Just because you can go anywhere and do what you want doesn't guarantee you'll survive, especially if you "accidentally" find your way into these levels.
open/close all folders
Saints Row
- Saints Row
- The original has several, but the two that stand out are the last missions for Los Carnales and the Vice Kings.
- In the Carnales mission you and Dex have to drive to the airport and kill their leader before he escapes in his plane. Sounds straightforward right? Well, once you arrive you'll notice two things. One, there are four well-entrenched mooks with rocket launchers that can kill you in two hits and scary target-leading abilities. Two, your vehicle is on a set path. This means that unless you aim perfectly you'll get blown away before you can even get close to the plane. Even better, you'll have about two or three cars shooting up your ass as you try to avoid getting blown away by the RPGs, and even if you only take one blast before getting to the plane, those cars will start ramming you until they explode and take you with them. The cherry on top? YOU HAVE TO RESTART FROM THE BEGINNING OF THE MISSION AND WASTE TWO MINUTES DRIVING BACK TO THE AIRPORT EVERY. TIME. YOU. DIE.
- The Vice King's mission? You have to drive King's car (it HAS to be King's car, no switching out if it gets too damaged) to Impressions and interrogate Stefan by driving while King holds him outside the window. The whole time more and more police show up to clusterfuck you into a corner where they will blow your car up and force you to start over. But wait! The mission isn't over after you interrogate Stefan, oh no. You then have to storm the Vice King's stronghold. If you die during the fight? All the way back to the very start for you! Have fun listening to Stefan whine for the 5th time. Thankfully, Saints Row 2 has checkpoints in its missions.
- The parking garage stronghold. On paper it's easy; all you have to do is destroy the cars of the VK members. Except when you get to the last one, its owner gets in and jumps off the conveniently-placed ramp, turning it into a "Get Back Here!" Boss fight with you chasing him around Stilwater. Good luck if you ended up with a slower car to chase him! Also, if you get him to go into a dead end, the bastard can teleport onto a different street. If you fall too far behind for too long, you fail and have to restart from the beginning of the stronghold.
- The original has several, but the two that stand out are the last missions for Los Carnales and the Vice Kings.
- Saints Row 2note
- One mission has you infiltrating a police station in order to hack their computer system. As designed, it's pretty straightforward: You walk in (disguised as repairpeople) and go straight for the computer room. Shaundi begins hacking, which sets off some sort of alarm, raising your police notoriety to four stars. This triggers waves of cops, whom you shoot. Eventually, Shaundi declares that she's finished and you escape in the conveniently-provided helicopter. This would not suck at all if a later patch hadn't given police helicopters (a number of which hang around the police station) the ability to shoot freaking guided missiles when your police notoriety is at four stars (which it is, unavoidably). Under these circumstances, you're doing well to even reach the conveniently-provided helicopter before you explode in a shower of mission failure. It's actually easier to just ignore the helicopter entirely and instead exit through the front of the building, then steal a SWAT tank and drive it all the way back to your HQ.
- On the same token, that one mission where you have to rescue Johnny Gat from the hospital in what basically boils down to a drawn-out Escort Mission. First, you have to wheel Johnny's injured ass out on a painfully slow gurney to the front door while Ronin forces pop out of every conceivable corner and shower you in gunfire. After realizing the door is locked, you backtrack to the beginning of the mission while even more guys come at you. Once you make it to the roof, you and Johnny get in a conveniently-placed helicopter that's even slower than the gurney you just pushed around while the Ronin pursue you in a fully equipped gunship that has the aforementioned guided missiles all the way back to your base on the other side of the city.
- This mission is made slightly easier in co-op, as this is the one mission in the entire game where objectives differ when playing in co-op; one player goes straight for the roof and brings the helicopter down to the parking lot, while the other (who escorts Gat) makes their way out the front door to the copter. This doesn't change the gunship chase at all, though.
- An earlier Ronin mission (the one that ends with Gat being in the hospital in the first place) is also pretty bad. The Hold the Line section at the beginning isn't that bad, but then a Saint shows up to drive you and Gat to the hospital. They will take an incredibly roundabout path through pretty much the entire city as just about the entirety of the Ronin pursue you in motorcycles and cars. This still manages to be hard in spite of the fact that you are given an infinite ammo RPG due to the sheer number of them.
