dull walking around.

Sure, Ironwood is beautiful and arguably even the best-looking area in the entire game, but the content therein feels like the most blatant sort of AAA padding, especially with the MMO-tier quality of the unimaginative objectives.

Ironwood is useful for Atreus' character development, but did it really need to be so freaking long?

In a game otherwise defined by excellent pacing, this sluggish section is a tedious slog that feels like optional content accidentally made mandatory, and proves especially egregious on repeat playthroughs.