10 Video Games That Punish You For Being Unlucky
Guess I'll die.
As much as we all want to believe that video games are primarily concerned with testing skill, that's not always true.
When you dig into the guts of a game, it often becomes painfully apparent that your success (or not) is dependent as much on luck as skill.
While you might make it through a tricky level by the skin of your teeth, it's also possible you'll get totally screwed over by the game's own internal mechanics that favour chaos over order.
These 10 video games, from cult classics to beloved entries into AAA franchises, all decided to ditch the conventional reward system by brutally punishing players for the random, cruel sake of it.
These games all introduced random elements which could totally ruin a player's run through a given level, and rather than serve as minor inconveniences would massively impede progress and cause major frustration.
Rather than punish the player for simply not being good enough to make it through, these games did it for no other reason than "just because," to add insult to injury when the RNG wasn't working in their favour...
10. The Final Mission Is Entirely Based On Luck - Driver
We all remember how gruelling Driver's infamously difficult tutorial is, but the game wraps up with a final level that takes a seemingly masochistic amount of joy in subjecting the player to a random bombardment of total f**king chaos.
The last mission, The President's Run, sees the player attempting to protect the President of the United States by driving him to an underground parking lot while avoiding the combined forces of the NYPD and FBI.
The enemy cars here are extremely fast, durable, and aggressive, which combined with inclement weather conditions make it highly likely your damage meter will be quickly filled up, resulting in a mission failure.
But the behaviour of your foes is randomised per the game's violently uneven AI, and so success is basically dependent on that. If you're fortunate enough for rival cars to crash themselves as you speed around, then you just might get the POTUS to safety.
On Hard difficulty in particular, there's no consistency whatsoever in terms of strategy, and so what wrecks your car in one attempt might actually save your bacon in the next.
Add in the seemingly random possibility that you'll skid on the road and flip your car or get T-boned by a civilian vehicle, and the mission's outcome is basically like flipping a coin.