Discussion: what's the worst level in an otherwise-great game?

We’ve all been there: this game would be perfect if it weren’t for this #$%@ level! Maybe it’s a bug, maybe it’s bad design, and maybe it’s just a bad player…but what’s the worst level you can remember from a game that was otherwise great?

Iain: Max Payne, the blood-trail dreamy hallucination nonsense. There was nothing fun about this. Nothing! I know what they developers were doing, they wanted me to chase the crying sounds of Max’s child and build my relationship with the character, but why would they make it so annoying?

Wrong way? Fall into darkness, start again. Step one pixel off the narrow path? Fall into darkness start again. Fling controller at screen because you’ve had enough of this shit? Fall into darkness, start again! Max Payne was an awesome, fast-paced, slightly over-the-top third-person shooter whose main mechanic was bullet time. Why would anyone think this slow, annoying walk in the dark was a good idea? In the end this section killed any emotional resonance it may have had, simply by annoying me so much that I considered turning the game off and never turning it back on.

Charlie: Crash Bandicoot 2’s “Ruination”. Crash Bandicoot has always been my platformer of choice, but this level was my Achilles heel. Aside from the obnoxious bonus full of those metal boxes you need to belly-flop, there’s a section of the level where you’re moving sideways across the screen and have to jump onto tilted, rotating platforms one after another. I cannot do this. Any other level of Crash 2 is cake to me, but I bleed lives like nobody’s business on that section of Ruination, even today. It seems sort of unfair to have a section like that, which relies totally on your perception of the 3D space, in a game with a fixed camera.

And the worst part? My younger brother is great at it. Does it in one go almost every time. There’s nothing more frustrating than losing 50 lives in a row, handing the controller to someone else, and then having them breeze through the section like it was Turtle Woods!

Mary-Anne: The Wailing Caverns instance in World of Warcraft. Now the Wailing Caverns (WC) is a great instance, don’t get me wrong. It’s one of the first instances a player will come across, and it’s very good training for what lies ahead. The instance is long and thorough, there are many quests, and a huge variety of mobs to deal with. But the problem with WC is that it is too damn winding and confusing, and back in the day when there weren’t any dungeon maps and you were too much of a noob to download an add-on, WC was a navigator’s hell. And let’s not even go into those random chasms that sent you tumbling down to another area.

I still remember being trapped in there for a four hour run…