It gets worse later (spoilers)

[Sniper Team 4]

Every Killzone game I've ever played. Granted, I've only played the first three, but the pattern is the same in every game. You start out as just a random soldier in the army. The trailers make it look like you are going to be taking part in these epic, massive battles with allies fighting and dying right along side you.

You get that in the first two or three missions and then BAM! You are one of the few survivors and you become a one-man death machine and your allies are stupid A.I. that can't hit anything. And you're sneaking around do spy or sabotage stuff for the rest of the game. That is so boring to me because that's not the game that Killzone is advertized as.

 

[Amaror]

Mass Effect 3

And no, I'm not talking about that "later". It's when Kai Leng shows up, and the game tries with all its might to prove just how much of a badass he is and how I should totally be intimidated by him. And then I realize this twerp is going to be the secondary villian/muscle for the remainder of the game... Fuck.

Oh god that was so pathetic.
"Look,look,look", the game went "look at this badass ninja! he's going to fight you now! You're so fucked!"
Player beats Kai-Leng easily ingame.
"No,no,no", the game went "You misunderstood! He actually beat you, i promise. There he beats you all fair and square, while you have no control over it whatsoever. Man that guy is surely gonna be tough when you finally face him, don't you think!"

 

[Shoggoth2588]

I'm gonna go with Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII.

That game is just the gift that keeps on giving, it starts kind of meh and then it progressively gets more and More and MORE boring with every ticking second, then the seconds become minutes, then hours, then FUCKING DAYS (OR AT LEAST IT FELT LIKE THAT MUCH TIME).

I recommend watching the series by Jesse Cox to see what the hell I'm talking about, to this day I still don't get what is it that people like about that game.

I need to check that out but it does remind me that Final Fantasy XIII was a game that I consider to be horrible...then it got two sequels...I played the demo of the second one, hated that, and just gave up on the thought that XIII could be salvaged. Not sure if XIII-2 and XIII-3 got worse than the already-bad XIII but it's a nice mental picture I'm going to cling to.

 

[Fractral]

I gave up on mass effect 3 after the Rannoch missions. I just lost interest for some reason, probably because that was about the time I started playing Persona 4. I've never played it since. I do own the trilogy collection on Origin, but after loving my replay of Mass Effect 1 I got to the sequel and just gave up again. I far prefer the RPG mechanincs in the first game to the shooting of the second.
Another that comes to mind is Cave Story. There's a section (a little way after the bad ending choice) where you lose all of your weapon levels and have to do this utterly bullshit precision platforming section. I spent about an hour repeatedly failing at it and then quit. As far as I'm concerned the bad ending is the canonical one; I'm never going to bother to replay that game.

 

[JUMBO PALACE]

I haven't even played through Dante's Inferno yet, and I can already tell it's going downhill fast. The first few hours I thought were actually really fun, and the fact that your ranged attack costs nothing adds a dash of flexibility and variety to the combat. But right when I got out of Lust, which consists of one corridor puzzle segment, one tower puzzle segment, one elevator segment and one boss fight (takes about half an hour at most to complete), I realized the game had blown its load. I haven't played the game since I got stuck on a segment in Greed where you're assaulted by a small group of damage sponge enemies that yield no health on death.

Not saying the game doesn't have its flaws, but I genuinely enjoyed it and it's one of the few games that I finished and then began again immediately. I'm in the minority on this, but I enjoyed the religious themes and the portrayels of the different circles of hell along with the pretty fun combat. I say keep going and give it a chance.

OT: Alien Isolation has been one of the most confusing experiences I've ever played through. Initially I loved it but that soon turned to hate fueled by endless re-loads and repeats of large sections of the game. Then around 3/4 of the way in something changed and I started to have fun again. I'm honestly not sure what it was that brought me back aroudn but lowering the difficulty to easy definitely had a part in it. I could allow myself to actually get engrossed in the environment without the constant cheap deaths.

 

[Signa]

I'm going to say Duke Nukem Forever. I genuinely enjoyed the beginning. Going around, finding things to boost your ego, as well as showing Duke's life after saving the world from the last time. It felt right, and it felt awesome. Then the actual gameplay started with its two weapon limit and flat jokes that couldn't even hit a amusing note on occasion.

 

[Shoggoth2588]

Another that comes to mind is Cave Story. There's a section (a little way after the bad ending choice) where you lose all of your weapon levels and have to do this utterly bullshit precision platforming section. I spent about an hour repeatedly failing at it and then quit. As far as I'm concerned the bad ending is the canonical one; I'm never going to bother to replay that game.