- Saints Row: The Third
- There are the occasional assassination missions where just trying to get the target to show himself is more effort than it's worth. Standout examples in The Third are the pimp whose hos you have to beat up to lure him out (your success relies entirely on whether the game will actually bother to spawn hos at all, let alone the specific [read: fat] ones that work for him; oh, and the game uses the term "get" instead of "attack", so if you don't catch on you might waste time trying to hire one of them, which there is no mechanic for) and the gas station owner that likes muscle cars (even if you have an eye for cars, there's no indication anywhere of what the game actually counts as a muscle carnote .
- The penultimate mission. It involves driving to and fighting through three separate hordes of STAG and Luchadores, while making sure to keep Pierce and Oleg alive. Oleg is usually fine on his own, but Pierce will get downed a lot, forcing you to drop what you're doing and risk getting yourself killed to revive him. It is also worth noting that in this mission, you have a five-star wanted level with the police AND the gangs, meaning you'll attract some heat just driving to each battle. In addition, at the end of each horde is a boss of sorts; the first is two Brutes, the second is a STAG laser tank, and the final is a VTOL. At this point the Brutes are not much of a challenge, but the tank and VTOL can and will destroy you. After taking care of the VTOL, you reach the Point of No Return, and which path you pick influences how the rest of the mission unfolds.
If you choose to kill Killbane, the rest of the mission plays out like a rehash of the last Los Carnales mission from the first game, with Angel driving you to the airport with the Luchadores in hot pursuit. That's right, that dreaded mission from the first game is back, now with tougher and more persistent enemies! However, shooting down the plane is much easier due to there being more anti-vehicle weapons in this game.
If you choose to save Shaundi, you have to scale a scaffolding armed with only the Sonic Blast gun, which requires you to get up close to your enemies, who can easily gun you down at the drop of a hat. It's a tall scaffolding, and if you die you go back to the base of it.
- Saints Row IV
- The second to last mission, in which you free-fall in a suit of power armour while "You Got The Touch" blasts in the background, has certain issues. Most notably, that if you touch anything you will die; if you come close to touching some things, it'll flag it as a collision and you will die, and the animations for manoeuvring up and down look like they're going the wrong way so it's very easy to touch things you didn't intend to. You got the touch, just don't touch anything.
Others
- Driving cars in Mafia: The City of Lost Heaven is rather awkward, due to their erratic controlling—realistic, because the game's set in 1930's when you didn't exactly have great maneuverability in cars. This doesn't really bother normally, but then the game throws in a level where you have to win a race with such a car in order to advance the story. Despite the developers releasing a patch where you could choose the race's difficulty level, the racing bit still causes very uncomfortable memories for many.
- Mafia II has the "Bomb Under the Seat" level from Joe's Adventures Downloadable Content pack. Here, you have to drive an explosive-rigged sports car across the city while trying to maintain a speed of above 35 km/h. Stay below that speed for more than three seconds, and you're blown sky-high.
- The final mission on Driver: Parallel Lines It's pretty reasonable until you have to chase down Corrigan, first you have a strict time limit to escape from a tunnel after Corrigan blows it up, not only do you go very fast while narrowly avoiding falling debris, but seemingly every single car is actively trying to drive right into your path to slow you down. Then you have to chase after and shoot down Corrigan's helicopter, which isn't a problem if you have plenty of SMG ammo (it also helps if you max RPG ammo, but it's pretty tricky to time it just right so that the rockets hit him) but the heavy traffic can really slow you down, and you'll fail if you take too long to catch up, and later on Corrigan flies over areas with lots of bumps and hills where it's real easy to accidentally flip your car over and fail the mission, so you basically have to fire RPGs and SMGs at him nonstop, hoping that you'll get lucky and be able to finish him off quickly before he flies over the rough terrain areas.
- Sosa's mansion, the final level of Scarface: The World Is Yours. Three bosses, a ridiculous number of Mooks armed with the same weapon Tony gets to use and no checkpoints. Sure, the first one is an Anti-Climax Boss... but that bunch of Mooks you need to kill to get to him will reappear if you let Tony die and are booted back to the start. The second one is fairly okay if you've still enough health on Tony, but the third and final boss is effectively Implacable compared to the others before. Alejandro Sosa takes multiple chest shots from the otherwise-one-hit-kill Desert Eagle and can dish it out as good as he can get.
- Put your guns away and fight Sosa hand to hand. He doesn't retaliate.
