Dying Light Review (Zote)
This is one of the most frustrating games I've ever played. Everything just feels like it's there to waste your time. It's artificial difficulty: the game.
I've been killed so many times by things that were COMPLETELY out of my control. Things like the game deciding to spawn at least a dozen virals behind you as you're trying to open a container (unskippable animation). Or the game seemingly disabling the stagger mechanic at random, so hitting enemies just doesn't interrupt their attacks for no apparent reason. Or the game making hitboxes stay like half a second after an enemy dies. Prepare to get hit a LOT by that one. I've even died like 4 times in a scripted sequence that as far as I can tell was completely up to just luck whether you took damage or not. By the way, did I mention dying also makes you lose xp? Yup, that's even more time you're wasting, grinding up to the level you were supposed to have to continue the game.
I think the worst offender for this is how half the enemies you run into can just dodge any attack you throw at them. You just gotta keep swinging, wasting stamina, wasting time until the game gives you permission to hit them. This is not hard. This is just wasting your time. You don't dread fighting those enemies when you run into them because of how tough they were last time but because of how much time they could potentially waste.
As far as I can tell pretty much everything in this game was designed with this approach. None of it is there to be actually challenging, just to waste your time as much as possible to give you that fake sense of difficulty. The worst part is the game itself is realllllly easy after unlocking some abilities, you get like 4 instant kill moves and plenty of crowd control. It makes it so obvious when the game is being unfair. It feels like playing a game where the developers realized they made the player too strong and instead of rebalancing things just decided to have a sniper shoot you in the head from across the map every 30 minutes so that you don't progress through the story too quickly.