Our Love-Hate Relationship With Licensed Games
These days video games have gotten so complex, expensive, and time-consuming to develop that it’s apparently not worth the trouble of churning them out to coincide with every major movie release or hit TV show. While fully-fledged video game adaptations used to be commonplace for every major genre blockbuster, you’re now more likely to see some cosmetic DLC in an existing game like Fortnite. Meanwhile, few savvy licensors have taken a wildly groundbreaking approach with games based on their intellectual property: quality over quantity. Controversy aside, Hogwarts Legacy is the latest game to transcend “licensed game,” instead being received as a Very Good Video Game (...that just happens to be based on a licensed property.)
That said, if you don’t care about Harry Potter, your mileage with Hogwarts Legacy may vary. The same is true of Marvel, DC, Star Wars, et cetera, and if you flat-out hate what a game is about, it doesn’t matter how it plays. Conversely, die-hard fans may have higher expectations for games based on something they love, setting them up for disappointment.
Mostly though, what a licensed game is based on is what gets our attention in the first place, and our appreciation for the source material will allow us to overlook shortcomings that might otherwise be deal breakers. Here are a few licensed games that hold special spaces in the Beyond team’s hearts for better (or worse.)
Let me preface this with saying I love Spider-Man. It was one of my first comics and I’ve owned nearly every game at some point or another. Thankfully Spidey’s games have been more good than bad, unlike some other heroes, but that just wasn’t the case with Spider-Man 3, the official video game tie-in for the 2007 movie. Spider-Man 3
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