- Delivering cocaine once you have a good number of fronts can be a harrowing experience. The first few aren't so bad, but every delivery ratchets up your Gang Meter by a good amount until your car is under constant fire by Mad Max-style street rovers and every front you try to deliver to will be under attack by a small army. All the money you make is kept in a tally until the delivery sequence is complete. If you die, not only is all that money gone, but so is the supply of cocaine you tried to deliver, which cost a small fortune or tedious sidequest to get in the first place.
- Assassin's Creed:
- Sibrand's assassination in the first Assassin's Creed game. Insta-death water. Jumping from pole to pole over said water with mechanics that don't work very well.
- Go the other way, through the land strip. You just have to kill a bunch of soldiers and make sure you make the last group of Templars come at you by killing one of them with a throwing knife. After that, when you go for Sibrand, he'll flee towards you.
- And the level leading up to Robert de Sable, which involves nothing but mowing down legions of soldiers again and again, is plain dull. Historically King Richard went back to Europe because he didn't have enough troops to hold the city he'd just captured—now we know why.
- The Bonfire of the Vanities DLC for Assassin's Creed II has a number of these, but the Port Authority mission is by far the worst. It's yet another case where being spotted by a guard is an auto fail, and the assassination target is on a ship that's crawling with them, including several that patrol. The general strategy involves hiding on the edge of the ship and yoinking them off one by one, but a fair amount of tricky timing (and luck) is involved.
- Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood has almost every mission where the Full Synchronisation requirement is no detection or damage. What really makes this annoying is that simply going back to the last checkpoint via death will not reset the Full-Synch requirement back to its fulfillable state - you have to restart the whole bloody memory. And Ubisoft didn't bother fixing this for Revelations, well done guys! The part in Sequence Eight where you need to get to the courtyard in the Basilica di San Pietro within a time limit is also very annoying due to its Full-Synch requirement of not killing anyone, combined with the guards getting on your case with abnormal speed.
- Immediately following the above mission, you need to escape the Vatican District with the Apple of Eden, with a Full Synch requirement of taking no damage. This, despite the fact that you can't fight back, since the Apple of Eden drains your health upon use and prevents you from equipping anything else, evading the guards will immediately cause another group to home in on your position, and some of the guards are faster than you.
- The mission to detonate gunpowder in Cappadocia in Revelations has a Full-Synch requirement of not losing any health, and pits you against no less than seven groups of enemies who can break through your block and attack while you are still countering another enemy, and you cannot sneak up on any of them for insta-kills. If any of these twenty-odd bastards so much as grazes you, it's restart-the-whole-memory time.
- Rescuing Hakuf from Fort Nikiou in Assassin's Creed Origins. Not only is he right in the middle of the camp, but also the camp is huge and swarming with guards and also two captains and the boss of the area. Also, if you slip up then the guards immediately call for reinforcements which can include a Phylakte showing up (a.k.a a guy who can kill you in two hits at the level you're given it).
- Sibrand's assassination in the first Assassin's Creed game. Insta-death water. Jumping from pole to pole over said water with mechanics that don't work very well.
- The final bossfight in [PROTOTYPE]: Giant monster with tons of health, your normal attacks are useless, the military are constantly shooting and bombing you while you fight, and the only way to get health is to stop and grab a human to eat (and any humans you try to eat are likely to get killed by the aforementioned bombing). Oh yeah, and you're on a timer. Good luck!
- The Stolen Body. Specifically, the part where you have to hold off a bunch of Infected and Hunters and keep them from breaking through a (rather tough, but far from indestructible) plate-glass door into a secure lab. Not so hard, right? Except that you have to fight them without any of your combat powers, reducing you to your regular punches, kicks, and throws, as well as the few guns left lying around. What's worse, if you fight right next to the glass (which you will, since most of the enemies will pretty much make a beeline right for it if they're left alone for more than half a second), your own attacks can end up damaging it as well. Have fun!
- Not that hard a mission as all enemies except hunters can be grabbed and insta-killed by being consumed (which gives you health on top of that). That combined with some of the crowd clearing moves makes the mobs easy. And the game gives you a ton of machine guns and rocket launchers to deal with the hunters. Oh, and trucks to throw at them too.
- Rescuing Dana, specifically the part where you have to escort the thermobaric tank around the infected part of the city. You'd think the military would be glad to have a Nigh-Invulnerable unstoppable badass that is clearing everything in their path for them... But no. There can be hunters, runners, even a leader hunter tearing up their armour and they STILL go out of their way to attack you.
