Artificial Stupidity / Action Games

• Assassin's Creed:
  • The guards in Assassin's Creed will sometimes throw you off a high ledge, then jump down after you. You can survive the resulting falling damage. They can't. In 2, you often lose thieves to the idiots trying to keep up with Ezio and jumping from too high or failing jumps.
  • The Multiplayer Tutorial AI dummy in Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood won't care if the player approaches him in an unusual manner, and will only jog away from the player if a chase is activated, never sprinting.
  • In 2, Brotherhood, and Revelations, Ezio can swim. No one else can. This does not prevent anyone moving near the water trying. It can be very frustrating when one of the super-elite assassins you've spent hours training makes a perfect kill on a guard in the docks, then calmly steps off the pier to his death.
• Armored Core:
  • The enemy AI in the games, especially on the PS1 and PS2, are capable of truly staggering feats of incompetence. Choose to fight AC's in the right arena and they will:
  A) Attempt to get at you by futilely trying to phase through solid matter.
  B) Attempt to get at you by futilely trying to phase through solid matter while emptying all of their weapons into a 10 meter wide concrete wall.
  C) Attempt to get at you by futilely trying to phase through solid matter while emptying all of their weapons into a 10 meter wide concrete wall and somehow killing themselves.
  D) All of the above
  • They have also been witnessed boosting out of the combat area for no reason, giving the player the victory by default. As you can imagine, there are myriad ways of rapidly climbing the arena ranks by exploiting the stupidity of its inhabitants. But the real problems start when FromSoftware, rather than attempting to program better AI, decided to compensate for the computers' stupidity by giving the AI-controlled ACs capabilities that far exceed what is possible, or sane, and in Armored Core 2 even equipped the AI with parts that didn't exist.
• In Dead Rising, it's not uncommon for Frank to be escorting a couple of survivors and, even though you've given weapons to as many of them as you can, for them to stand there calling for help while they're being eaten alive by zombies and doing absolutely nothing to defend themselves. This can be especially frustrating if you're handling a survivor that can't carry a weapon or if you yourself are in the middle of being attacked. This is even more frustrating if you were attacked while trying to help the idiot and you all die because said idiot will not even push the zombies (all the survivors are capable of pushing). They also have no concept of retreat, and will stand there fighting off a horde of zombies, no matter how overwhelmed they get, leading to the tactic of mashing the call button to make them move their sorry asses. Also, don't give them a gun unless you like getting caught in friendly crossfire.
• Driver 2 Advanced really did stretch the bar at the time for the Game Boy Advanced. It was remarkably fluid despite the pixel count being lower than fifteen for particular sprites. The control scheme and driving performed decently for the extremely limited physics engine it was rooted to. But the catch here is, a felony can be really unpredictable unless you try and figure out how to piss off the police and blinking pedestrian sprites. Why is this stupid on the A.I.'s end? Particular illegal crimes such as driving on the sidewalk and stealing cars would occasionally become "legal" and no authorities will pursue.
• Enemies in Dying Light don't realize they can't swim — including the powerful, agile, and reasonably intelligent Volatiles. At one point in the game's second area, it's possible to simply wade in chest-deep water just outside the city and watch endless hordes of super-zombies chase in after you, only to immediately die as soon as they get in attack range.
• In the Earth Defense Force series, civilians will run around at random, frequently running in front of your rockets and causing them to detonate early, killing you. Arguably justified in that civilians in a military situation are a liability because of their random actions… except that the civilians don't die, so they should have nothing to fear.
  • The NPC soldiers also have this problem a lot, especially in confined spaces. If you're say fending off ravagers in an underground level of 2025/4.1, expect to see a lot of your bullets being wasted on those idiots running right in front of your guns, sometimes even jumping seemingly just to get in your line of fire. There are no penalties or any particular usefulness to these guys offensive-wise, but still, you're losing precious ammo and some potential decoys for the giant bugs.
• Enter the Matrix has three driving levels. If you play as Niobe, you get to be the driver while Ghost takes shots at the enemy vehicles, and if you're playing as Ghost, you get to be the gunner while Niobe drives through the level. The problem? Apparently the AI-controlled Niobe completely flunked out of driving school, because she can't go five seconds without crashing into something and more than likely getting stuck (this is most aggravating in the final driving level, where you're trying to escape from the Twins, who are following after and shooting at you, and are also completely invincible).
• Sometimes, the AI for The Force Unleashed can be do something brilliant and organic, but more often it tends to be dumb as rocks. It isn't unknown or impossible to literally sit behind a force field wall doing nothing and watch a bunch of stormtroopers and a purge trooper effectively trip over one another and fall off bridges, ledges, and cliffs. It's possible to see almost an entire squad kill themselves with no input on the part of Starkiller.
