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Bullet Sponges - Which Games Are the Worst Offenders?

revolverjgw said:
Gears, it doesn't even feel like the enemies realize you're shooting them, then they eventually just drop dead. It makes the guns feel as impactful as supersoakers

Uncharted dudes take a lot of bullets, but at least they act like it hurts and are incapacitated for a moment. If you're shooting a guy 3 or more times, smarten the fuck up and take advantage of their vulnerability animation to shoot them IN THE HEAD
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I disagree here, I found it worse in Uncharted as sometimes I'd think they were dead only to have them still not be. Also Gears gets away with it to a degree as the locusts look like they could take a beating. It's more jarring in something like Uncharted where the bad guys are normal humans. Also as to the person who said it was only the supernatural creatures in the game that could not be headshotted for a quick kill I'm pretty sure the juggernauts or whatever they're called need multiple shots, you know the guys with helmets on their helmets.
 
I hate bullet sponges and will only play games with hardcore modes. I expect people to die when I shoot them. If I get the jump on you and shoot you in the back and the player has time to turn around and then shoot me, I refuse to play it. I don't care what my skill is, if you get shot in the back... you should be dead.
 
pkbox.jpg


Not that I hated it. I went in expecting it, but this game was just unload a minigun on a regular enemy for like 5 seconds.
 
jigglywiggly said:
It's Resistance 2 in co-op. By a goddamn mile.

8 people, EIGHT, pumping bullets into a single (unreactive) enemy for a whole 4 minutes watching his life bar slowly drain before he slowly explodes. Fuck that noise.
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That's more like something you'd see in an RPG, though. The CO-OP mode was strange in that game in that it was like a mix of FPS and RPG. The enemies certainly did not react in the same way you'd expect.
 
As long as the enemies show a response to getting hit, I have no problem with it. Resistance 1 was kind of irritating.
 
Both Uncharted games on "Crushing" difficulty.

I (recently) got Platinum trophies for both games, but god damn did some of the bigger firefights in the games take a long time!
 
Gameboy415 said:
Both Uncharted games on "Crushing" difficulty.

I (recently) got Platinum trophies for both games, but god damn did some of the bigger firefights in the games take a long time!
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At harder difficulties this becomes less of a valid complaint.

Obviously you'd hope that harder difficulties didn't just make enemies take more bullets, but that has to be part of it to make the game challenging.
 
anonymousAversa said:
KZ2 Singleplayer is SO ANNOYING with this. Towards the end it's just plain frustrating.
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Nakazato said:
MGO
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Go for the headshot people.

That's why I loved playing killzone 2 on the hardest difficulty, no matter how good their body armor was, the headshot was all you needed.

1 shot. 1 Kill.
 
I don't know about you guys, but games with bullet sponges tend to be my FAVORITE types. Resistance, Uncharted, DooM, Black, DMC/Bayonetta, Halo, Crysis, and so on.

One-hit games are just no fun to me. Crawling around and hoping that you always get your shot in first is too damn boring. This kind of action is pretty close to camping in my book, and the pace is just too damn slow. Not to mention it's just not my play style. The only exception that I've found that is tolerable is CS.

In the games I listed above, you can still win a firefight even if you start off with less health. That's the kind of skill I prefer in a competitive game, tactics and consistent accuracy. You can take your CoD and eat it up, cause I won't touch it.
 
Killzone 1 was awful about this. Enemies take a ridiculous number of hits before going down. Coupled with the wonky controls and the jumpy aiming, the game was pretty frustrating at times. Still a decent title.
 
I think the opposite issue is way worse of a problem. Any interesting gameplay mechanics you might have in your game are useless if every enemy dies to a single burst from any old weapon. It's especially bad in multiplayer; if there isn't enough time between getting shot and dying for you to turn to face the enemy, fire back, and try to move out of the way, then you can't even really call it a competitive shooter so much as a glorified game of two-way hide-and-seek.