This reminds me of the section in ZombiU wherein you're kidnapped by an insane survivor who forces you into a sort of arena. All of your items and weapons have been taken away, including your cricket bat. You're given a pistol and there are a number of explosives around that you can shoot. To survive this section of the game, you must kill off all of the zombies thrown at you with very limited ammo, no other weapons to fall back to and if you fail, you get to try again in the same stupid freaking arena. I liked ZombiU up to this point, which was a pretty glaring black eye in an otherwise pretty-good game.

 

[Pyrian]

XCom: Enemy Unknown. Starts off all fun and tactical and challenging, where taking cover and outflanking the enemy while keeping them suppressed and overwatching vulnerable corridors is very important.Bbut as you start hitting the level caps, the tactics boil down to "kill them all quickly"; your abilities make you extra deadly, cover becomes largely dispensable (nevermind destructible), and there's really no tactical defense against long-range grenades or close combat, so it just becomes a game of making sure they're dead as quickly as possible.

 

[FPLOON]

Sonic 06...

I survived Sonic's story, glitches and all, realizing that without the glitches and/or the "non-optional" side missions themselves, this could have been a decent story mode minus the story itself, basically... I survived Shadow's story, glitches and all, reminding myself that sometimes going all "Chaos Control" can make things worse until either you die or it runs out, which if you're killing robots and/or Iblis shits left and right probably won't be happening fast enough... I kinda breezed through Silver's story once I knew how to fully control him, glitches and all... But, once you start the Final story, that's when shit gets even more worse from here...

First off, you have to play every playable character except Sonic (because he died at the beginning of the Final story) and Blaze (because she sacrificed herself at the end of Silver's story) because each one's trying to retrieve a Chaos Emerald so that they can try to revive Sonic or some shit like that... The problem is not that these characters play horribly (even though most of the supporting ones do in some way, shape, or form), but the fact that you're revisiting most of the areas while the threat of mini-black holes of death "slowly" appearing around you in any and all directions, including right in front of you "unexpectedly", unless you hit a specific orb that can delay them for only a "short" amount of time...

Second, once you loose all of your lives at any given time, since there's no such thing as auto-saving while going from one character to the other (let alone auto-saving in general), you have to start all over again from the beginning of the Final story with probably less lives than before (if you originally had more than 5 lives beforehand) and, if there was a particular section that you constantly kept getting your ass kicked by somewhat-one-hit-KO mini-black holes (since for me, it was whenever I was jumping/gliding from one section to the other while a mini-black hole's trying to suck me in because it just appeared from "out of nowhere"), I hope you remember the motto of "gotta go fast"...

The only thing that's more worse than this is the fact that once you do beat it, not only do you never have to play through that level again (unless you play it on a higher difficulty than "Normal" and/or you're replaying the whole game again), but everything after that is MORE EASY that what you have to go through to get there in the first place... because if that section before the final boss was "Kaizo Mario", then the final boss is "New Super Mario Bros." by comparison...

Granted, the last time I replayed this game was two years ago because I was trying to win a bet involving S-Ranks and, to make a long story short, I got some money out of said bet... So, there's that...

 

[Dalisclock]

.....Fahrenheit aka indigo prophecy...Easy one I know.

The game starts off pretty grounded with a quite a few QTEs and quite a few mini hub areas as well and some good character interactions/dialogue, switching between the killer and two police officers investigating the murder Also, yeah, the sex scenes....Yeah..it's creepy and I find it embarrassing just to watch it alone.

Somewhere in the middle the protagonist dies and comes back but with supernatural power, there's a power struggle going on within some underworld, this guy is the one because he was exposed to a plot device element as a child in area 51 where his mum and dad were working/living which causes him to be like this. It's also mostly QTEs at this point...

It's like it starts off to be the X-files but then becomes a budget version of the Matrix mixed with ancient greek myths regarding the underworld mixed with generic Americana tropes.

It would have likely been better if it didn't feel like a massive chunk of the plot (during the 30 day time skip after lucas dies) had been surgically removed, with no transition or summary, just "Things are really bad, lucas is (un)dead and boning the female cop". Then it gets all matrix/DBZ...and that's where it lost me.

Great 2/3rd of a game though.

 

[Dalisclock]

\
Bioshock. I started losing interest after a few hours but I pressed on, using tonics to pump up my wrench damage which was actually quite fun. Then the big plot twist which I loved. Unfortunately that's the peak. And there's still a couple of hours to go. What a slog that final section was. We lose the two interesting characters (Atlas and Ryan) and instead are stuck with the remarkably boring Fontaine. Spend a bit of time faffing about, predictable final showdown, the end. That game really ended with a whimper.

