The 10 Most Boring Missions in Video Games

In an ideal world, playing video games means entering a flow where mechanics, challenge, and narrative fit together to entertain you. But sometimes, a game gets almost everything right and fails precisely in a single section that breaks the rhythm, tests your patience, or promises something it doesn't deliver, ruining everything else!

Surely you've encountered an absurdly boring, monotonous, repetitive, or "unrelated" mission to the rest of the game. The kind that sometimes even makes you give up on a second playthrough of a game you think is great, but just remembering having to go through that section again makes you give up on reinstalling the game. These are the kinds of missions we're going to talk about!

Here are ten missions frequently remembered this way: not necessarily the worst in overall quality of the game, but parts that many people describe as monotonous, frustrating, or that simply drag out the experience.

The opening mission of The Phantom Pain serves as a tutorial and, at the same time, as an introduction to the game's tone, also showing why the 'Pain' is in the game's name. The problem is that the mission, right from the start, shows the repetition to come: discreet infiltration, marking, target extraction, and few moments of variation. Players looking for more intense action felt disappointed because what the prologue demonstrates is a limited cycle of activities to come.

In online groups, this beginning is cited as an indication that many subsequent missions will recycle the same objectives, making progress mechanical and uninteresting. The feeling is of repeating procedures instead of experiencing phases with their own identity and, above all, with the creative and chaotic identity of Hideo Kojima.

In God of War Ragnarök, the section known as the Iron Forest stands out for being long and for trapping the player in extensive sequences of dialogues and uninteresting tasks. The section where Atreus encounters Angrboda.

The opinions of those who’ve gone through this phase speak of the long walks, sections where you control animals, such as the yak, and several side missions that are "fillers" and don’t contribute anything to the narrative.

For those who went into the game expecting a God of War-style experience, full of action and fighting, this stage ends up feeling like a drawn-out pause. Some describe it as two hours dragging on until a truly good fight appears. The problem here is the lack of balance between narrative and action.

The missions involving Zero's remote-controlled vehicles are a classic example of a mechanic that doesn't fit with the rest of the game. In San Andreas, where much of the fun is driving, shooting, and robbing, these sections have you piloting drones, helicopters, and remote-controlled planes with poor physics, time limits, and having to hit tiny targets.

Here, discussion forums talk about the frustration with the poor controls and the fact that they have nothing to do with the rest of the game. "It's boring!" sums up the players' reaction well: the mission isn’t only difficult because of the controls and physics, it's irritating because it demands a level of refinement in a sub-activity that many prefer to skip.

The reconnaissance mission at the port of Los Santos comes with a series of activities that seem designed to "fill in the gaps" rather than add anything to the story. Instead of shooting, explosions, or chases, the player drives forklifts, moves containers, climbs cranes, and takes photos.

These repetitive actions break the rhythm, and many players call it "manual labor" within the game. GTA V is remembered for its pace and variety; having a mission focused on stacking boxes and photographing boats seems like something that should be optional, not in the middle of the main quest missions.

The Assassin's Creed series delivered memorable moments of storytelling and historical exploration, but the older games had a series of missions that involved following targets and listening to repetitive, irritating conversations.

The mission boils down to following NPCs unseen, staying within a circle, and waiting for long conversations to unfold without getting caught. Because if you were, you'd be back to the beginning. Many players complain not only about the repetition but also the excess: it's the same type of challenge in series, imposed several times, which disrupts the game's rhythm.

In addition to these, the Animus missions also become tiresome. Even when the story in the present-day layers is interesting, these sections with little action broke the narrative's flow.

The parts where the player takes control of Mary Jane were widely criticized for not offering the same dynamism as the Spider-Man gameplay.

Instead of webs and acrobatics, the player finds themselves in investigative and stealthy sequences with limited mechanics, cover protection, and almost nonexistent combat. For many, this change breaks the game's rhythm: when you reach a part of the game full of action and acrobatics, having to face slow stealth and restricted controls is tiring and boring.

The Fade is remembered for being a dreamlike adventure that significantly changes the usual RPG format. In this mission, the player explores ethereal environments, solves puzzles, and undergoes transformation sequences that require navigating labyrinths and a lot of back-and-forth movement. What's bothersome isn't just the complexity, but the monotony created by tasks that seem artificially lengthy.

Those who’ve faced this stage usually say that it adds half an hour, or more, to the game without providing a challenge, and the visuals and design end up being tiring instead of exciting ("Wow, is this the Fade?" becomes "I can't stand this Fade anymore"). Thus, instead of being a memorable section, the mission is marked as something that drags on. And, for those who don't want to face this, there's a mod on Nexus that skips the entire Fade, but guarantees the player's rewards.

In Genshin Impact's events and commissions, there's a mission that involves escorting a balloon while running and eliminating enemies. The main complaint is that the task boils down to following an extremely slow-moving object and dealing with enemies in a repetitive routine without a way to end it quickly.

Unlike the mission to destroy the Slime Balloon, where you can inflict massive damage and end the mission quickly, escorting the balloon depends on its speed, even just to get enemies to appear on the map so you can kill them. The fact that it's recurring content in daily commissions makes it even more annoying, because it repeats an experience that isn't fun.

The dam in TMNT for NES is often cited when discussing unfair design. There, the player controls a submerged turtle, must disarm bombs in a narrow maze, and faces time and oxygen limits. The problem isn't just the difficulty, but the feeling of excessive punishment caused by imprecise hitboxes and enemies that reappear without giving the player time to react.

This turns the level into a forced trial and error, a test of patience rather than skill. When talking about truly difficult games, this level, along with the motorcycle level from Battletoads, is often mentioned.

Finally, the escorts with Natalia in GoldenEye 007 show how simple AI problems can ruin a great experience. The character, fragile and with erratic behavior, exposes herself to danger, steps in front of bullets, and requires the player to constantly compensate for her mistakes. On higher difficulties, protecting Natalia becomes an almost impossible task because the player loses due to dependence on an unreliable NPC.

The frustration stems from the transfer of responsibility: the player should be tested by enemies and design, not by the decisions of a game-controlled ally who doesn't act coherently. This dependence creates a feeling of injustice, leading many to point to these missions as the worst aspect of a game that, apart from those moments, works very well.