Ah, the licensed game. More often than not, they suck something awful. While there are a handful of gems that come from successful franchises, whether in the comic book world, the movie world, or the TV world, the games that come from them are usually bottom of the barrel.
It’s a lesser seen occurrence these days, but there has been plenty of evidence of this particular sort of garbage in the past. It’s usually due to laziness, being out of touch, and generally lacking any idea about what gamers actually want to experience when it comes to their franchises. We’ve seen misses time and time again, and today, we’re going to check out some of the worst games to come from well-known franchises.
This can be from any form of medium, with the only criteria being the franchise must be well known. That means superheroes, TV, and film-based games. They’re all on the table.
10 Enter The Matrix
Not The One
|
Platforms |
GameCube, PS2, Xbox, PC |
|---|---|
|
Developer |
Shiny Entertainment |
|
Release |
5/15/2003 |
Enter The Matrix had a huge moment when it came out. Because at the time, there was no cooler, video game-like movie than The Matrix. I mean, the point of The Matrix was basically, “What if someone lived inside a computer game and broke it with cheat codes?” It’s deeper than that, but that was the gist of it.
So the game came out, and we were expecting to play through the movies. Immediately, things felt off. Why’s that? Well, that’s because Enter the Matrix starred everyone’s favorite characters, Niobe and Ghost, who I think have five lines total between them throughout the trilogy.
It was a bummer for sure, but the gameplay was an even bigger one. It was awkward looking, the graphics were incredibly poor even for the time, and the story was a retconned, jumbled mess that tried to justify throwing these two inconsequential characters into much bigger roles than they actually had.
It was such a disappointment, but luckily, we would get a far better effort a few years later with Enter the Matrix: The Path of Neo. It wasn’t perfect, but it was a hell of a lot better than this.
9 Reservoir Dogs
If You Shoot Me In a Game, You Better Wake Up And Apologize
Reservoir Dogs is one of the best movies of the 90s. It’s full of incredible acting, great storytelling, and thrilling shootouts. That would make for a good video game, right? Unfortunately, that’s not the case.
This 2006 adaptation of the popular movie was a bit of a disaster. It featured some interesting ideas, like becoming more psycho depending on how many people you kill in shootouts, and also multiple endings where you can see things play out differently from the movie.
However, that doesn’t make up for the lackluster shooting mechanics, incredibly unsmooth driving segments, and hilariously mediocre voice acting to support a movie that once made stars out of its many talented actors. This one is a fine play if you’re dying to see what the worst of the mid 2000s had to offer in terms of edgy, super violent third-person shooters, but it’s good for little else.
8 Superman: The New Superman Adventures
The Man of Garbage
Let me take you back to a time before the Arkham games and Spider-Man PS4. Superhero games were plain not good. And the reason they weren’t good is because Superman 64 ruined the party for everyone. This is without a doubt one of the worst games of all time. I remember renting it at 10 years old and thinking it was terrible. When a 10-year-old knows you screwed up, you screwed up.
It missed the point of Superman completely, opting for infamously awful segments like flying through rings instead of high-stakes rescues and epic battles. It was a disaster of a game, and a huge warning for any game company in the future to try and make a game about Superman.
To this day, there has been no Superman game with any significant budget since. This is a game that single-handedly ruined a character in the video game world, and the repercussions are ongoing.
7 Iron Man
Broken Parts
I don’t understand why Iron Man didn’t work. Sure, it was only five hours long, but everything else feels like it’s there. It had solid graphics, good controls, and decent combat options, but something about the game is still empty.
It’s just not fun, and the mission design is painfully boring, which is partially due to the game taking after the movie instead of using a famous comic book plot that might’ve had more interesting plot points involved. It feels both polished and lazy at the same time, and it’s like the team at Behavior Interactive focused on the wrong things. Good graphics are great when the rest of the game is fun to play. They forgot the fun.
Because of that, it’s got that initial “Ooo, shiny” feel to it before you’re bored to tears. It’s only five hours sure, but you’d be better off spending those five hours playing just about any other superhero game or just watching the movies again.
6 Dragonball Evolution
I Need Answers
|
Platforms |
PSP |
|---|---|
|
Developer |
Dimps |
|
Release |
4/9/2009 |
Dragonball Evolution is a terrible movie, so naturally, a game came along with it to add fuel to the burning dumpster. I can’t even begin to understand why this was made. At this point, there had already been a ton of great Dragonball games, but here, this is the bottom of the barrel. Have you ever wanted to play as Justin Chatwin in bad cosplay fighting James Marsters in worse cosplay? Then you’ll love this game.
For everyone else, this is an absolute embarrassment of a fighting game with hilariously bad effects, terrible movement, lackluster modes, awful graphics, and overall, just a terrible use of a license that was already successful year after year from great games like Dragonball Z: Budokai Tenkaichi 3.
This was one of the worst games of all time, that’s for sure. It gets filed under the category of “Never should’ve been made unless it was for some evil prank on a poor, unsuspecting soul.”
