There are tons of excellent boss fights out there. I can't recall a single one that involved emptying magazine after magazine of my machine gun into it from a FPS perspective. IE: a bullet sponge.
For the sake of discussion, I'll include a few:
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Borderlands 2 (+ Assault on Dragon's Keep DLC)
- The 'BNK3R' Bunker
- The Warrior
- Handsome Sorcerer boss (DLC)
All of them are, by definition, 'bullet sponges', they're bosses, they have to be. You want to take them down in 30 seconds? Now here's the thing. Both the Warrior and the Sorcerer fights are rather boring, in my opinion (especially Handsome Sorcerer's). Not because they
are bullet sponges per say, but because the fight patterns they use are not exactly what I'd call "entertaining" (and are predictable, but they have to be to a degree since they are bosses... you don't want bosses to just throw random things in random ways at random intervals at you).
In Handsome Sorcerer's case, the map in which the fight occurs is too generic, doesn't offer hazards on its own nor can the player use the environment to his advantage (barely any 'cover', map is simple arena-style flat, no explosive barrel-style classic environmental objects to be used to 'aid' you, no 'traps' to be sprung to damage the boss, etc.).
The exception is The Bunker. It is another bullet sponge and I have to empty magazine after magazine of all my weapons into it to take it down. But the fight itself was fun. Why? Because the map is large to start with, and it has three layers. Additionally, you have to take down auto-cannons during the fight, as well as destroying regularly-spawning 'adds' (robots), not to mention that the Bunker's laser defenses activate every time a cannon is destroyed and must be avoided.
It's a boss fight that combines a small and just-balanced amount of platforming (jumping on crates to avoid lasers), tactic (you don't just brainlessly shoot at the boss while barely touching your keyboard keys, you have to move often) and weapons/munitions management (you have to take down robots, the boss and cannons, need to keep an eye on ammo, and need to make sure that the weapons you do have are effective-enough otherwise the fight will take a very long time). That fight, in my book, is a boss fight done right. It's well past the one-boss-in-the-small-room simplicity in most FPS games we've been used to from older years (generally-speaking).
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BioShock
- Big Daddies, they can be bullet sponges, but they were absolutely great to fight.
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Left 4 Dead
- Tanks (said it in my previous post but saying it again). They don't just stand there taking bullets. Once they spot you they run to get you, smash and throw cars in his path at you (which can one-hit you), and also grabs pieces of concrete from the ground trowing that as well towards you. The dynamic music kicks in to increase the atmosphere and the tension, he yells, makes all sorts of nicely-crafted groans and mutated-human noises and the screen shakes with every steps when in proximity. It's a 'mini' bullet sponge done right.
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Half-Life 2 (+ Episodes)
- Striders, well-implemented War of the Worlds-style tripod mini-bosses (especially in Episode Two).
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Metroid Prime(s) (series)
- I could write a long post just about that one but I'll just say that there's a good bunch of fun 'bullet spongy'-style bosses to fight in those (too bad they'll never be on PC).
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Crysis
- Last boss in the original Crysis, dare I say it was fun.
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Quake 4
- Makron/Brain (final boss). Another one that forces you to not just shoot 'at it' but keep an eye on incoming adds, having to move around, etc.
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Unreal Tournament / UT2004
- Xan (final boss in the Championship). One of the best 'cat and mouse' player-VS-boss fights I've had. And pretty nice A.I. too (of course, he knows where the powerups are, but that's ok, it makes the fight fun).
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DOOM II: Hell on Earth
- Final boss of DOOM 2, is a classic, and already that long ago id Software understood that just throwing one boss alone wouldn't do it justice. It combined extra monsters to fight, platforming to a certain degree and especially platforms-activations to adjust your own elevation to that of the boss' "head" (the small hole in the wall). Now, granted, it wasn't challenging (well maybe it was for some, perhaps back then it was, today maybe much less so), but the mechanics of a fun boss fight were already understood at the time.
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Painkiller
- Pretty much all bosses. Their sheer size of awesome epicness incarnate is enough.
º And many more I'm sure I'm not thinking about right now.
- The big points I'm trying to bring are:
1) Being a 'bullet sponge' per say isn't the problem. The problem is the implementation of the boss fight, the map itself, the boss' fight mechanics and patterns and how many things the player needs to do to bring him/her/it/them down. Be it taking cover, taking down shield generators to decrease the boss' defenses, having to avoid fire from extra mobs thrown in, etc.
2) Emptying magazines after magazines on one or multiple boss targets is a very old gaming concept and it's here to stay, apparently. The fact that you are surprised that a game next year (2015 is the given date so far) that prominently features the whole 'bullet sponge' concept is being developed at all is in and off itself surprising as well.
The only thing that's for sure is that boring boss fights will always exist, and fun boss fights will pop-up from time to time. But the concept/mechanic itself of bullet sponge isn't the problem, it's not what leads to a tedious fight. And making fun boss fights in FPS games is not necessarily easy (that much I'd definitely agree with). What leads to a tedious fight is the whole implementation of the boss battle from the build-up to it, to its very intro down to its climatic or anti-climatic conclusion. If the dev team can set up the tension first, give a proper minimal form of intro (especially if it's in a linear, story-driven FPS), craft an actual fun fight with various mechanics and finish the whole thing with a nice boss-given last sentence and/or a decent end scene then I'm all for the bullet sponge part of it.
Anyway I've made my points I guess I'll rest my case here for this subject (other than saying that yeah I'm waiting for Evolve and I can't wait to bullet sponge the Boss player with my team).