- Yes folks, you read right. This is the first escort mission in the history of escort missions where the forces you are trying to protect will attack you, and only you, at the expense of nearly everything else.
- You can always disguise yourself as a Marine and drive the tank yourself, as long as you don't graze your guards with the giant fireball cannon. Yes, this is an escort mission where, possibly, the units you're guarding will attack each other.
- The Altered World: This has to be the most annoying level of all. Let's summarize: you have to use the detector hacking skill (which you will never use again), the countdown is like, five seconds, The correct numbers appear too slow, making hacking the last two detectors depend on luck, You can't destroy the detectors, 'cause the mission fails if you do, the area is swarming with baddies that can also damage the detector (with the same result) and to top it all off: The detectors themselves send strike-teams on your ass if you fail to hack them on time.
- Trying to fill out the Web of Intrigue pits you against the game's most nefarious enemy. It is an enemy who has been against you since nearly the first mission. He has made you miserable for many a stage, but with the last few Web Of Intrigue missions, this foe is relentless, cruel, and merciless. This enemy? THE FREAKIN' TIMER!!! You have to cross the city multiple times in less than two minutes to take out the target. Oh, and many of them will be on ground level, in hostile territory, where enemies WILL kill them with you less than an inch away. And even if you get to the final guy at the last second, since it takes you several seconds to "digest" the target unless you manage a stealth kill, then you still can and will fail. Even on easy mode, the time limits are a constant, and it's nearly impossible to pull off these missions even WITH the maximum speed, jump, and glide upgrades. Have fun, tropers! Using the Whipfist and locking on to do long-range grabs will give you a bit more of a cushion, but it's still a matter of luck, and missing once can doom you completely. Even if you get the target on the first try, it's still close.
- This one gets considerably easier when you discover something the game never tells you about. The game actually spawns all the targets for these missions at the start, but will only show the closest target on the minimap. Taking a moment to view the full map and plan your route can make the difference between impossibility and having half a minute to spare.
- The one mission where you have to lure out Elizabeth Greene, and in order to do that, you have to defend a small bloodtox pumper from a HORDE of leader hunters, at least two hydras, and soldiers firing stray bullets that damage the vehicle by accident, and if you die (which is extremely likely, regardless of having both the strongest weapon mutation in the game, several guns at your disposal, and body armor that makes you even harder to kill than normal), or if the pumper gets destroyed, you have to start the whole thing over again. Need I mention that the Hunters have that annoying sprint-attack that knocks your ass across the area, or even kills you, along with a bunch of other annoying traits?
- The Stolen Body. Specifically, the part where you have to hold off a bunch of Infected and Hunters and keep them from breaking through a (rather tough, but far from indestructible) plate-glass door into a secure lab. Not so hard, right? Except that you have to fight them without any of your combat powers, reducing you to your regular punches, kicks, and throws, as well as the few guns left lying around. What's worse, if you fight right next to the glass (which you will, since most of the enemies will pretty much make a beeline right for it if they're left alone for more than half a second), your own attacks can end up damaging it as well. Have fun!
- "Anything for Trish" from InFamous. You have to protect a bus full of sick people for your Ex-Girlfriend, a paramedic who blames you for her sister's death, and who is trying to get them medical help at the hospital, while the ceiling is constantly being electrified to keep you powered up for the trip, so you don't have to get off to recharge. Seems good, but not only do you have to fight legions of bad guys from one island to another, the bus moves at a snail's pace and to top it all off, from any corner an enemy can appear with an RPG. And it happens every time, so before you even get to the end of the street you'll be in critical damage. And then there's the factor that you can get killed there yourself. The only way to finish this mission is to die over and over so that you advance from checkpoint to checkpoint until you're done. And that's before the bus gets thrown in the hospital's ceiling
- The Helicoptor mission from the same game. And you can't leave this one.
- The fucking dry ice mines in Brütal Legend. For starters, this is your first full battle against the Drowning Doom. And boy are they tough. Ratguts will absolutely destroy you if you so much as get near them. And unless you spam Fire Barons you will be steamrolled.
- Alternatively, you can take advantage of the fact that the AI never defends the left flank and send two or three units of roadies to their stage. Takes a little time to get there, but once you do you'll win in about twenty seconds.
