8 Best Movie Licensed Video Games Of All Time

Everyone knows that games based on movie licenses are generally pretty awful. Though the practice of making a video game version of a given movie has gone by the wayside recently, many will remember when just about every major blockbuster was accompanied by an atrocious tie-in.

Most of these have been totally forgotten, and plenty of budget-savvy players will be familiar with the slog of sifting through endless used copies of terrible titles based on Shrek or Harry Potter. Things have gotten so bad that used game stores now refuse to stock these old titles, as they almost never sell.

That said, it wasn’t all bad. We may have been inundated with shlock like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or The Crow: City of Angels, there were a few notable diamonds in the rough.

Nobody wants to search through never-ending torrents of half-hearted movie-based junk, of course. For those looking to get their film fix without risking their sanity, we've rounded up some movie games that are actually worth the time it takes to play through them.

Alien: Isolation isn’t a movie tie-in in the strictest sense, as it didn’t actually accompany any movie release, but it is still an excellent game which reproduces very faithfully the thrills and scares present in Ridley Scott’s 1979 horror classic Alien.

The triumphant follow-up to Aliens: Colonial marines, a game which may go down as Gearbox Software’s greatest failure, Isolation takes what made the original trilogy great and amplifies it.

Series fans have long marveled at the horror of deep space and the dread associated with being locked in a confined environment with an unknown hostile being. This concept is at the very core of Sega’s 2014 digital masterpiece. In fact, one segment of the DLC is a scene-for-scene re-enactment of the final act of the original movie.

Many segments of the game feature little more than the player, an escape route, and a horrific Xenomorph standing in the way. Without any truly lethal means of defense, players must keep their wits about them in this tense, wonderfully creepy survival horror experience.