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  • Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes. It comes with a laughable 11 modules which you tire of after a couple weeks of playing. It's badly coded and its modding support is flimsy and haphazard. The developers are unreachable and uncooperative.

    Without mods, you'd put down the game after a week and forget about it completely. With mods (created for free by the community) you now get a wealth of thousands of modules, but you also need multiple extra mods to get simple basic functionality that should be in the base game. Wanna play more than 100 modules? Game crashes on startup unless you install the Tweaks mod. Wanna play just the modules that your friends enjoy? Gotta mess around with Steam workshop subscriptions for hours unless you install the Mod Selector mod. Wanna play a specific set of modules you like? Good luck getting the right RNG, unless you install the DMG mod. Wanna play more than one bomb? Needs the Multiple Bombs mod. Some modules are genuinely unplayable unless you get the Boss Module Manager mod, which in turn relies on a volunteer-run external website to be running and to be constantly updated by volunteers. Even Camera Zoom is a separate mod!!

    99% of the game is made for free by volunteers, and yet it's the garbage 1% that everyone has to pay for. It's a travesty.

  • The Isle is honestly pretty bad in many respects. In fact, it's such a mess that I need to clarify which version I'm even talking about, because there is an OG version and an on-going complete rewrite, prompted by them having fired their only coder and no longer being able to understand their own codebase.

    The OG version was special. It was very simple, quite buggy and in a constant, obvious state of plans-and-hopes (being EA), but it had a unique atmosphere - the only true survival-horror to date, as far as I'm concerned/aware (only rivalled by some of my experiences playing DayZ, back when it was still an Arma 2 mod).

    Playing a herbivore, resting/hiding in a bush in the pitch-black darkness of night with only limited night-vision letting me see my immediate surroundings and footprints on the ground, the sound of a massive, rumbling carnivore sniffing for traces of food was quite a thrill. Not to mention the moments after when a pair of jaws around my size suddenly emerge out of the darkness.

    That kept me playing.

    Then they stopped working on that and began their rework from the ground up. The rework (which they call EVRIMA) has (or had) no day-night cycle (always daytime), went from being set in an arboreal environment to tropical jungle, and had two playable dinosaurs (one herb- and one carnivore) of about equal size. No creepy nights, no asymmetric gameplay, no horror elements, different feeling in both how it feels to play and how it looks, and it also ran like crap on any device.

    They're slowly working on it; it has some more dinosaurs now etc, but last I played, it still didn't feel the same and it was still buggy and severely incomplete. What emergent horror elements one might get out of the reworked version I feel are but shadows of what could have been.

    And yet there's none other like it.

    Edit: I believe the current version does have night-time, but it doesn't (or didn't until recently) have night-vision and IIRC the nights are not as horrifying.

  • Pokémon Channel may be one of the worst Pokémon games ever released; it's annoying to play, incredibly tedious and teaches kids to watch more TV instead of less.

    I really liked playing it as a child. The thing is, I can't for the life of me remember why I even liked it that much.

  • Robocraft is pretty awful. The current game is in maintenance mode. The only thing the devs can make is their LEGO-like live service game, but even that is too hard for them. This year they just quit and restarted on yet another attempt of a sequel to the only thing they've had success with. That being said, I still enjoy spending hours in the lab and shooting apart other players' creations.

    • Robocraft used to be one of my favorite games and slowly watching it become worse was painful.

  • Power and Revolution (geopolitical simulator 4) absolute jankiest (grand strategy?) game I've ever played and bugged as hell but I often come back to it because it scratches some my itches perfectly. If anyone has any game similar to this one I'm all ears

  • The reviews for Hyperbolica say it's too short and not a full game, but I really enjoyed it.

  • I would never play it myself so I'm not sure how much this counts, but there's something about Garten of Banban that keeps drawing me back to it whenever a new episode drops. I'm well aware it's just some shitty bottom of the barrel reaction streamer/theory crafting bait and it's mostly me wanting to see where the train wreck goes, but I think I'm enjoying it on an ironic level too.

  • I really don't enjoy bad games. They're bad because something significant disrupts the fun, such as major bugs, janky mechanics, poor pacing, bland story or characters, no sense of progression, grindy RNG time-wasting, systems (e.g. crafting) that are either far too shallow or way too convoluted, half-baked level design, or even external factors like obnoxious DRM or microtransactions.

    The bad game I sunk the most time into by far is No Man's Sky. People keep insisting "it's good now", but all the gameplay mechanics are truly awful. It's an okay sandbox and entertaining enough if that's all you're after, but as a game specifically it has about 2/3 of the issues I mentioned above.

  • Knights and merchants

    It's a bit like Warcraft without the supernatural stuff. You have to make a functional town that has farming, stock logistics, weapons manufacture, etc. and then you also have to win against a nearby kingdom.

    The mechanics are so broken. You can usually just wait it out for your enemy to run out of resources (to be fair it was the same in Starcraft) but every other level was a battle in an open field, and it was very hard to manage the actions of your army.

79 comments