Rust

Game design 101 time, kids.  Question:  What's the fastest way to completely break down a game experience...Billy?
"Remove control from the player?"
Very good, Billy!  Come up and get your cookie.  Everyone else, sit your buts down, play Rust and tell me how long it takes for you to become so bored that you decide the best course of action is to kamikaze into one of the raiding enemies.

So here's how this game works:  you circle around the small map and pick up scrap metal.  You then throw that scrap metal at turrets and towers to upgrade their health and ammunition so that they can survive the onslaught of alien invaders.

The biggest problem with this is that you have no power other than to throw metal at things, so the game very quickly devolves from feeling like you're actually defending stuff to feeling like exactly what it is: quite literally running around in circles, mindlessly and routinely picking up metal and putting it in a place.  I've had a more engaging experience putting furniture into a moving van.

Really, do you need anything more than that?  The game could pull everything else off flawlessly and it would still be a less than enjoyable experience.  People will tell me I just don't like tower defense games and that my opinion is biased, but I had a great time with other tower defense games on this list.  Remember Base Invaders? That was fun.  You know why?  It actually let you do stuff!

That's all I got for now.  Until next time, stay defensive

Links

Crust: https://www.digipen.edu/?id=1170&proj=25891