Six Reasons That Makes a First-Person Shooter Video Game Really Suck

Shôn Ellerton, May 6, 2026
Here, I lay out six reasons that makes, what could have been a magnificent first-person shooter video game, really suck.

I don’t get much time to play video games, but now and again, I’ll crank up Steam and open up an old classic like Half Life 2, Doom 3, Quake or F.E.A.R. Despite these games being nearly twenty years old, they’re still damned good.

However, there’s a lot of new material out there which I downloaded and installed but haven’t really got into for a variety of reasons. For example, the latest Doom franchise, Escape the Backrooms, Metro Exodus, and a bunch of others, the names of which I can’t remember.

In particular, I go for graphically-realistic POV (point-of-view) first-person shooters which I can use on the PC with a keyboard and mouse. POV, meaning that I want to see through the eyes of my character rather than that peculiar way that so many kids experience when playing blocky graphically-challenged games like Fortnite and those games which are hosted on the Roblox environment like Rivals. In any case, I play games solo and have zero interest as to what my character looks like.

My other preferences go to games which have often brooding atmospheres, a sense of adventure, and a reasonable sense of physics. None of this jumping half a mile in the air crap, running at seventy miles per hour,  or surviving falls greater than the height of the Eiffel Tower.

Others may like all that stuff, so this piece is not going to crap on those games which I don’t tend to go for, but rather, for reasons which make playing any of them a shitty user experience being unmemorable and sometimes completely unplayable.

So, what makes some of these games really suck?

1. The Inability to Save and Load On Request

The first thing that puts me off a game right off the bat is the inability to save and load a game on request. If the game does not support it, it can find another customer. Before I download any new FPS game, if it doesn’t support a single-key quicksave or quickload function, it ain’t being purchased.

By the way, I appreciate that this really only applies to solo mode, so for those playing in multiplayer mode, skip to my next pet peeve.

Now, I’ve been stung by this before with newer versions of Doom and a curious game called Escape the Backrooms, which isn’t really a FPS, but rather one of those digital urban explorer types of games in which you go from level to level avoiding all the nasties that might lurk around the corner. From an atmosphere perspective, it’s surprisingly good, but I don’t have time in my life to start at the beginning of each level because I tripped up somewhere.

In solo mode, there should always be a way to save and load a game. Multiplayer modes, naturally, don’t have the ability to even pause unless, somehow or another, all players agree on doing this, if at all possible.

The sorts of games that annoy me use the checkpoint method in which you have to survive to the next checkpoint, some of which are notoriously hard to complete. Once you pass a checkpoint, if you die, you start all over at the beginning of the last checkpoint or level. Which could have been a long time ago.

I’ve abandoned playing any game which uses checkpoints without the option of quick saves and loads.

2. The Inability to Custom Map Your Controls on Your Keyboard and Mouse

A very serious bugbear of mine is when the game does not allow you to map your keyboard and mouse to the controls of the game. For example, I was thoroughly annoyed when, again, Escape the Backrooms had no way to map which key I wanted to use to go forward, left and right. Considering that this is a relatively new piece of software, this reason alone, would make considering Escape the Backrooms a really shitty piece of software. You can have all the graphics and amazing atmosphere in the game, but if you don’t allow your users to choose which controls to use, you’ve got a pile of crap as a game.

On the polar opposite, we have the most amazingly flexible custom-mapping of controls available for products like Flight Simulator in which you can, not only map anything to anything, but have multiple profiles saved at the drop of a hat. Even old-school games like Quake, Doom, and, of course, the legendary arcade games hosted by the MAME emulator, offers this most needed of functionality.

Whoever designs games without this most basic of functionality is utterly clueless on user experience. And on this subject, what about those with left-handed preferences or those who have physical impediments like missing or badly-performing fingers?

3. Games That Require the Dexterity of a Teenager on Steroids

We now go to the third way that makes games suck. And that is when game designers shut out any user who doesn’t have the dexterity and speed which a young person may have.

Now, this isn’t about the game’s expertise level setting, for example, from beginner to advanced, but rather when game designers include a task which must be met within a very small interval of time. For example, running around a room turning four keys to the unlocked position before the first key reverts to locked. Or doing a seemingly endless set of tasks within a short of space of time before the mission fails, and so forth.

These sorts of games alienate those users who may not have the speed of a young teenager.

I’m in my fifties now. Does that mean I shouldn’t play any video games at all?

Guess not.

4. Overcomplicated Plots, Puzzles and Storylines

We’re moving on to the fourth way that makes these kind of video games suck.

And that is when such games have the most convoluted and complicated plots, puzzles and storylines ever known to mankind. Games which you have to sift through endless journals and clues just to be able to find a way to the next section.

Don’t get me wrong, I like a little bit of puzzle-solving to get to the next section, but if it involves having to read every damn journal or watch every little mini-movie in the level, I’ll get tired quite quickly of the game.

These sort of games are frustrating.

I’m not here to have my IQ tested.

I just want to have fun and play the game without having to consult the Internet to cheat for answers.

5. Awkward Game Play

The fifth thing which I hate with badly-designed video games is when game play is awkward.

Being brought up on a diet of early 21st-century games like Doom, Quake, and Half-Life, I’ve become thoroughly accustomed to using my mouse in conjunction with my arrow keys for movement. I’m fast and I’m good at using them. With most of these games, I can map it this way and I can try out a new game without any issues if they have the same functionality.

But then you have games like Bioshock and Silent Hill which came out during the early 2000s which have the most awkward game play I came across. They tried to be clever and introduced a different way of moving and interacting. Roll back to Wolfenstein 3D which led to a very successful way of moving about which most newer games adopted without any issue. So, why introduce a new and clunky way of moving about?

All of these POV-style FPS games should have the basics like moving forward, turning and strafing left or right, jumping, crouching, and using something or firing a weapon with minimum effort.

Keep it simple!

6. Seemingly Unkillable Bosses

The sixth and last problem with some games is the presence of those big bad seemingly invincible bosses you have to kill to progress onwards.

It’s all great and well having a bit of challenge when some great big roving spider-like thing chases you around an island-rock in the sky like in Black Mesa or when some demon from Hell surrounded by evil little cherubs with spotlights hunts you down in Doom 3 but if the boss you have to kill is totally disproportionate to the other lesser villains you have to get through to complete the level, it can become very tiring.

Often, these bosses will confront you in a confined environment in which the action is so fast and so persevering that even the use of quicksaves and quickloads seems ineffectual.

Now, to be fair, there are usually sneaky ways on how to kill many of these bosses, but it usually ends up doing research on Reddit forums to know what that is. And sadly, that really spoils it for me because I’m not one for cheating on games.

And for a bit of trivia and fun!

1. As for cheating, unbelievably I still remember the sequence of very old-school cheat codes, IDKFA and IDDQD! What game that was and what did they do?
2. If you were scared of being chased by someone dressed up as one of those divers with the old diving bell helmet, which game am I thinking of?
3. Deranged nurses with pyramid heads, smoking towns and witchcraft. Which game is this?
4. Little scary girls in abandoned office buildings. What game is this?
5. Throwing circular saw blades in a haunted town. What game is this?

Did you get them all correct?

I’m sure you did!