Interstellar, the new film from Christopher Nolan, premieres on 7 November in cinemas worldwide, but its official game has been available for free on Android since last month. As of no more than five years ago, every big Hollywood blockbuster has come along with its own official game for consoles and PC. Usually these titles were pretty awful, and therefore not very profitable. But we’ve begun to see the solution to this problem relatively recently, with the movement of these inevitable movie-based games toward mobile platforms.
What’s clear is that this change has been quite an agreeable one both for developers, whose games now reach a much broader audience, and for players, who as a rule are getting games that are quite a lot more interesting than they used to be. So now: here’s a few of the most interesting movie-based games that represent this new trend.
Hobbit: Kingdoms of Middle-Earth
Kabam has been making basically the same exact game for years now, mixing real-time strategy with social gaming. And Hobbit: Kingdoms of Middle-Earth is no exception to this trend. The good thing is that thanks to all this accumulated experience, the game inspired by the Tolkien novel is genuinely stunning. Proof of this is that, in spite of being one of the studio’s most recent releases, the official game for the Hobbit movies is by a long shot the one with the most downloads on both Uptodown and Google Play.
Interstellar
The case of Interstellar is quite a special one. As mentioned above, the movie has still not been released and its game already has more than 500,000 downloads on Google Play. And unlike the other titles we’ll see here, Interstellar is not just free to play, but actually is genuinely free, with no in-app purchases. That said, it’s also the most unclassifiable game (by far) on this list. On Interstellar you can create planets with their own moons, orbits, water masses, etc. But the game isn’t about that. You can also launch and pilot spaceships through the orbits of different planets, but it’s not about that either. In fact I don’t exactly know what Interstellar (either the game or the movie) is all about, but it’s ridiculously awesome.
300: Seize Your Glory
The film 300: Rise of an Empire has a lot in common with its official game: 300: Seize Your Glory. The main similarity is that both the movie and the game are impressive visual spectacles that nevertheless feel skimpy on content. Without getting into detail on the movie, 300: Seize Your Glory comes up a bit short on what it could have been. We’re talking here about a game with spectacular graphics and a simple but effective game system that unfortunately only lasts about half an hour (or double that if you’re truly awful). One can’t help but thank that maybe with a bit more love from the developers we could have been looking here at a much more significant title.
Edge of Tomorrow
Edge of Tomorrow is a very similar case to 300: Seize Your Glory—a title with good graphics (though rather worse in this case, to be honest) and straightforward gameplay that leaves a bit wanting. The main problem with Edge of Tomorrow Game is how poorly it makes use of the central concept of the movie, which seems directly pulled from the world of gaming. Thus, the result is a first-person action game with ups and downs that make you wonder what would have happened if the developers had been rather braver in their approach.
Godzilla – Smash3 and Godzilla: Strike Zone
Godzilla is a film about an enormous monster, so enormous that he couldn’t fit into just one game, so he has two: Godzilla – Smash3, a fighting game with puzzles; and Godzilla: Strike Zone, a first-person action title. The first is a sort of Puzzle Quest with huge monsters, and turns out to be genuinely entertaining. The second, meanwhile, is an action title that combines both first- and third-person segments where you really just go around shooting at a lot of things. Both are very decent titles, and although the second doesn’t have any in-app purchases, Godzilla–Smash3 is certainly quite a lot more entertaining.
Since Godzilla’s already made us name six articles instead of the five as promised in the headline, it can’t hurt to close by mentioning a few other games based on interesting movies. Transformers: Age of Extinction was released in cinemas recently and its game lets you run and shoot alongside one of the film’s protagonists. And then of course there’s Minion Rush, the most-downloaded movie game in the history of Uptodown and Play Store, which lets players enjoy an outstanding endless runner starring your personable little yellow friends from Despicable Me.