- How about the LAST full battle against the Drowning Doom: the first Stage Battle at the Sea of Black Tears. An endless supply of large groups of Reapers being thrown at you, an insta-death force field, and a giant... tree thing. Results do occasionally vary, as many a player has beaten the game easily on Brutal difficulty, only to go back through on Normal and get so completely stuck on this battle that they have no choice but to give up. There are a few tricks, though, mostly involving flying solo around the side of the force field and attacking the enemy with your car or whatever creature summon you've managed to earn from the Hunter missions.
- The Simpsons Hit & Run:
- The racing challenges. Every one of them is notoriously unforgiving (Even the mission in the first level), and you're forced to race the starting vehicle from the next level, which is statistically superior to every vehicle available in the level you're in. To rub salt into the wound, the prize for the race is typically the best vehicle available to you in the current level. This means to get the vehicle best suited to win the races, you need to win the races, and if you come back from the next level with a better vehicle (which is an option for any mission), the reward will be a vehicle that is statistically worse than the vehicle you came back to win the race with. Ouch.
- Monkey See Monkey D'oh. You have four minutes to collect 30 monkeys. Firstly this means that it's a drawn-out long mission, and failing means you get to start the whole thing over again. Secondly, this is the first collect-a-thon where the targets aren't laid out in a linear pattern; many are tucked away in dead ends and nooks and crannies, the map does a very poor job directing you to the next one to collect (You're better off ignoring it most of the time), and a few are even on rooftops where you need to get out of your vehicle and climb to them. Thirdly, there's enough pedestrians and obstacles strewn about that it's easy to trigger a hit and run, making cops get in your way and cost you coins. As if all of that wasn't enough, you're forced to use the sluggish Mr. Plow for a mission where good handling and quick acceleration (Like what the Honor Roller or Moe's Sedan has) would be a massive help to you (Though via an exploit you can switch vehicles mid-mission). The mission's not overly difficult, but is monumentally frustrating due to all of that coupled with an annoying and repetitive mission music
. - The final missions (the same one in three parts, actually). To sum up, you have to drive from the power plant to the school carrying a barrel of toxic waste strapped to your bumper which will fall off and explode if you so much as ding a wall with your fender. The path is also extremely unforgiving and the car controls for this game are very sensitive. On top of that, it's also a Timed Mission. If you lose the barrel, it forces you to run all the way back to the plant. But wait! That's a Timed Mission, too! One that will likely be outright impossible to complete if you've gone even half the required distance, forcing a restart. Oh, and there are certain points where other cars will try to ram you, and if you don't manage to get far enough from them before they turn to chase you, they'll catch up and bump into you, destroying the barrel and starting the above nonsense. The third part also forces you to use a very fast vehicle with sub-par handling, meaning lots of crashes, lots of barrel loss and lots of pain. Finally, because all the above just isn't enough, it's the only mission without a Mercy Mode.
- The second-to-last mission of Level 6, Set To Kill is very infamous. The player has 1:45 to destroy 15 laser gun stands by ramming them with a vehicle that follow a linear pattern. The route you're required to drive takes you through a densely-populated boardwalk full of pedestrians and breakable objects, all but guaranteeing you'll have the cops after you and costing you precious time. This is difficult enough, but after doing that, the player is given 50 seconds to drive all the way back to where the mission starts, once again forcing you to drive on the boardwalk. This requires all shortcuts to be taken and is severely frustrating. What's worse is that most of the time, you'll fail just a second off from reaching the destination.
- The game doesn't hide that the player is a second off, either, as a giant blue sphere marks each destination.
- Immediately after Set to Kill is Level 6's finale, Kang and Kodos Strike Back. This mission is quite short, consisting only of a race to the Duff Brewery, but may well take longer than any other. Your opponent is reckless and will likely cause accidents that'll get in your way, yet is miraculously able to avoid being delayed or damaged itself. Even if the road is clear, keeping up with the damn-near perfect AI is a feat unto itself. The one saving grace is the rare chance that the AI will screw up on the ramp halfway through the race, leaving it unable to make it back onto the track.
- Kwik Cash, where the player has to destroy an armoured truck using a very fast, but not very strong vehicle, and if the vehicle blows up the mission fails. It doesn't help that after doing this, the player is given a timed lose-the-tail segment with Chief Wiggum, and if the player fails it's all the way back to the start.
- The stealth missions in True Crime: Streets of LA.
- Even worse is "Cary in Trouble", which pretty much requires you to have both an encyclopedic knowledge of real-life LA streets and a faster car from a previous level. Thankfully you can replay the previous levels.
