8 Classic PlayStation Adventure Games That Are Barely Playable Today

If you’ve ever watched someone play an old PlayStation game and wondered why their character keeps turning in circles, you’ve seen tank controls. Here’s a quick primer. Pressing up moves your character forward in whichever direction they’re facing. Left and right only rotate them. With the stick alone, you can’t sidestep or change direction quickly. That’s tolerable in a corridor. It’s far less so when you’re creeping past a guard, lining up a shot, or timing a jump over a chasm. That’s why the scheme caused headaches in nearly every genre during the PS1 era. These eight classics are the hardest to revisit, whether tank controls are to blame or something else entirely.

8. Tomb Raider (1996)

The dealbreaker: To set up a single jump, you turn in place, step back, take a run-up, and hold the grab button in midair. Every single time.

Remember that Tomb Raider is a platformer. You leap roughly every 15 seconds, and most of those jumps demand near pixel-perfect precision. The tank controls were meant to help players land them. In practice, they also meant pressing a sequence of buttons in a precise order, at exactly the right moments, over an entire game. A “big” jump went like this. You walked to the ledge, hopped back once, ran forward, jumped at the last instant, and held grab in the air. All the while, you counted the blocks you needed to clear and used different button combinations for standing, running, and walking jumps. Guess wrong and it’s game over.

Fortunately, Aspyr’s 2024 remaster lets you switch to modern controls, with the camera on the right stick. You can also keep the classic scheme if you’re feeling brave. A full remake, Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis, arrives in February 2027. Until then, take comfort in the one courtesy Lara offers. She’ll never walk off an edge, though she’ll gladly run straight off one.

7. Fear Effect (2000)

The dealbreaker: A fear meter in place of a health bar, and a game that punishes you when your ammo runs dry.

Running out of bullets is a special kind of stress in any shooter. Here, you follow three mercenaries who chase a supernatural conspiracy across Hong Kong in the year 2050. A job to retrieve a Triad boss’s daughter becomes a descent into a surreal vision of hell. Along the way you meet Triads, zombies, and demons. If you’re spotted or hit, your character’s fear rises. So, helpfully, does the danger around you. Fear Effect uses tank controls, which tend to pin you down more often than they let you escape. A 2025 re-release from Limited Run Games made the tank controls optional. It also added widescreen, rewind, and save states. Making tank controls optional may be the kindest thing anyone has ever done for them.

6. Resident Evil (1996)

The dealbreaker: A zombie in the next room, and a camera angle that can’t see it.

Being unable to spot a threat around the corner may be the whole point. It certainly ramps up the dread. Resident Evil helped define survival horror, and its fixed camera angles are part of that. You guide Jill or Chris, two members of the Raccoon City police’s elite S.T.A.R.S. unit, through a zombie-infested mansion using tank controls. That means “forward” always means forward for the character, whatever the camera shows. The consistency helps when the view cuts every time you pass through a doorway. Combat suffers, though, because you’re aiming at enemies you often can’t see. The stiff, cumbersome movement doesn’t help either.

For the original experience, the Director’s Cut, which adds analog stick support, is available through PS Plus Premium. For the best way to play the first game, though, try the 2002 remake and its 2015 HD remaster. They feature a rebuilt mansion with new visuals, lighting, and revised layouts.

5. Metal Gear Solid (1998)

The dealbreaker: You can look around in first person, but you can’t shoot that way.

It sounds like a minor quibble until you’re trying to slip past a guard. Snake is a legendary soldier lured out of retirement to infiltrate a remote Alaskan nuclear weapons facility. He can switch to a first-person view to scout ahead. When it’s time to aim, however, you’re thrown back into the overhead camera. It often sits at an angle that hides the very person you’re trying to shoot. This is a stealth game with an exceptionally unforgiving stealth system. Thankfully, the sequels improve a little. If you’d like to try the original, it’s playable in Master Collection Vol. 1 on PC, PS5, Switch, and Xbox Series X. It may be clunky, but it’s at least brief, and you can finish it in just a few hours.

4. Dino Crisis (1999)

The dealbreaker: “DANGER!” prompts that strip away your controls at the worst possible moment.

It’s a recipe for disaster. The premise is delightfully silly. There’s a secret research island, a missing scientist, and a government project that has gone very wrong. (Spoiler: dinosaurs are involved.) Picture Resident Evil, but with dinosaurs, and you’ve got the right idea. You play Regina, a special ops agent sent to rescue a scientist named Dr. Kirk. Sadly for the doctor, you move with tank controls under a camera that trails you rather than holding a fixed angle.

Capcom tried to soften the blow with a quick-turn button. But Dino Crisis takes your controls away just when you need them most. At scripted moments, a “DANGER!” prompt flashes across the screen, and surviving means mashing buttons rather than steering. Every skill you’ve carefully built up, from turning to aiming to running, suddenly counts for nothing. If your reflexes aren’t quick enough, you pay for it.

3. Syphon Filter (1999)

The dealbreaker: Armored enemies and painfully slow manual aiming.

A shooter lives or dies by how quickly you can land headshots. Syphon Filter is Sony’s blend of stealth and gunplay, a spy thriller starring secret agent Gabe Logan. His mission is to stop a deadly virus, and the game wants you to play it like a fast-paced spy film. If only that were possible. It isn’t quite tank controls, but the game is sluggish and awkward to play. That shows most when you shoot. Lock-on aiming is available, but it’s useless against enemies in body armor. You have to drop into a slower first-person aim to go for the head anyway. So the skill the game values most, a headshot on an armored guard, is the one it makes you perform most slowly. Meanwhile, enemies fire at you from off-screen. Enjoy!

2. Parasite Eve 2 (1999)

The dealbreaker: An RPG sequel that traded turn-based combat for real-time shooting, with controls so stiff that learning them is the toughest boss.

It’s an odd reinvention for a series that began as a turn-based RPG. Aya Brea, a former NYPD officer, now works for an FBI unit that hunts creatures born of mutated cells. In the sequel, she fights in real time with tank-style controls. You explore pre-rendered backgrounds, lock on to enemies, and dodge your way through a monster outbreak. It begins in a Los Angeles shopping tower and ends in a deserted Nevada town. The hardest part of Parasite Eve 2 isn’t a boss or a random encounter. It’s mastering what one reviewer at the time called “the stiff and stubborn playcontrol.” It does get easier after an hour or two. That’s the good news. The bad news is that you still have to spend that hour or two building the muscle memory.

1. Silent Hill (1999)

The dealbreaker: It’s very hard to find on modern consoles, and the original code was lost.

This is a different kind of unplayable. With the original Silent Hill, getting hold of the game is the main obstacle, more than the odd controls or punishing design. You play a man searching a fog-choked town for his missing daughter. The 1999 game is out of reach on current consoles. Its publisher has acknowledged that the source code was lost, so for a long time it couldn’t be officially ported or remastered. (A fan decompilation project has just finished reconstructing the original code, which could pave the way for unofficial ports someday.) Today, your options are an original PS1 disc or, for the moment, the PS3 store.

If you want the series on a modern console in the meantime, there’s the Silent Hill 2 remake, 2025’s Silent Hill f, and Townfall. For now, the best way to play the first Silent Hill is with a PlayStation, a disc, and a lot of patience for fog.

Source: Polygon