The Game With The Worst Boss Fights Of All Time
Worst Enemy of All-Time
WORST Castlevania Game Of ALL TIME
How could a game this good … have boss battles that are so bad? Welcome to MojoPlays, and today we’re looking at the worst video game enemies of all time - specifically, the bosses in “Deus Ex: Human Revolution”. For this video, we’re doing a deep dive into the number one pick for our list Top 10 Video Game Enemies That Ruined Everything - so if you haven’t seen that yet, head over to WatchMojo to check out. Bosses are meant to not just test our reflexes, but also our knowledge, our proficiency with the game’s mechanics. One of the most famous examples is the “Batman: Arkham” series as most of the boss fights in those games demand you master countering, how to pull off different takedowns, and how to utilize every gadget. For a more recent example, “DOOM: Eternal”, which we placed on the list for its Marauders and Tentacles, kept boss fights interesting by constantly pressuring the player to dash, switch weapons, and know when to burn, freeze, or Blood Punch enemies into oblivion. This was a good way for the game to remind the player to keep health and armor up at all times. What brought “Deus Ex: Human Revolution” down was its very focus - player choice. The “Deus Ex” series has been known for providing players with various ways to build their character with a certain playstyle. You can turn protagonist Adam Jensen into a gun-toting warhead, a sneaky assassin, a mischievous hacker, etc. In other words, you’re supposed to play the game YOUR way. While the other “Deus Ex” games may or may not fulfill those aspects of the game, “Human Revolution” sticks out from the line of suspects specifically because the boss fights do not compensate for the player’s build. Most, if not all, of the game’s boss fights demand you augment Jensen to the point where he’s an unstoppable, gun-wielding machine. If you go for any other build, your boss fights are going to be long and grueling. However, this goes against the whole idea of “playing your way”. The thing that hurts more is that there are several other games that exercise player choice without compromising the game’s design. The recent “Ghost of Tsushima” allows players to take down Mongols through stealth or standard combat, and no matter which playstyle you choose, the game provides you with enough opportunities to accomplish both - or even switch playstyles midway. For a title closer to “Human Revolution’s” RPG-like “augmentations”, “Fallout: New Vegas” allowed almost every character build imaginable, giving players windows to utilize high Charisma and talk their way out of a situation or aim their weapon at the head of whoever coughed in their direction. “Borderlands”, while a tad more restrictive on options, practices player choice by providing three unique skill trees, which, in turn, creates even more different ways to play certain character classes. What all three of these games accomplish is giving the player a number of options to play the game their way without sacrificing other aspects of the game. The level design didn’t suffer, the combat was still fun, and most importantly, the boss fights were tailored to every type of experience. Arguably, the biggest problem with “Human Revolution’s” boss fights is that they weren’t even designed by Eidos Montreal! The studio had actually considered axing boss fights entirely at one point just to meet deadlines. Instead, they were outsourced to another Canadian studio known as Grip Entertainment. Studio head Paul Kruszewski addressed the ire of the boss battles in a video released a couple weeks after the game launched. In it, he explains that the team had to “take our tech and inject it into” the game’s engine. He also confesses that he’s more into shooters and didn’t know much about the “Deus Ex” series. Admittedly, Grip Entertainment is only the middle man in this predicament. What makes this more frustrating is how the game was marketed when this problem was present. Mere days before “Human Revolution” launched, 1Up dot com published an interview with director Jean-Francois Dugas where Dugas stated “...sometimes we have constraints that force us to lead the players in some direction…” while emphasizing how the game is played and what players can choose for their actions. As history was written, this was not entirely the case. The boss fights clearly favored only a specific playstyle. Can we fault the developers, though? Well, mistakes were definitely made, but developers faced a difficult dilemma: outsource, or miss deadlines and delay the game. This was simply another case of rushed development as well as a lesson in maintaining communication between the developer and the player. When you tell the player they can do something only to revert the rules, it can make your game frustrating. You can’t tell them to build a wooden house using only LEGO bricks - it just doesn’t work that way. If you’re encouraging custom skill trees and such, you need to make sure every part of your game allows for that and conveys those choices clearly. Otherwise, it may alienate a part of your audience.