- Just Cause 2 brings us Black Gold, in which the intended way of doing it is difficult for all the wrong reasons. You're piloting a fighter jet, and have to blow up an oil rig. Jet controls are difficult to figure out at best, and hard to work with even once you have figured them out (primarily for the fact that, except for slowly taxiing while on a runway, there is no yaw control). If you die? Well, good job, you just locked yourself out of 100% (unless you get 100% on that rig before starting the mission). If you drop the jet for a helicopter instead, which the game doesn't tell you you can do, it becomes considerably easier.
- The Raya Race. At over twenty minutes long, it's easily the longest race in the game, and it takes you around a good portion of an island. This, in itself, isn't too bad. It's that you'll have to use a sports car if you hope to win. The game's driving controls get incredibly loose at high speeds, making it easy to spin out, and if you do, you'll have to pray that you can find another fast car, in an area of the map that doesn't normally have them. Oh, and did I mention that it all takes place on the wrong side of a highway?
- Red Dead Redemption has its generally smooth and enjoyable mission layout interrupted by the hated "Liars, Cheats, and Other Proud Americans". Apart from being one of the few missions where you can't shoot your enemies, you have to compete in a cart... um, chariot race, and dear god, you will hate that cart. It's slower than a horse, far less maneuverable, has sluggish and occasionally glitchy controls, makes the actual horse pulling it exhausted, will crash often, has the turn radius of an aircraft carrier, and is just barely smaller than the road that you're supposed to ride it on. Worse, the course itself is punishing, filled with turns, sheer cliffs, and rail-less bridges over water... water that will eat your soul the moment you dip your toe in it. Add to that the facts that you can't use your own Kentucky Saddler or War Horse in the race, that visibility tends to be poor, and that the nearby civilians tend to put on khaki camouflage and stand right in front of sandy slopes, and you've got a level that will have you smashing your TV in fury.
- Red Dead Redemption: Undead Nightmare gives us "A Cure for Most of What Ails You", which, perhaps not coincidentally, is given to you by the same character who gave the mission above. You have to wander around a forest and a desert, collecting 5 specimens each of two very specific plants. Wouldn't be so bad if you weren't being constantly heckled by both zombified versions of the main game's extremely vicious wildlife (cougars, wolves, and bears, oh my!) and packs of roving zombies, some of which spit projectiles. And if you're playing at night, have fun with the reduced visibility.
- There are a few missions in Mercenaries 2: World in Flames that are like this. But among the worst are:
- Any of the Pirate Smuggling missions. They all involve the same thing: driving past armed checkpoints with an unsecured cargo in a pickup truck that can fly out seemingly on a whim. Sometimes you have to deal with Helicopters armed with homing missiles. And if you play the missions late in the game, sometimes the Allies shoot at you. Almost EVERYTHING they have has homing missiles.
- Eva's Recruitment mission. Drive a bouncy, unarmed and unarmored monster truck through a quarry equipped with super-hydraulics that make you fly thirty feet. It's timed, you have to leap over a bunch of stuff, but that's not so bad. It gets bad when the VZ show up. They shoot at you, drop logs on you, and at the end you have to avoid a tank in just the right way, or you will get blown up in one hit. Die at any point and you have to start all the way at the beginning of the course.
- The Final mission for China. When you do this mission for the Allies, it's actually rather easy, as all you have to do is destroy a few anti-aircraft guns and the Chinese main base. Not so with the Chinese version of the mission. In the Chinese version, you have to take out several Allied buildings along with the HQ. This would not be so bad, if nearly everything the Allies used did not have some type of homing missile. Their helicopters will shoot you down, their APC's will blow up your tank, and grenade-launcher equipped Humvees will blow you to pieces. Good luck trying to capture the HVT at the end.
- The Ambulance Escort Mission for China. One unarmored, slowly moving ambulance. Lots of landmines. Allied Soldiers making sure to back up the landmines. You have a Chinese APC armed with an infantry-killing machine gun or a cannon more likely to kill your own ambulance than the missile-armed Allied APC's. Have fun.
- A far easier approach is to use a helicopter (you need to get into the APC first in order to progress the mission, but then can hop out with no trouble) and grapple the ambulance underneath. Fly it over the mines and soldiers and place it near the target. Land nearby and you can easily drive the ambulance the last few feet to finish the mission.
