6 Great Games With Terrible Save & Checkpoint Systems

Halo 3

This fan favorite game is full of great action, amazing characters, beautiful locations, and some incredibly frustrating checkpoints.

Halo 3’s checkpoint system appears on the screen every time it saves your progress, showing us a “Checkpoint…Done” each point it saved.

However, Halo 3 had a tendency to “Checkpoint…Done” at the worst possible times.

Sometimes you’d go ages without a save, trudging through the entirety of Cortana or The Ark with nary a checkpoint. Other times the game would save practically every second, making sure your progress is saved after every three steps you take.

Since the checkpoints were sporadic, sometimes you’d even find yourself reloading a save in the middle of intense combat.

It’s hard to finish the fight when you have to dodge a Wraith shot seconds after you spawn in.

Dead Rising 2

Dead Rising 2 is a unique take on the zombie genre. Stuck in a giant shopping mall with a number of hostile zombies and crazy characters, it’s your job to survive until help arrives.

The only way to save your hard earned progress in the game is by manually saving in a bathroom. Bathrooms aren’t everywhere and, depending on where you are, you won’t see one for a while.

Also, don’t forget that time is an important factor when completing quests and making sure your daughter doesn’t turn into a zombie.

So, if you save at an inopportune time, like five minutes before Katey needs her Zombrex and you’re more than five minutes away, goodbye Katey. That never happened to me *cough* *cough*.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2

Overall, Modern Warfare 2 was an amazing game with a great soundtrack and incredible action. However, it has the same problems as Halo 3. Its checkpoint system is a little too out of sync.

It is very easy to go from a pleasant, scripted checkpoint to one deep in the trenches of battle with red jelly splattered across your face.

You just have to pray the entire time you play through Loose Ends that you don’t get a terrible checkpoint while defending against hordes of enemies for several minutes.

And since you’re defending a DSM as it hacked into a system, you could very easily go right back to square one because you decided to recklessly rush into battle to finish the mission the moment it reached 100%.

Yakuza 0

Just like Dead Rising 2, Yakuza 0 has a manual save system. Instead of bathrooms, in this game you have phone booths.

They’re marked on the map for all your saving needs, but the manual aspect means you have to be conscious of your saves and remember to make a trip to a phone booth before a crazy mission.

Since you’re also locked in cutscenes most of the time, you can even go a very long time without saving your progress.

So, if you want to squeeze in a few minutes of Yakuza 0 before going to work, you need to make sure you aren’t trapped from saving. Thankfully, the later games in the Yakuza series adopted an autosave system to avoid this mess.

Resident Evil

Resident Evil takes the cake with manual saves. Not only did you need to find a typewriter to save your game but you also needed an Ink Ribbon to use it.

Ink Ribbons are not in abundance in Resident Evil and it is a chore to find them. Above all, they also take up inventory space.

In a game where your inventory is already limited and you need to carry a lot of things around, the frustration is real. Thankfully, in later games, they nix Ink Ribbons altogether.

Dark Souls

A notoriously brutal game, Dark Souls is very unforgiving when it comes to combat, enemies, and bonfire placements.

The future games in the series comparatively have a lot more bonfires (or lanterns in Bloodborne) and a number of shortcuts getting back to them.

Dark Souls, on the other hand, has very sparse bonfires. The journey down through Blighttown is already terrible, but adding the fact that there are practically no bonfires until you reach the bottom is cruel.

Don’t even get me started on the long and painful run from Firelink Shrine down through the dark and eerie Tomb of the Giants.

For news on the latest games in the series mentioned, here’s a look at Halo: Infinite, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, and the Resident Evil 2 remake. They also, thankfully, have better checkpoint systems.