That's pretty much why I never really jumped on the "BIOSHOCK IS THE BEST SHOOTER EVER!" train. Once you meet Ryan the rest of the game is pretty meh, and then there's that crappy escort mission which ruined the whole "You become a big daddy" idea.

Though I was kind of annoyed how the beginning of game feels so dynamic and...you know, actually underwater. The rest of the game doesn't really have the same feeling.

 

[Drathnoxis]

I want to say Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, but actually that game was pretty terrible right off the bat with the tedious spoon fed tutorials. Although it certainly did get worse when my wrist started to get sore from all of the wii-mote waggling. Not to mention that roughly 70% of the game was pointless fetch quest nonsense. Or that segment where you have to prove yourself to the water dragon queen whose life you've already saved by swimming around a pond collecting music notes.

Pikmin 2 had those boring randomly generated caves. Those bloody caves just kept stretching on to infinity as the game went on and had none of the clever design that was present in the overworld because for some mind boggling reason they decided it was integral that they be random.

I have to say Half-Life 2.

I would have to agree that Half-Life 2 getting worse later if only for one moment late in the story that completely ruins any sort of character that Gordon Freeman ever had.

Spoiler: Half-Life 2 spoilers

Late in the game you are in the lair of the big bad and there are these giant metal coffins on rails that render anybody inside completely immobile. So, superb genius that he is, Gordon Freeman decides that the best course of action is to climb on in. This is literally the only way to proceed though the game. The coffin then delivers you right into big bad's own office, who is astonished that you would deliver yourself to him practically on a silver platter.
It's like, what was Gordon thinking? What did he think would happen by climbing into the mobile iron maiden? It's not like he didn't know what it was, early in the game we see a character trapped in one and have great difficulty trying to break him out! It's just one of the most moronic decision any video game character has ever made. He might as well have thrown away his weapons and chained himself to the wall of the dungeon for all the sense it makes. Like wasn't this guy supposed to be pretty smart? I didn't think we were supposed to be controlling a drooling imbecile. And to make it worse, it's not even like it happens in a cutscene, the game forces the player to go along with the retardation and walk into the obvious trap. And this is the game that people call one of the best examples of weaving narrative into the gameplay?

 

[wAriot]

Indeed, for me it happened with a lot of games throughout the years. It's really painful to admit it, but most of those games are VERY good, some of my favorites (even if I didn't actually finish them). I just got stuck, or got to a boring part. Thief, Deus Ex, System Shock 2... It's a pity, because I seriously like them.
Someday, though. Someday...

Mass Effect 3

And no, I'm not talking about that "later". It's when Kai Leng shows up, and the game tries with all its might to prove just how much of a badass he is and how I should totally be intimidated by him. And then I realize this twerp is going to be the secondary villian/muscle for the remainder of the game... Fuck.

Man, Kai Leng was hilarious.
Which isn't a good thing, since he was supposed to be the "serious business" villain.

Spoiler: The message he sent was particularly funny

 

[Scow2]

Saints Row IV. And it goes downhill fast.

It starts off glorious, first with the riding the missile scene to become President of the U.S, and then the press conference thing setting up so much... Stripper poles in the White House bedrooms? Saints in charge of D.C.? Gun racks in the Oval Office? President of the U.S.? Alien invasion wrecking our shit? Red-White-And-Blue Stars-And-Stripes Turret in the front (Or was it back?) Lawn? All awesome.

And even getting stuck in the cheesy 50's simulation was hilarious.

... but after all that, it dumps you in a simulation of the previous game. Yeah, you get to do some 'crazy' stuff... but not really, because it's all just a simulation, and not even pretending to be real... Boss is just a pompous blowhard, while the 'hero' is Kenzie, because she's the only one actually doing anything. Or the game just goes dumb.

The game has an awesome set-up promising "Independence Day meets Metal Wolf Chaos Starring the Third Street Saints"... and instead, they throw that all away and we get a shitty knockoff of The Matrix with a blustery protagonist who, because there's no weight to their actions (Simulation, remember?), is even more unlikable than Neo.

 

[bliebblob]

I feel skyrim definitely hits such a point once you've worked your way through all the quests at least once. I still want(ed) to try so many more character builds after that but gameplay-wise there isn't anything left you haven't already done before. You can of course always just start clearing out caves and ruins for the sake of it, which is exactly what I resorted to, but some of skyrims more... Patronizing design decisions really begin to shine when you do that, as well as some nasty legacy issues from oblivion...