Personally, I thought it was really elegantly handled in Uncharted. Body shots were exclusively the domain of power weapons and panic-button run-and-gun tactics, while even the weakest starter weapons are death machines if you use them skillfully. It would have been a really shitty game if killing someone by shooting the chest took only twice the ammo to shoot him in the head. Halo's been covered already, but that's not so much a case of having bullet sponges as it is expanding gameplay mechanics beyond Pull Trigger -> Dead Guys. The only dedicated shooter I can think of offhand where it's bothered me is Gears of War, and even then it's not so much that enemies actually are bullet sponges so much as that the mechanics used to kill them quickly aren't really as fun or interesting as Halo or Uncharted.

It's a pretty big problem in some FPS/RPG games, though. Mass Effect 1 really was just Pull Trigger -> Dead Guys, except it took forever to get to that second step, and there was really nothing you could do to speed it up since there was no locational damage. Fallout 3 was the same problem turned up to 11, even though it had locational damage, because even with 100% headshots, the damage-versus-HP balance was totally fucked up until the end of the game where your weapons outpace (most of) the enemies. Then again it's been getting better lately: Mass Effect 2 allowed for some skill differential since there was locational damage, and the difference between various HP types brought in some actual variety to the gameplay, and Alpha Protocol takes the Uncharted route of making headshots super lethal and body shots more of a backup (though unfortunately the gunplay in AP sucks dick for other reasons).


Still, I'd take the most bullet spongy FPSs around over the way it works in Military Pop-Up Gallery 27.
 
Ephemeris said:
Go for the headshot people.

That's why I loved playing killzone 2 on the hardest difficulty, no matter how good their body armor was, the headshot was all you needed.

1 shot. 1 Kill.
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Yes.



I've always thought people that don't like bullet sponge games are the ones that aren't good enough to get headshots and aim for the body.
 
ghostofsparta said:
Yes.



I've always thought people that don't like bullet sponge games are the ones that aren't good enough to get headshots and aim for the body.
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For me it's about the lack of on the fly tactics,
In a game where hit matter it would be possible to only see an opponent's leg (Under a car ect) shoot it so they start a animation that would give you time to run close and batter them with a bullet sponge you would have to stand there wasting a clip hiting the ankle over and over again.
 
ghostofsparta said:
I've always thought people that don't like bullet sponge games are the ones that aren't good enough to get headshots and aim for the body.
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I dislike bullet sponge games where I'm shooting my enemy in the face to no avail. Emptying the full clip and all that. Annoys me, but if the game is good I could still enjoy it. Gears and Resistance sums this up pretty well for me.
 
Ephemeris said:
That's why I loved playing killzone 2 on the hardest difficulty, no matter how good their body armor was, the headshot was all you needed.
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Or
abuse the nailgun, which gives you a reticle is a one-shot kill
or
abuse the sniper, which is a one-shot kill
or
abuse the lightning gun which is infinite ammo
or
abuse the LMG, which mows down those armored LMG fucks quickly in the desert area

Only time the game is hard is probably the bridge. And the enemies aren't even bullet sponges in KZ2's elite mode. Aim at body, empty 5-6 rounds into them, they dead.

It's the same for all difficulty modes, so you should be saying they're "sponges" even on Easy.
 
Gears is the biggest offender of this. Doesn't matter the difficulty, this game is the biggest offender of all high-profile games. Halo is like this as well. Uncharted 2 fixed some of this, at least, so it wasn't as bad as the first one where people considered the enemies to be bullet sponges. It's probably the best "balance" of this shooter mechanic for enemies though now at least. But Gears is awful, and Halo comes close to that, but it's hard to balance such a thing in shooters I think.
 
Halo isn't a bullet sponge game, christ people. There are enemies with no shields, who will go down instantly with a headshot, and there are enemies that have shields which require certain weapons to use in conjunction with other weapons to bring them down in 2 shots. Not to mention it has the best grenade system in any console FPS. Learn to play the game, sheesh. Shooting your Assault Rifle 50 miles across the play space is not the way the game was intended to be played.
 