• In Gears of War, Locusts (the main enemy in the game) are supposed to dynamically move around and take cover in response to your team's position. However, nine times out of ten, they will, in a pitched firefight, leap over the cover to reach a better place, leaving them horribly open for an explosive headshot. In the sequel, this was fixed, but the AI has even more pitiful failings; enemies will run straight into security lasers, clearly-visible proxy mines, a sentry turret's line of sight, etc. The sequel also added the ability to detonate a grenade if you are shot to the ground with one in hand, thereby giving you the option to take your enemies with you when they come in to deliver the finishing blow. While it may look cool when done properly, computer-controlled players will usually chose to detonate it every time, even if they were shot down in a location where they were perfectly able to be saved, such as behind cover with the rest of their squad, leading to them blowing up not only themselves, but all of their teammates too.
• In The Godfather, expect that pedestrians will somehow, in an attempt to jump out of the way of your car, instead fling themselves into your path. Especially annoying, when you consider that any contact between a moving car and a civilian, at any speed, is almost universally a One-Hit Kill.
• Gundam Battle: Gunpla Warfare: AI tends to have an Attack! Attack! Attack! strategy that is terrible for two reasons:
  • AI will, for the most part, use their EX-Attacks as soon as possible. This is actually a passable strategy for AI-controlled opponents since they have an Instant-Win Condition if they defeat the player's mech. However, on the players' side, it's much less viable since it means an AI-controlled ally (or AI-controlled PC, as auto-play is an option) won't save powerful EX-Attacks for a boss and instead will waste them on mostly-dead mooks or even empty space.
  • AI tends to rush headlong at an enemy. Doesn't sound so bad, but it leaves the unit completely open to just being shot as it's gradually approaching their target. This is even worse in the Arena.
• Hotline Miami features enemies that are totally oblivious to their comrades getting shot and dying left and right. Even if it happens right in front of them, they act as if nothing happened as long as they don't hear you doing it. Stationary enemies are even less responsive to loud gunshots, making them difficult to lure out at times.
  • In Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number, the AI of dog enemies seem to have gotten even dumber; while in the first game, they immediately charge at you when they see you, in Wrong Number, it's not uncommon for them to not even notice you for a while… before charging at you a few seconds later.
• Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor: The AI is consistent and performs well… until you press the stealth button. Running around a corner and climbing on top of a wall always breaks their engagement. Farming stealth kills for optional objectives just requires hit-and-run tactics until you meet your requirement.
• Mindjack is positively insane in this regard, considering that the game is principally about trying to get AIs to fight for you. One would think that it'd be easy to program an AI to shoot an enemy standing directly in front of them, with no cover and nothing blocking line of sight, but then again… Boss battles, which take place in fairly open areas, tend to feature the boss, in its eternal quest to not shoot any opponents, turning into a wall and firing into the ground.
• The Mummy Returns is hardly a pinnacle of gaming history, and the AI Medjai shooting at you will often miss at super-close range if you run back and forth a lot, but the best is the boss fight against Ardeth Bay for Imhotep in Cairo, the second mission. After killing all of his Medjai guards, you can simply back him into a corner and mash the kick button, resulting in a never-ending stream of kicks to the head that Ardeth can never get past or block. Since you can't kill him and just have to hold him back until your train leaves, this makes the boss fight less of an issue than the health-draining cats.
• Sacred Odyssey: Rise of Ayden, a Zelda clone, comes with plenty of programming issues, including utterly idiotic AI where you can walk right in front of orcs and halflings and stab them, before they even tried retaliating. There's also a constant glitch whenever you're in a small area fighting large numbers of enemies at once - mooks out of range will stupidly run into walls and pillars.
• In the first Tenchu game, you can swim but your enemies have Super Drowning Skills. They apparently don't know this, because if you are spotted by an enemy, you can simply jump into water and watch them follow you in to drown. Also, dead bodies in the game are effectively "out of play", meaning that guards and civilians will walk past dead bodies (or even multiple dead bodies) without noticing that anything is amiss.
• In Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen, the enemies often have Ungodly Dodge abilities. However, this is often counteracted by their tendency to stand near gas tanks and then blow them up. And in the rare occasion that you have backup with you, it will blindly charge into battle and be destroyed, thus leaving you to complete the mission by yourself, one hundred times more efficiently than if they were around to help.
• In The Uncanny X Men for the NES, one-player mode would saddle the player with a computer-controlled ally so unfathomably stupid that players found it most convenient to get the enemies to put it out of its misery. Generally, the best it could do was randomly fidget in circles while attacking over and over.
  The Angry Video Game Nerd: You could do better if you played the game blindfolded. That's no exaggeration.

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