In the era of gaming that I grew up in, the dominating wisdom was thus: “licensed games are never good.” For the most part, this was true; most licensed games were quick and crummy cash grabs that you rented for a weekend from Blockbuster and then never thought about again.
There were a few that managed to distinguish themselves by being halfway decent, but these were the exception rather than the rule. By the late 2000s, the frequency of licensed games died down significantly.
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However, in the time since things quieted down, there’s been a bit of a paradigm shift. With less frequent licensed games has come a greater degree of care and development in the few that still come out.
There are still stinkers, sure, but the winners actually manage to be quite good rather than just decent, and they run the gamut of sources, including well-liked movies, television, and even anime.
Your affinity for these games may be influenced by how much you like the properties in question, but for me, these are standouts from recent years.
For the purposes of this list, we’re defining “modern” as any licensed game that was released within the last two console generations.
9LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga
More Bricks, More Fun
LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga
Since the mid-2000s,LEGO games of popular films and television serieshave been of consistently decent quality. They’re not exactly high art or have pulse-pounding gameplay, but they’re fun, cute, and full of cheeky jokes for the fans. If there were a LEGO game that elevated the concept to its highest possible potential, though, it’d definitely beLEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga.
I admit, at a glance, I pegged this game as a redundant cash-grab. We already had LEGO Star Wars games, why did we need to retread that same ground?
But rather than a retread of the old LEGO Star Wars stuff, The Skywalker Saga is more like an optimization, a full remake and elevation. Rather than the linear setpieces based on the flow of the movies, this game gives you an entire LEGO-built galaxy of Star Wars people and places to fool around in.
Some Star Wars games can get a little too ambitious for their own good, so going the LEGO route actually helps to keep things focused. You can still hit all your favorite moments and locales from the films in action gameplay, but with simplified controls and graphics for a tighter scope.
8RoboCop: Rogue City
Surprisingly Spry For A Metal Man
RoboCop: Rogue City
Compared to some of the other blockbuster hits of the 80s, RoboCop never had much of a presence in video games. It had some throwaway tie-ins for the NES and SNES, followed by a gaggle of forgettable games from the early 2000s, and that was about it.
I’d say the first genuine attempt to see RoboCop realized in a playable capacity came about inRoboCop: Rogue City.
It’s easy to forget after all these years, but RoboCop was a pretty violent movie, and Rogue City reflects that in all its gory glory. RoboCop himself is an absolute force of nature, largely immune to basic gunfire and able to grab punks by the throat and drive them into walls. To play this game isn’t just to play as RoboCop, it’s to be a living force of nature, as it should.
Also, you get to do actual day-to-day police stuff on occasion, like working the front desk at the station and issuing citations. It’s not nearly as action-packed, but I appreciate it from a set-dressing perspective. Hey, even RoboCop can’t be a bullet-blasting force of nature 24/7.
7Dragon Ball FighterZ
The High Speed Dragon Ball Experience We Always Wanted
Dragon Ball FighterZ
I’m going to say something that’s probably going to make some people mad at me: I did not care for the Dragon Ball Z Tenkaichi games growing up. Yeah, it was more faithful to all the high-flying aspects of the series, but it always felt really floaty and imprecise to me.
The appeal of Dragon Ball combat is speed, how many punches and ki blasts everyone can chuck at each other in a span of a couple of minutes.
This, I think, was one of the big contributing factors to the success ofDragon Ball FighterZ, alongside the pedigree of Arc System Works. FighterZ is a capital-F Fighting game, not just a Dragon Ball game where you slap characters against each other like action figures. It’s fast, precise, and combo-focused, with a genuine skill curve that differentiates high-level play.
More importantly, it has all those qualities while still incorporating the things I love about Dragon Ball, like big beam duels, transformations, teleporting behind dudes, and powering up while screaming. It showed that Dragon Ball works as an FGC-ready fighting game,even if half the roster is Goku.
6South Park: The Fractured But Whole
Fun Game, Topical Humor
South Park: The Fractured But Whole
2014’s South Park: The Stick of Truth was a genuinely surprising hit, largely due to the fact that, prior to it, there had literallyneverbeen a good South Park game. Ever. It was a perfect blend of the show’s humor with old-school Paper Mario-style RPG gameplay. Unfortunately, it’s just a bit too old for this list, but luckily, we got a sequel in the same vein.
South Park: The Fractured But Whole both builds on the gameplay and combat systems established in Stick of Truth and instates itself in the then-current vibe of the show.
The entire game immediately follows the events of a season 21 episode where the boys can’t agree on how to format their new superhero franchise, which was a great take on all the MCU nonsense that was going on in the late 2010s.
Fractured But Whole gives you a chance to explore everything that’s changed in the town since you explored it in Stick of Truth, which gives the whole thing a nice feeling of continuity. Also, you get to learn magic farts from Morgan Freeman and then beat him up. I have the achievement for that featured on my Steam profile.