Mind you, the key words here are "After you've done all the quests." Which is easily a good few hundred hours of fun, so I hardly feel ripped off.

 

[laggyteabag]

Shadow of Mordor: The first half of the game is kinda fun, i'll admit. You don't want to just run around pulling entire groups of Uruks because you are a squishy teddy bear of a guy, and the second you pull a captain that you weren't prepared for, you may as well get ready to kiss your ass goodbye. Unfortunately, however, the sheer amount of power creep that the game possesses is enough to make even the most satisfying combat systems tedious, because the sheer amount of passive buffs and abilities that you obtain just turns the game into easy mode. Shadow of Mordor is in serious need of a hard mode.

Another one for ME3's Kai Leng. That guy was a plot-armoured twat.

Assassin's Creed 3. You start the game Haytham, who is a charismatic type of guy, and it turns out that he is not an Assassin (a good guy), but is actually a Templar (a bad guy). Unfortunately, after you find this out, the game then throws you into the shoes of the most bland and boring character in an Assassin's Creed game since Altaïr: Connor. You are then stuck with his boring ass for the rest of the game. Good thing they didn't give him more games like Ezio and his trilogy. That would've been painful.

Skyrim. Once you have your full set of the best armour and weapons in the game, there is nothing to strive for or do. The caves and dungeons are filled with the same 3 or 4 enemy types (Bandits, Draugr, Falmer or Dwemer Machinery), and all of the quests revolve around going into these caves to collect something. It is just one boring ass game. How do people even play it, let alone like it without mods?

 

[Scow2]

Skyrim. Once you have your full set of the best armour and weapons in the game, there is nothing to strive for or do. The caves and dungeons are filled with the same 3 or 4 enemy types (Bandits, Draugr, Falmer or Dwemer Machinery), and all of the quests revolve around going into these caves to collect something. It is just one boring ass game. How do people even play it, let alone like it without mods?

It can take a long time to get the best armor and weapons in the game.

 

[laggyteabag]

Skyrim. Once you have your full set of the best armour and weapons in the game, there is nothing to strive for or do. The caves and dungeons are filled with the same 3 or 4 enemy types (Bandits, Draugr, Falmer or Dwemer Machinery), and all of the quests revolve around going into these caves to collect something. It is just one boring ass game. How do people even play it, let alone like it without mods?

It can take a long time to get the best armor and weapons in the game.

But even so, you still have to play through the game's aforementioned lackluster an repetitive content, and if you do want the best gear in the game, its not even like you need to do anything overly special to obtain it (ie Kill a boss). When you can craft the best gear with relative ease, then you have a problem.

 

[DementedSheep]

The obvious one is Bioshock. The game goes to shit after Ryan, especially for me since I didn't like the game-play in the first place and with most of Raptures secrets revealed and all interesting characters dead there wasn't much to keep playing for. I only finished it because "fuck it, I've come this far and I'm sure it ends soon". The final fight seemed out of place.

I'm not sure if the Riddick game gets worse or whether its just a case of too much of the same so I get bored of it despite it being fun at the start. Personally I don't know why the wardens don't start him off in maximum or just shoot him since he keeps breaking out.

Crysis because the further I get the more often I seem to run into glitches, sometime game breaking ones like the damn helicopter you have to kill appearing underwater. That might just be me though.

XCom: Enemy Unknown. Starts off all fun and tactical and challenging, where taking cover and outflanking the enemy while keeping them suppressed and overwatching vulnerable corridors is very important.Bbut as you start hitting the level caps, the tactics boil down to "kill them all quickly"; your abilities make you extra deadly, cover becomes largely dispensable (nevermind destructible), and there's really no tactical defense against long-range grenades or close combat, so it just becomes a game of making sure they're dead as quickly as possible.

Yep, it's one of my favourite games but all the difficulty curve is off. It's hard at the start when you're out-gunned but you have to chose between gearing your people properly and getting satellite coverage. The first terror mission with chryssalids is a ***** if you don't have upgraded weapons yet but once you get set up it becomes too easy. I don't need to be carefull advancing when my flying overwatching squadsight snipers will kill anything that moves. If I do hit a large group a rocket solves that problem. If it's tight corridors good luck fighting my invisible assaults and if I can't kill them all in one turn I have mindcontrol. All my soldiers just feel overpowered.
It makes senses that it would be hard at the start of the invasion but it's not good from a gameplay perspective. Though I do know some who like it that way because it feels like they have progressed.