Ramirez said:
Shooting your Assault Rifle 50 miles across the play space is not the way the game was intended to be played.
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I laughed so much when the guy in the Reach stream yesterday was doing this, on shielded enemies no less :lol
 
J-Rzez said:
Gears is the biggest offender of this. Doesn't matter the difficulty, this game is the biggest offender of all high-profile games. Halo is like this as well. Uncharted 2 fixed some of this, at least, so it wasn't as bad as the first one where people considered the enemies to be bullet sponges. It's probably the best "balance" of this shooter mechanic for enemies though now at least. But Gears is awful, and Halo comes close to that, but it's hard to balance such a thing in shooters I think.
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No.
 
Yeah, Uncharted (first one) is the "most recent" one in my mind.
Made worse, because the enemies were most of the time, shirtless.
 
LongDongJunon said:
Bad Company 1 (Mulitplayer)

It's annoying but you eventually get used to it somewhat. Never really diminished my enjoyment of it.
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I just went back to BC1 multiplayer this morning (our team won every match :D) and it was surprising to see how much the bullet damage changed for BC2.
 
Ramirez said:
Halo isn't a bullet sponge game, christ people. There are enemies with no shields, who will go down instantly with a headshot, and there are enemies that have shields which require certain weapons to use in conjunction with other weapons to bring them down in 2 shots. Not to mention it has the best grenade system in any console FPS. Learn to play the game, sheesh. Shooting your Assault Rifle 50 miles across the play space is not the way the game was intended to be played.
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Too much of a hassle trying to understand what they're playing.

It's way easier to complain and think it's the game's fault.
 
I used to say the bullets in Black turned into marshmallows once they hit a human.

It may make me seem sick and twisted, but one of the reasons I liked Goldeneye and Perfect Dark was that every bullet had an impact on the enemy. I loved seeing their reactions to getting shot and would replay the early levels over and over to see as many as I could. I miss this in modern games.
 
It's not the bullet sponges that bother me. It's the fact that the butt of my rifle is more effective at killing people than 5 rounds from an AK47 that can penetrate and exit the trunk of a tree at 50 metres.
Are there any games where using the butt of a weapon doesn't automatically kill someone?
 
Slackbladder said:
It's not the bullet sponges that bother me. It's the fact that the butt of my rifle is more effective at killing people than 5 rounds from an AK47 that can penetrate and exit the trunk of a tree at 50 metres.
Are there any games where using the butt of a weapon doesn't automatically kill someone?
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Halo.
 
Coxswain said:
I think the opposite issue is way worse of a problem. Any interesting gameplay mechanics you might have in your game are useless if every enemy dies to a single burst from any old weapon. It's especially bad in multiplayer; if there isn't enough time between getting shot and dying for you to turn to face the enemy, fire back, and try to move out of the way, then you can't even really call it a competitive shooter so much as a glorified game of two-way hide-and-seek.

Personally, I thought it was really elegantly handled in Uncharted. Body shots were exclusively the domain of power weapons and panic-button run-and-gun tactics, while even the weakest starter weapons are death machines if you use them skillfully. It would have been a really shitty game if killing someone by shooting the chest took only twice the ammo to shoot him in the head. Halo's been covered already, but that's not so much a case of having bullet sponges as it is expanding gameplay mechanics beyond Pull Trigger -> Dead Guys. The only dedicated shooter I can think of offhand where it's bothered me is Gears of War, and even then it's not so much that enemies actually are bullet sponges so much as that the mechanics used to kill them quickly aren't really as fun or interesting as Halo or Uncharted.
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This. Someone gets it.

People seem to be suggesting that all games have to have the same mechanics.

Yes, if you're shooting a regular dude with a gun in the chest he should probably down quickly. But if it's some crazy sci-fi setting I expect things to be a little different.

Although, as Gears shows, the balance is tricky. But Halo has it perfect. You play on normal, your guns are pretty powerful.
effingvic said:
Halo multiplayer. Ho. Ly. Shit.
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Whut.
 
