19 Things Video Game Fans Are SICK Of

It's strange to think that the most important thing about Sekiro isn't its desk-chewingly frustrating final battle, but the way in which its parry-heavy combat seemingly shattered the minds of every game developer who played it. How else do you explain every studio under the sun's recent obsession with parrying?

Damn near every Soulslike contender released this generation - Lies of P, Steelrising, Thymesia etc. - demands the player git gud by learning how to parry, which completely misunderstands why the original Dark Souls became so revered. There, parrying was just one option you could happily ignore in favour of battering enemies from afar with magic, or turning yourself into a walking tank. Most modern soulslikes forget this, and incorrectly assume that the genre is solely about how good the player is at pressing the block button just before an enemy attack hits. 

But it's not just Soulslikes that have been infested with this particular plague, with Spider-Man 2 and Doom: The Dark Ages being the most prominent victims. In the case of the former, the parrying mechanic takes a hero famous for flinging himself around the battlefield like a red and blue pinball and forces him to periodically root himself to the ground like a spandex clad tree. 

Meanwhile, the overwhelming emphasis Dark Ages places on its parry mechanic removes the focus on Doom's signature strengths of zooming across the battlefield while juggling an iconic arsenal. Small wonder the Revelations DLC - which sees the shield symbolically destroyed in its opening minutes - is seen as superior to the base game in every way.