Screenshot: MachineGames / Claire Jackson / Kotaku
It’s hard to say what’s more of a bummer, folks. Was it the dark days where every single big blockbuster movie got a shitty tie-in video game crunched out by some poor dev team in six months to launch alongside the film? Or is it the present, where new movies rarely get tie-in games at all outside of the occasional throwaway mobile game? Yes, of course there are exceptions, but for every Goldeneye 007, Scott Pilgrim, or Spider-Man 2, there are a dozen E.T.s, Rambos, or Fight Clubs. Meanwhile, we’ve finally got kind of a good thing going in the other direction, with enough quality movie/TV adaptations of games that an outright shitburger like Borderlands feels like a rare exception and not the rule.
I get it, games take longer and more effort to make, especially the kind of quadruple-A thing most film studios would prefer their cash-ins to look like. But here’s the secret sauce, kids: Most of the best movie-to-video-game adaptations aren’t even direct adaptations of a specific movie, but are instead parallel stories, spinoffs, off-brand prequels and sequels, and weird anthology tales existing in the same universe. Star Wars has been proving that theory right for decades now, but even ambitious-yet-average one-offs like Mad Max and Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora have the right idea.
And that’s the sweet spot we’d like to look at, especially in the wake of the rather excellent Indiana Jones and the Great Circle: The games that took a film’s ball and ran with it. There’s quite a few of them, but here’s 10 that are especially worth your time.
Probably the indisputable winner of this entire list, if we’re honest. Creative Assembly took a good hard look at everything Aliens: Colonial Marines did and made the exact opposite of that. The extent to which Isolation applies pressure to the player and dares them to make a wrong move or make the wrong noise is breathtaking. Quite literally, too, if you turned on that option on select platforms where the alien can hear you through your controller, laptop, or camera microphone. And how gloriously sadistic is the fact that they even included that option?
There are elements of The Thing that show its age, especially the gunplay that becomes a drag once you start getting fewer alien monstrosities and more generic humans in your way. But wrapped around a fairly bog-standard survival horror game is a suite of brilliant mechanics that truly makes it feel harmonious with the Carpenter film of the same name. Once you start rescuing survivors, any one of them could be infected at any time, and deciding just how much to trust them–or not–with resources and tasks still feels tense and unique. Nightdive Studios just shadow-dropped a very pretty remaster of the game. It’s still very much worth a look today as it was back in 2002 when it first arrived.
Here we have the rarest of rare scenarios: Escape From Butcher Bay is a game that is an outright triumph in every way the film it was meant to tie-in with is not. Yes, there’s still a goofy charm to Chronicles of Riddick: The Film, the kind of bro-ey nerd charm you can only get from one Vincent Diesel, Esq. It actually feels more like a one-shot D&D/Warhammer campaign than anything else, and nobody was even attempting that in 2004.
Escape from Butcher Bay, however, is every inch the sequel to Pitch Black the world needed and wanted. The game is a down and dirty, stealthy prison escape scenario with an excellent “see-in-the-dark” mechanic, awash in character actors, and a lot of Riddick shanking people in the spine. And the game pulled all this off while still serving some satisfying Furyan lore expansion. For some reason, we haven’t gotten 10 sequels to this yet.
Oh sure, there’s an argument to be made that Shadow of Mordor/Shadow of War are the better games to include here, considering how much of their presentation is lifted from the Peter Jackson films. However, I’d argue for a more unique experience, look no further than The Third Age. As literally anyone who plays it for five minutes can tell you, the game is basically just Final Fantasy X in Middle Earth. Thing is, what seemed like a derivative choice in 2004 feels far more novel in 2024. The story, with a kind of parallel Fellowship ensuring the A-team gets to Mount Doom, runs roughshod over the established canon, but the group’s backstories are all solid enough to maintain interest for the entire play time, and hey, least they don’t do anything too stupid like, say, oh, idk, for instance, make Shelob a goth baddie, or make the last thicc female Ent fight a Balrog.