Jexhius said:
This. Someone gets it.

People seem to be suggesting that all games have to have the same mechanics.

Yes, if you're shooting a regular dude with a gun in the chest he should probably down quickly. But if it's some crazy sci-fi setting I expect things to be a little different.
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Agreed. I don't see why people can't recognize that each type of shooter has its place.

If you don't like how Halo works, don't play it. Same goes for Modern Warfare, Uncharted, or anything else.
 
ichinisan said:
Resistance 2 Co-Op. I mean I'm shooting a Gatling Gun directly at a Chimera and it takes a while to die.

I mean in it's face.

In it's fucking face.

It should just be a bloody rag of tissue attached to the neck.
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It took fucking forever to kill the bigger guys & and most of the time you're just holding the shoot button since the AI is so stupid.
 
Uncharted and Gears of War.

People listing Mass Effect, Fallout 3 or Borderlands apparently don't comprehend what type of game they purchased. Holy shit.
 
I read up more on the Reavers, and apparently there's a random glitch that makes them almost invincible to gunfire.

That's what had to have happened. If none of you got the glitch, I don't think you really understand what I was talking about.

Reading up on them, they apparently only have just over double the HP of Deathclaws. Which should make it relatively easy to take one down. Which is not what happened when I was playing. When I was in Let-Charon-Unleash-All-Damage mode, it took Charon 10 minutes just to get one of them to half their health. And he was using a shotgun at close range.

I joined the fight when one of them got to about 10% health. I decided to take out the injured one. Since I was at close range, I think I was using my shotgun mostly. Or maybe the plasma rifle. I don't quite recall.

But it took like 2/3rds of that weapon's total ammo to take off that last 10%. Or so it seemed. Totally insane.
 
sn00zer said:
Fallout 3
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Yes... As much as I love the game and I've played through it a number of times on every platform, yes. There's nothing like shooting someone in the face with a fully repaired Terrible shotgun and them only losing 1 little tick of their health. Sometimes you can do this 5 or 6 times and they'll still have half their health left. But it's not always finicky like that. For every time this happens, you blow the person's face off about 10 times, so it's not exactly the bullet sponge syndrome.
Ack, yeah Reavers. If you don't get a critical sneak shot on them, they will definitely give you a run for your money (ammo wise at least).
 
Atleast in Halo shields explain why they are bullet sponges. Most other games bullets are flying through people and they just keep coming.
 
SlipperySlope said:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_JYlNrwSyRA&feature=search

This is what I'm talking about. He had Fawkes, and I had Charon. And this is just one Reaver, I was fighting multiple. He also had the Sentry Bots helping. On my play through, the sentry bots were destroyed right away.

If this isn't a bullet sponge, I don't know what is :) His bullets weren't doing anything to its health. Or at least nothing noticeable.
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I can't even tell what is happening in this video. It's like a million lasers are cutting through the air and this skeleton dude is casually walking around. I would never have the patience for a Bethesda game.
 
ITT people don't know how to play Halo properly and complain about it.

To elaborate, there is a difference between a game where the player or his adversaries are bullet sponges, and a game where you have to follow up on your initial twitch shot. Halo is the latter, where you have to consistently hit your marks and stay on the enemy, and not just get lucky by catching someone off guard. In this situation, the better player will win more often over worse ones, because they are more consistently at a higher skill. People complain because you don't get instant lucky kills, and that's because of very specific design decisions that make it something I prefer to any shooter on the market.
 
Guevara said:
I can't even tell what is happening in this video. It's like a million lasers are cutting through the air and this skeleton dude is casually walking around. I would never have the patience for a Bethesda game.
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This is an exception. There is nothing else like this. The video starts with the Reaver already at half health. And it's 5-on-1, with Fawkes and his Gatling Laser. And it took those 5 2 and a half minutes to take off half the health on ONE reaver.

It just has to be a glitched enemy. Some error in the code somewhere. Technically he's only supposed to be about twice as powerful as a Deathclaw, but as you can see in the video, he's nearly unstoppable. The ammo it took to take half his health could have killed off 500 deathclaws.
 
