Worst Game Plots

This is quite a tricky one.

Often, having a bad plot will completely spoil a game. Usually to the point where I refuse to play the damn thing. I really enjoyed the first Star Trek: Elite Force, for example. I was quite young at the time, it's not my fault. Anyway, the sequel came out and I was quite looking forward to it, right up until the end of the opening cinematic which was so trite and badly written I couldn't bring myself to play it.

This is the case with a lot of games. Singularity is a more recent example. However, there are some good games out there with utterly dire plots. Here are a few of them:

1) Half Life 2

This one is a particular bug bear of mine. The plot here isn't exactly bad so much as it is *completely* absent. This was okay in Half Life 1 because you always had the general objective of escaping. Here, though, you're just blundering from one set piece to another with no real idea why you're doing anything or who the hell all these people bossing you around are.

2) Far Cry 2

This one would slip into the -completely absent plot- box with Half Life 2 were it not for the end. Spoiler warning. At the end of Far Cry 2, you meet up with the Jackall who explains that his overall objective was always to get the civilians out of this horrible war torn country. You spend the last act of the game helping him evacuate the civilians.

Anyone who hasn't played Far Cry 2 will think that sounds reasonable but it's important to point out that The Jackall is pretty much entirely responsible for arming the two waring factions in this nameless African state. To put it simply, the civilians wouldn't have needed to evacuate if he hadn't flooded the country with cheap, reliable firearms. This is such a pathetic attempt to tag a HAPPY ENDING on to what was gearing up to one of the most depressing games of all time that the person responsible should be slapped. In the balls. Hard.


3) Assassins Creed 2

Admittedly, AC 2 isn't a stunning game - there's far too much faffing about - but it is solid in many ways. The plot, however, isn't. At the start, your family get murdered in the standard - Trusted Family Friend Sells You Out For Power - way that even I saw coming. From there, things just disolve into a gigantic mess. Leonardo Da Vinci is your mate and makes you stuff and there's some conspiracy where people are trying to do... something... I was never really clear who the people I was assassinating had done or were planning to do but they all did the evil voice so they must have done something...

4) Assassins Creed 1

Doesn't have an ending

5) Crysis

Ditto

6) AVP

Cracked recently lamented the business practaces of Weyland-Yutani but AVP is the height of bullshit Corperations Are Evil nonsense.

Now, I'm a massive anti capitalist. I occasionally describe myself as an anarchist, although I'm well aware that anarchism can't work as a system without a series of very, very small non-interlocking comunities. Films/games bashing on about the dangers of corperations are preaching to the choir as far as I'm concerned but in AVP it just *doesnt make any damn sense*. Why have they captured the aliens? What do they hope to gain from their research? Why are they doing any of this when they have combat mechs with miniguns?

These questions are present in Alien, Aliens and the less good follow ups but they're never more inescapable than they are in AVP because there so little else going on to distract you from how shitty the plot is.