- And the worst one of all, the PLAV mission "Paint the Town". You have to liberate Merida from a heavy VZ occupation. First you have to destroy several buildings to get the VZ's attention. To do so, you have to go through a gauntlet of tanks and RPG's. When you are done doing that, you have to defend a church, which is easily one of the the biggest buildings in the town. Making matters worse is that you are "helped" by PLAV troops with explosives. If one of them runs in front of a cannon you are using as you fire it, they will all turn hostile against you the moment you hit the ground, and try to kill you with said explosives. While you are standing in front of the church. Then reinforcements show up, in a helicopter which can blow up on the church's roof. Then you have to capture or kill the VZ commander after about five or so minutes of this madness. When you get there, if you want the full cash bonus for capturing him alive, you have to make sure to not only not kill the commander yourself, but make sure he does not kill himself, his "allies" don't accidentally blow him up and to blow up the stands in the stadium he is using as a base so that the guys with the Stingers and rocket launchers don't blow up the helicopter you have to throw him onto. And to rub salt in the wound, the bonus objective? "Don't Kill Civilians". The same civilians who casually walk about a battlefield. The same ones who think the safest place to stand to avoid a tank is in front of it.
- The "Amazing Discovery" quest in Space Pirates and Zombies. Wave after wave after wave after wave of medium and large enemy ships, all sporting extremely powerful weaponry. You will be forced to grind in order to stand a chance.
- Dead Island has a quarantined section of the city map that constantly spawns waves of Infected all the time you are within it. Unfortunately, the Third Head Of Cerberus quest requires you to explore this area. Even if you take to the rooftops and run as much as possible, you are almost certainly going to be overwhelmed by the sheer numbers.
- Also notable is that this is the ONLY place in the entire game where zombies will climb ladders to get after you.
- Ryder White's DLC campaign. It begins with waves of humans with guns, a horde of Infected spawning if you don't go straight for the objective, Suiciders hiding around corners or behind closed doors. Cheap but manageable. After blowing the bridge however you have to get to the roof of a petrol station and hold out for extraction. There's lots of guns, ammo, explosives and fuel drums so you should be able to easily wait for the chopper...right? Every Infected on both Banoi and Palanai scream, "ZEEERRRG RUUUSH!!!" at the same time and pelt for your position. Jumping up on something to avoid them doesn't work, they just knock you off. Best chance is to run and hide behind a bin far away and try to kill the fifty it takes before you can rush back and move on.
- "Distract Moash" in Escape Velocity: Nova. You need to land on a space station while not letting too many of your escorts die. Between you and the station is a massive amount of Moashi ships. You're likely to die from gunfire before you can slow down enough to land. The best solution is the Not the Nine O'Clock News Maneuver. Jump in, then fly away from the planet to lure the blockade away, then double back around them.
- Most of Dead Rising, especially the mall gardens if you haven't killed the Convicts driving around and / or are escorting an NPC who can't walk unaided.
- Convicts that constantly bloody respawn. You'd think cutting someone to death with a katana would prevent that sort of thing.
- At least they drop their minigun each time, which is very useful for speed runs. "Oh, you got a pretty nice shotgun Cletus? Well, SAY HELLO TO MY LITTLE FRIEND!"
- Convicts that constantly bloody respawn. You'd think cutting someone to death with a katana would prevent that sort of thing.
- Don't Starve is already hard as it is, but the game ups the ante with Chapter 5 of the Adventure mode, Darkness. You start in area surrounded by campfires, fire pits, and a backpack full of stuff. The catch? The chapter is locked on PERMANENT NIGHT, and standing in the dark for more than 5 seconds results in a monster attacking you for 100 DAMAGE. Not only that, but food is painfully scarce, crops won't grow in the dark and your sanity constantly depletes, which will likely result in hallucinations and, subsequently, enemies who can put out campfires and fire pits. The items you need to find to progress are all scattered around the dark, and some can even be locked behind gates that open and close depending on your current sanity level, which is not only something the game never bothers to tell you about, but is also again complicated by the fact that you're constantly losing sanity by fumbling about in the dark. Thankfully, there are several Maxwell Lights around the map that provide infinite lighting as long as you stay close to them, but they aren't so useful if you aren't prepared. To make matters worse, this is the last level before the ending of Adventure mode, and dying here will have you restart from chapter 1.