5 Aliens: Colonial Marines
Game Over Man
Aliens: Colonial Marines is one of the biggest letdowns of all time. Often, games from popular franchises come and go without any fanfare. This was different. The hype was big here, and the thought of getting to take the fight to the Aliens from the iconic franchise was a juicy one to say the least.
The reality was sadly about as bad as it can get. There were tons of bugs, the performance was garbage, and the game was only seven hours long. This wasn’t the old school days of gaming where that length was okay either. This was 2013. We’d already gotten used to big titles giving us 30+ hours to chew on when it came to our games.
Here, maybe that brevity was a blessing, because the shooting felt awful, the Aliens were broken most of the time AI-wise, and it just felt like the developers did not get for one second why this franchise was special. It’s a shock, because Gearbox Software is very experienced, so maybe they had a bigger hand pushing the buttons behind the scenes. Either way, this is one of the biggest disappointments for any franchise in recent memory.
4 Fight Club
I Am Jack’s Unending Disappointment
The image above is of the frontman of Limp Bizkit, Fred Durst. You might say to yourself, “Wait, Fred Durst wasn’t in Fight Club, was he?” and you’d be right; he was not. But if you beat this game, you unlock Fred Durst. It was 2004 and unlocking Fred Durst was considered an achievement in a video game. Okay, I’m getting off-topic here, but Fight Club is a game that misses the point in so many ways it hurts to count.
It’s a game that focuses on the fighting aspect of the movie, which, right off the bat, is just the wrong move. You create a character who is a blank slate and fights through different portions of the movie’s story, which is now retconned a bit to fit you in, and it’s just fight after fight. There is a unique system where your injuries carry over and may force you to retire, but other than that, it was as unnecessary of a game as there can be.
Unless you really want to beat the hell out of Jared Leto and not get a lawsuit for it, I don’t see a reason this game exists. It’s incredibly violent, sure, but that doesn’t make a game fun to play. There are countless better fighting games, endlessly better boxing games, and even better games featuring Meat Loaf (shout out Rock Band 3).
3 South Park
Friendly Faces Everywhere, Bad Visuals and Terrible Mechanics
South Park never should be a first-person shooter, but that’s the game we got in 1998, right as the series became a super success. It was about as bad as you could imagine. The graphics were a poor rendition of a series not exactly known for its visuals, and the gameplay was easily the worst first person shooting you could find on the N64 at the time – and that’s saying something considering how awful those controls truly were.
The story is classic South Park nonsense, but none of the actual charm and cleverness from the series can be found here. You’ve got the voices and the characters, as Matt Stone and Trey Parker provided, but they actually left this project early on due to the direction. That was red flag number one, and they were right to distance themselves from this game as it’s one of the worst uses of a popular franchise ever made. Thankfully, the series’ video game quality would rebound majorly decades later.
2 Marvel’s Avengers
Avengers, Don’t Assemble
Marvel’s Avengers is a painful one for me. While there is fun to be had here, it gets it wrong in ways that are unforgivable. When making a superhero game, you need interesting enemies to fight. Here, we fight robots of varying colors for the entirety of the game, with some underwhelming henchman types thrown in.
You also need a great villain to fight. Here we have Modok, Abomination, and Taskmaster, over and over again. While the combat is actually pretty great, the environments are boring and uninspired, the story is badly written, and the multiplayer is so ridiculously repetitive and predatory that it had to go free-to-play because of how bad the microtransactions were.
It’s such a shame, because the game can be fun at times, with the combat and the variety of characters all feeling different, but it all feels so repetitive so quickly and the mission design is truly awful, having you either play king of the hill or destroying random modules over and over for no particular reason.
Some had hoped this one could get revived with additional content, but the DLC was more of the same. Eventually, Crystal Dynamics gave up. The game is currently delisted.
1 The Lord of the Rings: Gollum
The WOAT
The Lord of the Rings is one of the most famous franchises of all time. There have been a ton of great games using the license, with some highlights being the PS2-era games that were named after the second and third films. The Lord of the Rings: War in the North, is also a fantastic spinoff with great combat.
The Lord of the Rings: Gollum, conversely, is just the worst game ever made. Hands down, licensed or not, I don’t care. This is the game nobody asked for and nobody needed, and yet it was still made – and made as poorly as possible. The stealth is awful, the graphics somehow look worse than a game from 20 years ago, the voice acting is poor, the plot is bad, the stealth sucks, the platforming sucks; everything is just so bad it’s hard to count.
This was a game that was dead on arrival, and it was no surprise that it became a meme the second it was released. This isn’t one of those “so bad, it’s good” titles, either. This is so bad that it’s offensive. Stay far away from this one. It’s far more corrupting than the ring itself. I would welcome the Ring Wraiths stalking me 24/7 before I play this one again.
- Security Camera Installation – indoor/outdoor IP CCTV systems & video analytics
- Access Control Installation – key card, fob, biometric & cloud‑based door entry
- Business Security Systems – integrated alarms, surveillance & access control
- Structured Cabling Services – voice, data & fiber infrastructure for new or existing builds
- Video Monitoring Services – 24/7 remote surveillance and analytics monitoring
Author: 360 Technology Group