5One Piece Pirate Warriors 4
The Ideal Spin-Off Musou
One Piece: Pirate Warriors 4
This is probably just because I already like One Piece, but I think the One Piece: Pirate Warriors games offer some of the best gameplay out of all the licensed Warriors game spin-offs.
A big chunk of what makes One Piece fun is seeing Luffy and company absolutely annihilate large crowds of jobbers and, well, that’s kind of the mission statement of Warriors in a nutshell.
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Pirate Warriors 4in particular covered some of the most climactic recent events from the series, including the Whole Cake Island and Wano arcs, while mixing in new and improved character growth and gameplay over the previous games.
This was the first Pirate Warriors game where we could experience the full scope of Luffy’s transformation abilities, including both forms of Gear 4, as well as Gear 5 a few years later via DLC.
The game’s only real shortcoming in my mind is that, since the Wano arc was still ongoing when it was released, they had to make up a half-baked original ending for it. But I’m sure whenever they make another of these, and they probably will, that’ll be remedied.
4Indiana Jones And The Great Circle
Swashbuckling, Tomb-Plundering Action
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle
For as beloved as the film franchise is,Indiana Joneshasn’t exactly had a surplus of smash-hit video games. Perhaps the problem was that all of those older games were shackled to the plots of the original films.
What we really needed, at least if Indiana Jones and the Great Circle was any indication, was something brand new that still held that distinctive Indy flavor.
In addition to being an exceptionally faithful and good-looking depiction of a young Harrison Ford in exotic locales and mysterious tombs, I think Great Circle did a great job of capturing what made Indy Indy. He’s scrappy, resourceful, and intelligent; it could’ve just been another shooter game, but the emphasis is instead on stealth, environmental manipulation, and old-fashioned fisticuffs.
To put it simply, a lot of the older Indy games felt like something someone made in pursuit of a paycheck. Great Circle feels like a game made by fans of the franchise, who wanted to portray it in themost authentic, yet still entertaining, light possible.
3Marvel’s Spider-Man
One Of The Best Spider-Man Games, Period
Marvel’s Spider-Man
As far asgames licensed from Marvel propertiesgo, Spider-Man probably has the best track record of wins to losses. I still have a soft spot for the old PS1 games.
That said, there have only been a couple of games to date that really give you the full scope of the Spider-Man experience, particularly responsive web-swinging throughout Manhattan. One was the Spider-Man 2 movie game, and the other wasMarvel’s Spider-Manon PS4.
In addition to the aforementioned web-swinging, which is absolutely excellent in this game, I think what helps this game succeed where others fall short is in being an original story rather than tying in to the MCU. Where the Spider-Man of the recent films is a bit bogged down by baggage, this one is much more in touch with the whole “friendly neighborhood” shtick.
The game isn’t just about swinging around and punching dudes, it’s about helping the city, connecting with the people of New York. Even just the little details, like Spidey patiently waiting on the subway for fast travel makes him feel more like the Spider-Man I knew growing up: a New York schlub with a bit too much on his plate.
2Marvel’s Guardians Of The Galaxy
Kickstart My Heart
Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy
In a similar vein to Marvel’s Spider-Man,Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxyis set in an original continuity rather than that of the MCU, even if it was a pretty clear cash-in on the MCU’s popularity.
Unlike Spider-Man, though, there wasn’t really any precedent for the Guardians as far as games were concerned, so it was a potentially risky move. Thankfully, it paid off.
Guardians of the Galaxy was what I like to call “pleasantly straightforward.” No over-bloated open world, no endless meaningless collectibles, no unnecessary online components - just a fun little action romp with a bunch of dweebs in space backed by quite possibly the greatest soundtrack any video game has ever had. It’s what a good old-fashioned video game should be, licensed or otherwise.
Admittedly, I’m not sure if I agree with it winning Best Narrative at the 2021 Game Awards, but for what it was, it was a pretty entertaining and engaging story, and a good overallintroduction to the Guardians as characterswithout all that MCU baggage.
1Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge
A Loving Throwback To The Arcade Age
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge
Out of any game to bear the name of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, one of the best and most fondly-remembered remains the arcade classic, Turtles in Time. If anyone wanted to make a new TMNT game, it’d be perfectly sensible touse that game as a jumping-off point, which was more or less what they did withShredder’s Revenge.
Shredder’s Revenge is not only an exceptionally fun love letter to arcade beat ‘em ups of a bygone age, it’s also a loving tribute to TMNT as a franchise.
They got as many of the original voice cast from the classic cartoon as possible in to reprise their roles, and even expanded the base roster to include Casey Jones, Splinter, and even April, who doesn’t have to be kidnapped this time.
You could call it nostalgia-bait, and to an extent, it is, but it’s the good kind of nostalgia bait. It knows what worked about the classic, while updating the game to modern quality-of-life and content standards. It’s a heck of a lot better than that crummy Xbox Live remaster of Turtles in Time.
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