10 Totally Out-Of-Place Levels In Awesome Video Games
Nobody asked for a turret-shooter level in Dead Space.
It's no secret that making a great video game is incredibly difficult, requiring the collaboration of hundreds or even thousands of artists to deliver an entertaining end product.
Sustaining that brilliance over an entire game, potentially running dozens of hours in length, is no easy feat, and so it's little surprise that even some of the greatest games of all time get a little loopy every now and then.
These 10 video games, all great works in their own right, nevertheless indulged their wild side for one level, chapter, or mission that just felt totally, impossibly out of place.
From stark shifts in gameplay nobody asked for, to changes in tone and setting few ever expected, these levels were wholly at odds with what came before whether for better or worse.
In some cases it marked an ambitious departure from what players were used to, while in others it represented a misguided attempt at shock value or even a cynical, lazy effort to pad the game out.
Whether you dug these levels or not, they felt completely out of place within games which were otherwise something else entirely...
10. The MJ & Miles Stealth Levels - Spider-Man
Insomniac's Spider-Man is one of the greatest superhero video games of all time - a stunning exercise in wish fulfilment as players were granted the opportunity to sling around a teeming New York to their heart's content.
But for some reason, Insomniac felt that a game centered exclusively around Spider-Man might be too much of a good thing, and so forced players to partake in a series of mandatory stealth missions starring Mary Jane Watson and Miles Morales.
Not a single living soul bought a Spider-Man game to play dull, frustrating stealth missions as these characters, and while the levels were relatively short, ripping away the feature attraction numerous times throughout the game just felt totally unnecessary.
They're not even good stealth missions, either: the enemy A.I. is laughably shallow, and getting caught infuriatingly triggers an instant checkpoint restart.
Any mission which wrestles control away from the titular superhero in their own video game should be 100% optional, though thankfully Insomniac seemed to listen to the vocal complaints, as the Miles Morales-starring spin-off featured nothing of the sort.