DeaconKnowledge said:
Splinter Cell.

For a series that tried to focus on realism, headshots not instantly killing people was ludicrous.
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Yep.

Really broke the game for me. Enemies have literally NO reaction to being shot. You actually didn't even know if you even hit anyone in that game.

You could unload a few shots into enemies, yet they'd still manage to nail you no problem like they weren't even being shot.

On the flip side, Metal Gear Solid and Resident Evil are the only games that got this right.

edit: Goldeneye and Perfect Dark in earlier gens as well. Was beaten to it though.
 
Havok said:
ITT people don't know how to play Halo properly and complain about it.
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ITT: Spraying an assault rifle at medium range and meleeing each other to both die = skill?

If you're supposed to use a plasma/covie weapon on a dude to pop their shields and then spray them with a human weapon (DMR/Battle Rifle/Assault) I really really wonder why the Covie army didn't just learn that and then own Masterchief. (Oh wait, he has super speed and strength, my bad)

Again, I like the game. But the shields could pop a little faster for some (pretty shitty) default weapons like the A. Rifle. Not to completely change the game, just make the kill speed slightly faster.
 
2 Minutes Turkish said:
Yep.

Really broke the game for me. Enemies have literally NO reaction to being shot. You actually didn't even know if you even hit anyone in that game.

You could unload a few shots into enemies, yet they'd still manage to nail you no problem like they weren't even being shot.

On the flip side, Metal Gear Solid and Resident Evil are the only games that got this right.
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And Goldeneye. It's sad that so few games have "I got shot" animations. It seems like it would make sense. Not even Valve does it.
 
TheSeks said:
ITT: Spraying an assault rifle at medium range and meleeing each other to both die = skill?

If you're supposed to use a plasma/covie weapon on a dude to pop their shields and then spray them with a human weapon (DMR/Battle Rifle/Assault) I really really wonder why the Covie army didn't just learn that and then own Masterchief. (Oh wait, he has super speed and strength, my bad)

Again, I like the game. But the shields could pop a little faster for some (pretty shitty) default weapons like the A. Rifle. Not to completely change the game, just make the kill speed slightly faster.
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Not at all what I was saying. Keep in mind that my perspective is from someone who has played a lot of Halo, so I understand if coming into it people don't know that you should basically never be using the Assault Rifle if you aren't at close range. It doesn't do a great job of explaining that, either, but after a certain point, the way the playlist gametypes are set up and how the missions start divying out weapons pretty much point to the Battle Rifle and Carbine as the end-all be-all, and after you start using the headshot weapons, it ceases to be the spray and pray CQC fest that very low level play is. It's just frustrating to see that that's what people think Halo combat is, when it really isn't if you put in the time to learn to play it well.
 
What makes it worse in Uncharted are their spazzy, bullet dodging animations. I've never before *actually* *enjoyed* pumping enemies full of bullets until I played Uncharted.
 
Hype about the new MAG beta got me to rebuy it, bad idea...

Basically what was once a display of poor weapon balance due to the laser accuracy of the LMG coupled with its dmg. and massive amount of rounds has now become a game of all guns nerfed.

Most of the community engages in gun fights ending in knife kills from 10ft away. You spray and spray at charging enemies before you slash one another. Due to the removal of TK Knifing anytime groups assemble in tight areas gun use is an after thought.

So yeah sponging up players due nerfing weapons turned a large scale war into an arena/twitch shooter.
 
StopMakingSense said:
Metroid Prime 3. Ridiculously so.
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You are supposed to use the hyper beam on strong enemies with large amounts of health.

The true answers to this topic are Uncharted and Peace Walker. (if we are including RPGs as well, I would also include Mario & Luigi Partners in Time's bosses, they take FOREVER to defeat!)
 
Final boss in Stranglehold. One old geezer who can have 20 more special slo-mo sniper shots to the head than his goons.
 
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