What video game do you regret buying?

Another case of "Brink" here.


I bought it at launch, having watched interesting and fun-looking gameplay footage from various demos. When I booted it, I had a few... let's just call them issues.

  • Numerous graphical problems. All particle effects were large blue squares. (Still not fixed, as of last week when I re-installed it.) That means that muzzle-flashes completely obscure the entire screen, making it pretty much unplayable on my computer.

  • Iffy map design. Almost all of the maps in the game have terrible choke-points, most likely to encourage parkour (a big selling point for the game), but almost all of the alternative routes were within line-of-sight of the main path, so you'd end up dead as soon as you tried to do anything novel. Many of the maps were very large as well, and you always seem to respawn all the way at one edge, so you end up running for 40 seconds, only to get immediately shot when you get the the choke point.

  • Dead servers. Not just nowadays, but even at launch there were VERY few people playing the game. For a 16 v 16 objective-based game, this was not good. Combine this with very strange AI bots (They start incredibly easy, and literally ignore you until you kill them. After a you gain a few levels, they become impossibly difficult, seemingly ignoring bullet-spread, and scoring perfect headshots at all times.)

  • Frustratingly different feeling characters. I'm fine with different weight classes, but the time to kill for "Heavy" enemies was somewhere around 8 to 10 seconds, whereas "Light" characters would die in just a few bullets. To me, the parkour never felt fast enough to provide Light characters with any sort of survivability, and the heavy characters (in my opinion) were very boring to play, because they moved much slower, and didn't really have anything going for them other than their apparent disinterest in bullets.

  • Confusing as FUCK objectives. The game has a mechanic where objectives change as you play, opening new routes, and allowing players to win in multiple ways. Sounds good, but they change seemingly without warning, and with no apparent indicator. Suddenly, the waypoint you were running towards would disappear, and be in a completely different part of the map that you spent half a minute running across. Compound this with the fact that every class you play has a different set of objectives. One minute, you're trying to blow open a wall as an engineer. You think to yourself, "there are three engineers here, what they could really use is a medic to keep them alive!" Switch to medic, and the waypoint is gone, with five new ones in different locations around the map.

- Players NEVER bleed to death. When you're shot, you lie down and take a bit of a nap until you either choose to end your own miserable life, or a medic throws you a syringe. You can then revive yourself immediately, at your exact location. The only way to truly kill someone is to either bore them to death, or walk over to every body you can find, and punch them in the face with the butt of your gun, because the "bleeding out" animation features no motion and looks exactly the same as an actually dead body.

When I played Brink, I was young(er) and stupid(er). Maybe it wasn't that bad, and I just didn't understand it. I've tried to play it again on several occasions more recently, but dead servers and generally terrible experiences have so far made it impossible to tell.

/r/AskReddit Thread