10 Video Games With The Worst Enemy A.I.

There's little denying how awesome the Hotline Miami games are: the ultra-violent top-down shooters occupy that small, liminal space between infuriatingly difficult and just-challenging-enough.

The objective is simple throughout: use stealth, your weapons, and your sheer guile to murder your way through a stage full of enemies, with even the simplest mistake often resulting in the player's instant death.

It's tremendously entertaining, in spite of the fact that the game's AI is basically one atrocious crapshoot. On the flip of a coin, the AI might hold in place and wait for you to emerge, or wander off and randomly shoot you when you're preoccupied somewhere else.

As with so many games on this list, it's the inconsistency that's most annoying. Some enemies won't even flinch when one of their fellow goons gets brutally murdered mere feet away, which proves especially annoying if you're trying to lure enemies into a doorway to mow them down.

The AI behaviour is "eccentric" to be kind, often acting as though suffering from a major neurological disorder: it's not uncommon for them to just give up shooting at you or walk into a room and then walk right back out of it for no reason at all.

In a game that's all about split-second timing where even simple mistakes are brutally punished, the rules of the enemy behaviour need to be clear. That the game is still so much fun in spite of all this is frankly miraculous.