- Before that, one of the chapters you may have to deal with is the run-destroying King of Winter. As the name implies, the weather is locked permanently to winter, which is already incredibly difficult to survive as-is. Upon spawning in, to help out a bit, you're given a backpack with a Thermal Stone inside and a blueprint for Rabbit Earmuffs. However, there are three big problems with this chapter - first, the stone has to be re-heated almost constantly through proximity to a campfire to keep you from quickly freezing to death, and the earmuffs only really buy you about fifteen seconds of warmth once the thermal stone cools off, meaning you need to chop logs and create fires every couple minutes on top of exploring for teleporter parts and scrounging for food. If you're not careful with where you set these up, you'll end up causing a gigantic bush fire, depriving you of trees to cut down and quickly leaving you frostbitten. Second, daytime is very short (about a minute and a half to three minutes at most) and it has the longest night time duration of any of the chapters before the Darkness chapter, which severely cuts down your available exploration time and constantly eats into your sanity levels. Third, and most heinously, areas containing parts needed to progress to the next chapter can be blocked off by the same gates mentioned above that require you to actively go insane to bypass them, leaving you susceptible to powerful and fast hostile nightmare creatures. Your best bet on prevailing is to spend previous, less resource and time-intensive chapters prototyping items that help you endure the cold and cook food to keep you from going hungry... but this isn't always possible, as The King of Winter can sometimes be the VERY FIRST CHAPTER when you start Adventure Mode. If that happens, unless you've practically mastered the game, you may as well die and reset.
- You would think that Subnautica's example of this would be one of the several biomes containing Reaper Leviathans. However, it's not at all difficult to avoid Reapers if you spot them in time. Rather, Subnautica's One Level is the Koosh Zone, which is covered from end to end in a virtual carpet of Shockers, gigantic electric eels which are not only one of exactly two enemies in the game capable of delivering attacks at range, but are also capable of taking away nearly half of your health with a single bite (where most enemies only deal 30% at most). They are defensive, rather than aggressive like most dangerous creatures, but there are simply so many of them in the Koosh Zone that it's almost impossible to reach the seafloor anywhere in the area without angering at least one, much less explore in any detail. They're also one of exactly two enemies (The other being the Reaper) which are borderline immune (only being stunned for a fraction of a second) to the Repulsion Cannon, a late-game tool that blasts most living creatures so far away that they'll likely pass out of the render distance before they stop moving. Add to that the fact that Bone Sharks (an extremely aggressive Super-Persistent Predator and one of the fastest creatures in the game) can also be found in the area, and we get one of the most aggravating areas to pass through in the entire game.
- Terraria:
- The Underground Jungle, which has vicious enemies that are hard to hit, particularly Hornets that can poison you and snipe at you from a great distance. It's also possible, especially with weapons that can go through blocks, to accidentally summon Queen Bee while down there. Entering Hardmode does not make it easier: while you get better armor and weapons so that Hornets aren't a problem anymore, you'll now have to deal with Moss Hornets which are scaled appropriately to beat an early-Hardmode player, and deceptively fast Giant Tortoises who deal truckloads of damage. It's not until around beating Plantera and Golem that the place becomes more managable. Even the surface Jungle becomes a place you don't want to casually mess around in during Hardmode, as Derplings will jump at you at lightning speed.
- The Underworld, prior to Hardmode. Just getting its ore alone requires some form of magma protection and an Obsidian Skull/Shield to avoid being burnt, all while avoiding some of the nastiest Pre-Hardmode enemies in the game: Bone Serpents (large "worm-class" enemies that go through blocks at high speeds), Fire Imps (teleports who shoot fireballs that also go through blocks), and especially Demons (they fly around, shoot multiple fast-moving scythes, and have a variant where killing it could accidentally summon a major boss that kills you if you try to teleport away). It's especially bad in Expert Mode, where Demons can even cut through the armor with the highest defense available by that point in the game like it's made out of paper and fourshot a player at the highest possible life at that point. The two "less deadly" enemies, Hellbats and Lava Slimes, are still pretty bad, and make it easier to get sniped by the former three. Activating Hardmode requires fighting the Wall of Flesh down there, and because of the nature of that boss, the usual trick of "build a single screen-sized arena with one Campfire and Heart Lantern" won't work — you'll need to either spend a lot of time building a gigantic bridge/flattening out the uneven and magma-filled terrain or find some way to not burn to death on your run from one end of the world to another, all while dealing with a massive boss that shoots lasers at you. The Underworld becomes significantly easier once Hardmode starts, as it does not gain any new enemies until after a Mechanical Boss is defeated, and even then, it's only one type rather than an assortment of powerful monsters.
