8 Video Game Spin-Offs That Broke EVERYTHING
2. Left Alive
Front Mission is an overlooked series of tactical mech combat games that went MIA over the 2010s until producers Square-Enix elected to create a surprise spin-off.
Perhaps trying to strike where Metal Gear Survive failed and fill in a gap in the industry, Left Alive’s developers seemed all too keen to drop the franchise’s original identity and turn the game into a wannabe MGS clone.
Except if you’re going to take a series in a new direction you should really be confident in it and Left Alive feels like Square-Enix shuffled it out as quietly as possible, embarrassed by what they had wrought.
Not only does Left Alive not fit with Front Mission, it’s hardly a functional game in its own right. The stealth is terrible, the controls are finicky and most importantly the enemy AI is hysterically bad.
Groups of soldiers are either impossibly precise marksmen or literally falling over each other trying to get a single shot off and the only thing funnier than that is the physics that sometimes cause them to leap into the air upon death.
Thankfully, Front Mission is saving face by rereleasing the earliest games in the franchise this year and remaking the third entry because Left Alive was absolutely not the way to bring it back to life.