Worst Movie Tie-In Games of All Time

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Adam is a lifelong gamer who enjoys RPGs, action adventure games and a healthy helping of VR to boot. He has written for countless sites in the gaming medium, and you can find him playing the newest souls-like or JRPG.

The movie tie-in game is somewhat of a lost art, but from 2000 to the mid 2010s, it was a big thing to do. While there are a few decent gems in the movie tie-in universe, the ones that failed are far more prevalent.

They are generally incredibly low effort, short, and as mindless as can be. They basically make these games for a quick cash-in, and although decent companies are sometimes behind the product, there usually isn't close to the kind of effort you'd normally get from them. That's usually due to a time crunch to get things ready just in time for a movie release.

Screenshots from three movie tie-in video games often considered better than their source material.

We're going to check out a handful of terrible movie tie-in games that manage to take even the best movies and drag them down to the depths.

10 Reservoir Dogs

If You Shoot Me In a Game, You Better Wake Up and Apologize

A Reservoir Dogs tie-in game makes zero sense from the get-go, as the movie wasn't about GTA-style, over-the-top shootouts or action sequences, but rather the relationships between a bunch of bank robbers and the price of loyalty when everything goes to hell. So what does the game version of this movie do? Over-the-top shootouts and action sequences, of course.

It just misses the point so terribly. It's basically the same mission over and over, shooting at cops as you try to make your ill-fated escape. While there are some novel ideas, like taking hostages and a sort of Mr. Blue-inspired rage meter that sends you into a blood-soaked frenzy, this game just barely feels like the movie it's tied in with.

It also came out nearly a decade after the movie released, which was baffling in itself. Overall, it just didn't really make sense to turn a movie like that into an action game, and the results speak for themselves.

9 Dragonball Evolution

Powering Down

Developer

Release Date

Platforms

Dimps

March 19th, 2009

PSP

Dragonball Evolution was a wild attempt at making a live-action Dragonball movie, and while the intention was good, the movie was anything but. So naturally, a tie-in game came right along with it, and it was somehow worse than the already atrocious movie.

First of all, you've got characters that look far less cool than their anime counterparts. For example, Goku, the main character who is a Saiyan with insane strength and is built like a truck, is portrayed by Justin Chatwin, who is not believable in the slightest in the role, even in video game form. It just gets worse from there.

The controls are awful, the length of the game is shorter than your average fighting game, and the attacks that are meant to be world-destroying and light up the screen come off as pathetic variations on the ones we know and love. They had to know this would be a disaster, and that's why it only launched on PSP. But you can't get anything by us.

8 Fight Club

Too Little, Too Late

Fight Club came out in 1999, but the game of the same name didn't come out until 2004. At that point, we'd seen Fight Club, we'd talked about Fight Club, and guess what? We were sick of Fight Club. So, of course, we get a tie-in to the movie 5 years later, during the year of 2004, where gaming was taking leaps left and right.

Fight Club gives you a custom player and shoves you into the story of Fight Club. It's an incredibly short game that looks okay in the graphics department, but fails in every other category. The gameplay is incredibly repetitive for a fighting game, with poorly explained mechanics and an overall clunky feeling that usually is the thing that ruins any game in this genre.

Then you've got the actual plot, which, according to this game, was more about the fighting than anything else. If you've seen the movie, you know that's only a modicum of the plot, and one that isn't particularly important in the bigger scheme of things. It was just a missed opportunity in so many ways and a game that shamefully shares its name with one of the best movies out there.

7 Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1

You're a Soldier, Harry

Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows - Part 1

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 is a great movie, and one of the more contemplative ones of the series. So what did EA do for the game version of it? Turn it into a third-person shooter in the vein of Gears of War, of course.

I'm not joking, your wand here is essentially a gun. Now that's not a terrible idea on its own, but at no point in this franchise was Harry acting like an action hero. There are also plain bizarre segments here too. For example, do you remember in the movie where Harry had a shootout with two fast food worker wizards in a restaurant? Me neither.

You're playing a cover shooter as Harry Potter. It's as ridiculous as it sounds, and while it looks solid enough and the voice acting is okay, the game just feels bad to play. The spells don't have a ton of impact and the animations for casting them are pretty awful as well. It's also linear as can be, leaving little creativity to the player. There is a reason that this series hasn't worked in games until Hogwarts Legacy changed everything in 2023.

6 007: Tomorrow Never Dies

The Successor That Failed

Tomorrow Never Dies had a brutal job, and that was to follow up what is arguably the greatest movie tie-in game of all time in Goldeneye. As a PlayStation exclusive, this was supposed to be the answer to the N64 mega-success that was Goldeneye, but immediately, the vibes were not good.

The graphics were pretty terrible, even for even 1999, and the view went from first person to third. A big problem came with that. The main one is lock-on shooting. All the skill, the hours facing off in multiplayer with friends, and mind-numbing attempts to defeat the control room were erased here with some truly awful lock-on third-person shooting. It just became so damn easy, and all sense of accomplishment was gone.

