Videogames based on movies get a pretty rough ride from gamers. Admittedly, there’s plenty of reason for this - most of them are horrendous. Often buggy, poorly-designed and rushed out simply to cash in on the latest cinema craze, they frequently show the industry at its least creative and most avaricious.
That’s not true of all movie-based games though. Occasionally, something comes along which bucks the trend and provides plenty of entertainment - sometimes even managing to eclipse the enjoyment gained from the film it’s based on.
Here’s our list of 5 Movie Spin-off games that don’t suck.
5. X-Men Origins: Wolverine
He’s the best there is at what he does, but what he does isn’t very nice. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for the utterly dire film which saw Hugh Jackman’s portrayal of everyone’s favorite Canadian mutant stumble through dull set-piece after dull set-piece, before finally squaring off against a re-imagined version of Deadpool which drew the ire of fans up and down the land.
Thankfully, the game based on the film was actually pretty good. Set before the events of the film, the game sees you playing as Logan, trying to piece together the events that led his mutant military unit to split up. As you took damage, Logan’s body would become battered and bruised, exposing his adamantium skeleton - until his healing factor kicked in and repaired the damage before your eyes. A neat combat system allows you to string together plenty of combos, while some of the game’s action set-pieces are far more imaginative than the woeful movie that spawned it. Take the Sentinel, for example: about halfway through the game, Logan infiltrates a secret facility manufacturing giant, mutant-hunting robots called Sentinels. After shutting down the facility, the end of the level sees you facing off against one of the giant robots in a courtyard, before later dismantling it piece by piece in an extended skydiving sequence.
Throw in plenty of unlockable costumes, upgradable abilities, and some attractive (for the time) graphics, and the result was a game that felt as though it was everything the film should have been, but wasn’t - fun, filled with action and with plenty to keep you going back for more.
4. Spider-Man 2
The second superhero-themed entry on the list was arguably the first game to really nail the feeling of being Spider-Man. Let loose in a vast, open-world recreation of New York, simply swinging around the city was an absolute joy, while the graphics were incredibly impressive for the time. With a satisfying combat system, some decent animation and plenty to do, Spider-Man 2 was a game which ended up being just as much fun as the film on which it was based. Subsequent Spider-Man games haven’t always fared as well - the less said about Spider-Man 3, the better (both the game and the film), but Spider-Man 2 holds a special place in the heart of many gamers for finally allowing them to act out their fantasy of being the wall-crawler.
3. LEGO Star Wars
These days, LEGO games are so ubiquitous that it’s hard to remember a time when they weren’t so popular. From Batman to The Hobbit and Marvel Superheroes, Traveller’s Tales has become adept at taking popular franchises and adapting them into the familiar brick-based form we all know and love.
It all began back in 2005 with the release of LEGO Star Wars, which re-imagined the prequel trilogy as a light-hearted collect-em-up. No scene was safe from the developer’s wry sense of humor, with even the darkest of scenes twisted into a laugh-out-loud parody. A year later, the original film trilogy was adapted, before finally a combined release saw players able to experience the entire series in LEGO form - replete with plenty of hidden unlockables and a metric ton of fan-service.
LEGO Star Wars might not be the best LEGO game ever made, and fans will debate for years which title that award should go to - but it’s certainly one of the better Star Wars games of recent years, and definitely better than the prequel trilogy of films.
Plus, you get to repeatedly smash Jar Jar Binks into little pieces. Who doesn’t want to do that?
2. Goldeneye
What? You expected this to be in the top spot? Think again.
Rare’s accomplished first-person shooter for the N64 proved long before Halo that the FPS genre could work well on console. Originally conceived as an on-rails shooter, the game mutated over the course of its extended development (it was released two years after the film, following numerous delays) into one of the most critically-acclaimed and most-loved titles of all time.
Some creative license saw Rare putting its own spin on some of the game’s events, while replayability was offered in the form of its different difficulty settings - in a clever move, playing levels on higher difficulties added additional objectives to complete, rather than simply increasing the health of your enemies or increasing their damage output.
It was the game’s multiplayer modes which were the real star, however. Up to 4 players could battle it out across a series of maps which took inspiration from the entire history of the film franchise, while players could take the role of iconic villains such as Baron Samedi, Scaramanga and Oddjob (screw you Oddjob!). Meanwhile, a variety of modes named after various Bond movies ensured that there was plenty of fun to be found - Licence to Kill saw players killed after a single shot (the only mode where the famously rubbish Klobb weapon was actually an asset), while The Man With the Golden Gun was a mad scramble to the center of the map in order to pick up the titular weapon, which once collected, could only be obtained by killing the person wielding it.
Rare went on to use their work on Goldeneye as the basis for Perfect Dark, another excellent shooter, while numerous developers over the years have attempted to replicate the success of Goldeneye in other games based on the franchise. While some of the titles have been fairly enjoyable, others - such as 007 Legends - have been utterly woeful. While these days the game feels dated, with awful graphics compared to today’s standards and a control scheme that feels unnatural in the age of dual analogue controls, Goldeneye remains one of the most memorable moments in gaming history.
1. Blade Runner
Ridley Scott’s seminal sci-fi noir film Blade Runner is hailed by many as one of the best films ever made. From its fantastic imagining of a dystopian future Los Angeles, to its superlative soundtrack by Vangelis, it’s a film which has stood the test of time remarkably well. In the film, Harrison Ford plays Deckard - a man tasked with hunting down a number of escaped replicants - essentially, genetically-engineered superhumans.
When Westwood Studios - then famous for creating the Command & Conquer franchise - was approached to create a game based on the film, the weight of expectation on their shoulders must have been daunting. Somehow though, they carried the task off with aplomb and released a game that still stands up amazingly well today, some 16 years later.
Rather than follow the events of the film, the game instead casts the player as Ray McCoy: another Blade Runner who, similarly to Harrison Ford’s character from the film, is on a job to hunt down a number of escaped Replicants. Events in the game run parallel to events in the film, though the two don’t crossover aside from a few references here and there in spoken dialogue.
Taking the form of a point-and-click game, Westwood utilized several clever techniques which to this day are rarely imitated. The game progressed in real-time, and certain events and evidence could be missed if the player wasn’t in the right place when certain events transpired. In addition, some characters were randomly determined to be a Replicant, aiding replayability. Thirteen endings were also available, determined by a number of factors. After discovering a Replicant, the player could choose to dispatch them or side with them, facilitating their escape from the city.
Where the game stands out, is in Westwood’s exacting recreation of the look and feel of the Ridley Scott’s film. The developer perfectly recaptured the atmosphere of the Los Angeles as portrayed on celluloid, with dark, rain-soaked streets, decrepit buildings and neon signs flickering in the darkness. You could use the Voight-Kampff machine to interrogate suspects and determined whether or not they were human, and use the scanner in your apartment to zoom in on photos and evidence, uncovering vital clues. In a wonderful nod to the film, players are also able to determine for themselves whether or not McCoy himself is a Replicant.
Blade Runner was an utterly fantastic game, and aside from some occasionally awkward shooting sections, there’s very little that can be said to criticize it. In recreating the look and feel of the film, Westwood crafted what is possibly one of the most authentic interpretations of a movie ever crafted - at least until Alien: Isolation is released later this year - while some of the innovations still impress today. It’s a shame that a sequel never materialized, and that Westwood later got absorbed into EA’s empire before being ignominiously dissolved several years later after being relegated to churning out never-ending sequels to Command & Conquer; based on the evidence on show in Blade Runner, the developer was capable of far more inventiveness than simply iterating on the well-trodden formula of building bases and ordering units.
Dale Morgan
@spamdangled
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