Every once in a while, somebody threatens to try and do a new Back to the Future, or maybe turn that Broadway musical into a film. Meanwhile, Telltale got there first, with the help of series screenwriter Bob Gale, and a smattering of the original cast in tow, all putting in work. The first two episodes are a little on the sillier side, with a jaunt to Prohibition-era Hill Valley. But once the busybody ancestor of Principal Strickland gets involved with Doc Brown, resulting in Hill Valley being turned into a techno-dystopia, things are drastically more interesting. It’s a damn shame the ending–which managed to rope in Michael J. Fox while introducing some multiverse shenanigans back when that was still cool–never went anywhere. What we’ve got instead is still the one and only time this series has ever been expanded upon in a meaningful way.
Look, I love GTA V and Red Dead Redemption II, but every damn day, I mourn that the Rockstar Games that had time to pump out games that weren’t GTA appears to be in a coma. Don’t even get me started on how much I miss Midnight Club, we’ll be here all day. But above all, we don’t talk enough about the one time Rockstar decided to play in someone else’s cinematic sandbox to give us not just one of the best takes on a 3D beat-’em-up we’d get (until the Yakuza games finally started to gain traction in the West), but also one of the best movie adaptations all around. The Warriors takes a cult classic film literally nobody was even paying attention to in 2005, and breathes new life into it. The game isn’t just an adaptation, but is an expansive prequel starring most of the same cast. This thing has been long overdue for a remaster, but alas, Rockstar would have to pull people off of lovingly modeling every strand of a meth head’s chest hair in GTA Online to do it.
It’s always a mistake whenever someone says Bond films are all just dumb action flicks, especially the Daniel Craig era. But to be fair, the Pierce Brosnan flicks weren’t shy about being exactly what they were, until they parasurfed way too close to the sun with Die Another Day. Quality of the films notwithstanding, it made total sense that Brosnan would end up getting the best Bond game ever made (Goldeneye 007’s aged, and you know it. Why are you booing me? I’m right). Everything or Nothing is just a wild-ass ride from beginning to end, with enormous action set pieces no film would be able to budget for without bankrupting England. It’s frankly shocking it didn’t, considering the staggering amount of star power EA managed to rope into this. The game features Brosnan himself, as well as Judi Dench, John Cleese, and even Willem Dafoe as the baddie.Shannon Elizabeth and Heidi Klum star as Bond girls, and Mya does the theme song (which is still a bop). This is just straight up, spared-no-expense AAA shit right here, a game that actually feels like a later Uncharted sequel long before anyone even heard the name Nathan Drake.
Ask virtually anyone about what they think a John Wick video game should be, chances are good the answer is something that resembles Max Payne or Hotline Miami. Nobody’s first answer would’ve been John Wick Hex, and yet after playing it, one will find themselves wondering “Why wasn’t it?” John Wick Hex is a strategy game that puts you in the head of the Baba Yaga, where every little consideration of the killzones he finds himself in must be accounted for to escape without taking a bullet, and it’s only after you’ve done the legwork that you actually get to see the dope, bone-crushing, headshotting glory. It’s also working with a really cool cel-shaded art style, and really, though, it’s just cool to see John as the Baba Yaga, the guy still building his legend instead of the legend.
Out of everything else in this list, Terminator: Resistance is shocking in the fact that nothing about its pedigree gives the indication that it might be playable let alone often good. Look at developer Teyon’s resume prior to this, and it is a long, depressing list of straight up shovelware for the Wii and 3DS. Hell, their last licensed game is the dreadful PS3 Rambo rail shooter I mentioned at the start. Somehow, those guys managed to pull off Fallout-but-with-Terminators, and did it in a way that doesn’t outstay its welcome the way too many of the Fallout games do. We used to get stuff like this all the time in the PS2 era. Now, a AA game taking a road-less-traveled with a big property is one of those swings nobody makes. But when they do, it often winds up being a delightfully wonky treat.
It’s not exactly a surprise when WayForward manages to make a pretty passable game out of a tie-in property nobody cares about, let alone a legitimately fun, cool Metroidvania, but in The Mummy Demastered’s case, the team found themselves in the wild position of crafting the only shining positive about an absolute shitshow of a project. The Dark Universe is still a punchline in the annals of recent film history (though we did get that great Elisabeth Moss Invisible Man out of it), but the game is surprisingly pretty forward thinking in a few ways. Specifically, it’s got more of a Souls-like approach to the way it handles death, in that, as a nameless grunt, completing the mission means heading into darkened tombs, having to take down your predecessor if you want any of your inventory back. All it really needed was a trailer with a pixel-art Tom Cruise screaming in the center sound channel of your TV.
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