It didn't help that the story was just the movie's plot, which wasn't good either, but the gameplay could've made up for it. Unfortunately, it was arguably the worst part.

5 James Cameron's Avatar: The Game

An Experience Like Any Other

James Cameron's Avatar: The Game

James Cameron's Avatar: The Game was a great idea in theory, but in actuality, it didn't manage to bring any bit of the magic from the actual movie into game form. It came out before the movie, and while that's fine, the game does almost nothing to explain just what the hell any of this even is. What Avatars are, what their purpose is, and what they're fighting for is barely explained. While the appearance of the ever hilariously named Unobtanium gives the RDA their purpose, little else is given to the player.

You play as either the RDA or the Navi in a prequel story, and that dichotomy is cool as a concept, but the execution is just so plain. You get either a generic third-person shooter as the RDA, or a melee-focused route as the Navi. Unfortunately, while the shooting is fine, the missions are incredibly boring, amounting to little more than fetch quests half the time.

The Navi get some more interesting sections, but that doesn't help hide the absolutely terrible melee combat that you'll be engaging with for the majority of the game. Unlike Ubisoft's go at the series, the world here isn't close to as polished, full, or vibrant as that experience, and the ending result is a game that felt rushed out and wasn't nearly as focused as it should've been.

4 Enter the Matrix

Not the Ones

Developer

Release Date

Platforms

Shiny Entertainment

May 14th, 2003

Gamecube, PS2, Xbox, PC

The idea of a Matrix video game was so easy to see, as the movie itself basically stars someone who is using all the cheat codes in a game. So a video game based on the Matrix made perfect sense, except instead of fighting and dodging bullets as Neo, Shiny Entertainment instead we get to play as Ghost and Niobe, two characters who barely register in the movies. And yet, they're front and center here.

The feeling of being unimportant in the scheme of things is just way too pervasive here. You're technically playing through the events of the movies, but you're running basically grunt missions while Neo, Morpheus, and Trinity handle the real business. The gameplay is not all that great either, with stiff animations and a distinct lack of cool that the movies lived on. The shooting was haphazard, and worst of all, the graphics were bad.

On its own, the game isn't horrible, but the problem is what the game should've been. It should've starred Neo and company. It just feels like a slice of the pie when we wanted the whole thing. We would eventually get the actual game we deserved two years later in the form of Enter the Matrix: The Path of Neo, which, while it had its own issues, is a vastly superior experience.

3 Transformers: The Game

Autobots, Go Away

Transformers: The Game is one of a long line of Transformers games, but this one is based on the blockbuster hit movie. It came out prior to the movie release, and if you played it before seeing the movie, you likely would have no reason to see the movie. You'll get to play as either the Autobots or the Decepticons, but honestly, playing as the Autobots just sucks. Half your weapons do no damage to enemies, and while the graphics are pretty enough for a 2007 game, you are generally stuck in missions where you're traversing city streets as slow-moving vehicles with some awful time limits involved as well.

The Decepticons are far more fun, and the game feels like it was made for them, but there is barely any variety in the missions. Most objectives are just "destroy this," and the occasional boss fight is just a boring back and forth that relies on flashy visuals rather than engaging gameplay.

The strangest decision here is how guns don't affect most enemies you face, so half your arsenal gets arbitrarily erased for no apparent reason. That leaves you with the melee combat, which is terribly basic and lacks the sort of feedback you'd expect from building-sized robots clashing in a city street. The movie was no masterpiece either, but it was a fun action flick that did a hell of a lot more with the property than the game did.

2 Iron Man

Why Can't We Get This Right?

Iron Man should've been arguably the easiest superhero to adapt to a video game, and yet, we've seen time and time again that this just isn't the case. While they managed to get Robert Downey Jr. onboard, as well as Terrance Howard, the rest of the game is not near the movie's quality.

First, the graphics are just plain ugly, especially when it comes to the character models, and although things get a little bit better once the missions start and you take to the skies as Iron Man, the drab levels, generic-looking environments, and creatively bankrupt enemies don't really do much to wow the eyes either.

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Mission-wise, you'll be killing X amount of targets or protecting X thing, and it's just so incredibly dull that after the first few missions, you've pretty much seen the entire game. Add in weird choices like only letting you use new unlocked armor in missions you've already beaten, and forced villains from the Iron Man comics with barely any context, and you've got a boring, short experience that manages to lose everything the movie did well in the translation to game form.

1 Charlie's Angels

Failing the Characters

Charlie's Angel the game is a beat-em-up, which is the first big mistake of many that this game manages to make. To go along with that, we've got atrocious animations, limited movesets, laughable difficulty, and a plot that makes the movie's story look like Shakespeare.

There are occasional puzzles that do the bare minimum, and the enemies you fight border on parody. Which is all to say, I think this game missed the point of the movies. All of the tongue-in-cheek comedy, cool fight scenes, and great scenery is nowhere to be found here.

Instead, it's a half-assed beat-em-up with barely any combo variation and the occasional ability to trigger an ultimate attack, which essentially breaks the game that wasn't all that difficult to begin with. This is truly the bottom of the barrel when it comes to tie-in games.