10 Levels That SUCKED in The Best Video Games

Even the best video games have moments of weakness. Here are some of the worst areas and levels in the greatest video games.

10. Cortana - Halo 3

09. Ascension - Crysis

08. The Fade - Dragon Age: Origins

07. The Hedron Chamber - Contro

06. Wolfenstein: The New Colossus - The Courthouse

05. Diablo 2 - Act 3

04. The Sewers - Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 

03. Crash Bandicoot: N.Sane Trilogy

02. Lost Izalith - Dark Souls

A lot of the time, the reason why we call games the best games is that they've just got incredible level design, but even the best video games have some clunkers.

10. Cortana - Halo 3

Kicking it off at number 10, it's Cortana from Halo 3. I want to say this is probably one of the more obvious ones, so let's definitely get this one out of the way. The ninth campaign mission of Halo 3 is about as far from a standard Halo mission as you can get. Instead of the usual wide open spaces and variety of weapons and vehicles that a normal Halo level would indulge you with this time. Master Chief is trapped in a cramped and confusing place, taking on a seemingly endless onslaught of incredibly annoying enemies. 

Another level that gets mentioned a lot when you're talking about the worst levels. It's the library from Halo 1, and yeah, that level's pretty repetitive, but it's got a lot of wide hallways and open areas that make fighting the flood at least tolerable Cortana not so much. This level has almost none of that. It seems like there's stuff trying to kill you anywhere and you can't take two steps without getting pelted with needles from those annoying turrets that are everywhere and there's flood just popping out of these pods that are all over the place. It's really endless. To top it off, everything just looks exactly the same. The enemies blend into the environment, so they're hard to see. The whole place is a slog. It's bad enough on normal, but put it on heroic or legendary and it's just torture. 

09. Ascension - Crysis

Number nine is Ascension from Crisis. Ask anyone who likes Crisis when it starts to go downhill and nine times out of ten they'll say when the aliens show up. The first real encounter with aliens occurs in the mission core where you're floating around inside the mountain. The remaining levels are simply not as good as the first half of the game. You can't really argue otherwise. However, the worst and most boring and forgettable mission is Ascension. It's pretty bad because the VTOL control is really sluggish and your objectives are really basic. Trying to fight the aliens in this thing is mostly just annoying because they're tiny targets. 

08. The Fade - Dragon Age: Origins

Irenicus's dungeon in Baldur's Gate 2. This sloth demon eventually traps you in the fade in Dragon Age Origins. From this, uh, weird metaphysical realm where the demons and the spirits come from. According to Dragon Age lore, sounds cool right? Sounds pretty interesting, but it isn't. You lose all of your party members at the start. You travel around to different areas to get different forms that allow you to overcome certain obstacles. Sounds interesting, right? It is. It's so boring, it's so tedious and the bulk of your time is spent backtracking. It just goes on so long too. By the end, you're just begging for it to be over. There are mods that are dedicated to skipping this entire section. That's how annoying it is, especially on repeat playthroughs. Dragon Age Origins is a fantastic game, like a perfect example of what we're talking about with this list because the fade just sucks. 

07. The Hedron Chamber - Contro

Number seven is the head draw. The Ashtray Maze is followed by one of the most frustrating levels in game history: the entire lava is just a series of brutal arenas with highly damaging enemies, very little cover, and, worst of all, no checkpoints. At least at launch. I'm not sure if it's still as bad as it was back then, but this was a slog back in 2019. But there is one element that I noticed in the transition from two to four player co-op, and that is the vehicle sections. Instead of having something cool where one player pilots a vehicle and the other controls the turret, you really get nothing to do other than shoot enemies. This part appears to be an attempt to add variety into the game, but it actually kind of limits the game. These games are normally a non-stop joyride but this level is like sitting in traffic. People hate turret sections that are like a minute or two minutes long and this is like 10 times that, plus it's underwater, so it feels slower than it already is. 

06. Wolfenstein: The New Colossus - The Courthouse

Number five is Wolfenstein: The New Colossus. At the courthouse, this is supposed to be a big cathartic moment when BJ finally escapes from the Nazi clutches and goes on a rampage against his captors, but instead of being the power fantasy the game desperately wanted to be here, this level is instead a brutal meat grinder that'll just chew you up and spit you out. It always starts the same. The entire thing ends up being a dream sequence, which is extremely annoying. And while the concept is fine, they could have just made it so that when you die in the dream, BJ simply wakes up and the game continues. I guess that would have been too easy, but wow would that have been better. 

05. Diablo 2 - Act 3

And number four is Diablo 2: Act Three. Basically every enemy manages to be very annoying. The tree dudes, the giant mosquitoes, it's all terrible. But by far the worst is the pygmies. They're these fast distance enemies. I have yet to scour the environment pretty thoroughly to find everything, even when you just want a beeline toward the exit sewers from vampire the Masquerade bloodlines.

04. The Sewers - Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 

There are a lot of things that make this game special. The sewers, on the other hand, are this overly long, dull, frustrating mission that can catch new players off guard and just make them miserable. There's no story, no characters, just repetitive it's by nature hallways and it's filled with all these annoying enemies. To make matters worse, it's a vampire game, so you have to suck blood in order to survive and there's hardly anything down here. The Masquerade bloodline starts to feel a bit rushed and complete in the second half and to make up for that the developers just pad edit out certain combat areas to go on way longer. These sections do not play to the game's strengths not even a little bit and the sewer section is the worst of them by far. 

03. Crash Bandicoot: N.Sane Trilogy

Number two is hot cocoa or really any jet ski level from the Crash Bandicoot and Saiyan Trilogy. This stands out to me because when I first played. The insane Trilogy I was just baffled so it's a mission where you control Coco on a jet ski uh but we're calling what you're doing here control is generous turning is sluggish unresponsive. The physics seem messed up and heavy the controls just flat out suck. It felt wrong because I didn't remember the original game controlling like this. It's because it didn't for whatever reason the developers of the insane Trilogy decided to make the jet ski controls quote, unquote, more realistic in the most miserable way they could come up with.

I know a lot of people complain about the bridge stages and the altered movements and physics of the regular games and mostly I don't really think it's that big of an issue or even an issue here. However whatever they do the jet ski controls, made him way worse any of the jet ski levels would come over this list but the worst is hot Coco because all the Nitro crates just feel impossible to avoid especially if you're going for 100 completion like the insane trilogy. 

02. Lost Izalith - Dark Souls

Finally number one. The lost izalith in Dark Souls. This is one of those levels that should have been epic. You're deep in the Underworld and you can literally walk on lava. You have that ability in this level and you can see the place long before you actually get here. This massive dome in the middle of a lava lake, what horrors could possibly await inside a bunch of dragon asses? It turns out, yes you heard that right, you enter the area, turn the corner, and see for the first time an endless sea of zombie dragon buttocks just standing around. Why are they here? What is this supposed to be? I have no idea. To be fair, there's some different stuff to see when you actually get out of the dragonbot lake, but it's small, cramped, and not all that visually interesting. To cap it off, it's one of the worst bosses in the entire soul series. The Bed of Chaos which is less of a boss and more of a random number generator. 

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