...so I recently thought I'd try to go back to Evoland, and finish it before doing Evoland 2. And now I remember why I hated the first game so much: poor hit detection, where my sword swings would often miss enemies right in front of me. Of course, enemies and trap projectiles had no problem hitting me, even if it looked like their shots or blows would either miss or narrowly graze past me.

So I got to thinking, are there any other games out there (in)famous for their poor hit detection? The only other non-indie game I can think of off the top of my head was the WWII BG-style cRPG Another War.

The 1st Deadly Dozen game was ruined by it. When they made the 2nd their main selling point was improvement of it.

That's pretty sad considering 2D collision detection is pretty much a solid science in games for decades now. It's still iffy in the world of 3D due to an amazingly higher level of complexity but with 2D it's cut and dried really. Developers that get that wrong need to stay in school and keep their day jobs. :)

An old Apogee game Pharaoh's Tomb (famous for having its creator, George Broussard, misspelling his own name on the title screen) had a bounding square for detecting collisions that was slightly bigger than the character, so sometimes you get hit when you shouldn't. I know it's old, but even then collision detection could have been done better. 2 "sequels" using the same engine had this fixed.

Was frustrating at times, but the game's pretty fun. I loved it. You can get it from 3D Realms for free now
https://3drealms.com/catalog/pharaohs-tomb_46/

I forgot the title, but there was a fps game setup in ww2 with a very bad hit detection. So bad the programmer forgot to resize collition box where enemy is crouching. The result is hillarious. When enemy crouch behind cover, player can throw knife to empty space above head and kill him

Dark Souls was pretty bad at it at times. Though the fans tend to ignore that fact because it creates "difficulty" and "challenge."

Dark Souls collision detection was EXCELLENT. I assume, then, that you're talking about weird PVP behavior. The PVP issue is entirely latency-related and only has to do with the game's shitty netcode.

The Evil Within (spoilers?)

And yes, i know that i missed the 3rd and 4th shot.

Na man, enemies with spears or longswords did a marvellous job of missing you completely whilst taking a good chunk of your health. Nevermind some of the boss battles. Could of been down to the games general shit performance but I had a lot of issues like that. It was such a shame, especially after how well made Demon's Souls was. Damn, that is pretty bad.

dragon age, and other similar rpg, where they miss at point blank, (i know its not poor hit detection, but it pisses more then a hit detection on first person shooter would

Garry's Mod, ugh those shitboxes

I dunno if I got the super-copy of Dark Souls or something, because I never had any problems of the sort when playing it, except in PVP as noted earlier. If some dude hit me, it was cause I didn't block or roll away in time. I had significantly more difficulty reliably avoiding attacks in Prince of Persia Sands of Time than I did in Dark Souls. Though that was a much easier game, obviously, and mistakes could just be rewound.

Enclave was criticized for that originally on the xbox. The PC version added little pop up numbers showing how much damage you did, so at least you knew whether or not your hits were landing.

Modern bullet hell shooters look like they have bad hit detection; it is not unusual for bullets to pass through the player's sprite. The thing is, it's quite intentional, and it is one of the reasons those games are manageable in the first place. So, the hit detection might look bad, but it's actually a very intentional design choice that works well.

In the original Super Mario Bros., only the very bottom of a piranha plant is deadly. It is quite easy to jump through a piranha plant without getting hit, and it's a common strategy in speedruns. Note that this was changed in the All-Stars version.

The easiest way to make the game feel like it has poor hit detection is to design the hit boxes so that they don't favor the player. On the other hand, if the hit boxes favor the player, the game will be significantly less frustrating, and it will feel like the hit detection is very good, even if it actually isn't.