Recent film sequel Tron: Legacy looked and felt unreal throughout, whereas Monolith’s earlier and rather lower-tech game follow-up to the silly-but-charming original 80s movie felt overwhelmingly tactile. It’s the difference between a creative vision that is ‘what would it be like to be inside a world of electronic data?’ and one that is ‘how can we make this as visually spectacular as possible?’ Tron 2.0 is no less cheesily literal in its depiction of computer-world than any other kind of Tron, but it’s so much more about worldbuilding than mere setpiece – let alone hokey mysticism and blandly attractive posterboys.

Sure, there’s no shortage of shooty sections and racing sections and some particularly egregious jumpy sections, but Tron 2.0’s primary interest is in showing the society within the machines. And it’s still rare for what is ostensibly a shooter to include conversation and choice elements. Pair that with some gloriously oddball sci-fi weapons which riff off Tron’s lore and theme and, yes, genuinely great Lightcycle battles and you’ve got a game which quite possibly does Tron better than Tron. It looks beautiful too, its edges-not-textures art style saving it from looking anything like as dated as other shooters of the era. I still find it boundlessly sad that, after this, Monolith disappeared down a black hole of crunchy but dour FEAR games.

Read more: Jim Rossignol’s retrospective, John Walker’s retrospective

Honourable mentions:

Mad Max

A number of my colleagues reckoned this should be in here, but I dissuaded myself from including it because a) I wasn’t hearing anything more convincing than “it’s quite good” and b) while it is indeed quite good as an open-world action game in the desert, I’m really not convinced that it captures something especially Mad Maxian. And it’s several worlds away from recreating any of the unrelenting, fine-tuned Fury Road. But as Recent Games Based On Movies Which Aren’t Terrible go, sure, why not?

Star Wars Battlefront (series)

The latest game is ridiculously pretty and its two PS2-era predecessors are considered high watermarks for licensed multiplayer games, but I’m not convinced any of its incarnations have really captured some essence of the film beyond the surface level. The new one particularly works hard to conjure nostalgia, but I didn’t think there was much to it beyond that.

Alien: Isolation

I know someone who worked on this stealth’n’horror Alien semi-sequel reasonably well, so I can’t very well go recommending it. Others may well do, however.

STALKER series

I love ’em, but I think the games owe far more to the book than the essentially action-free movie, and even then they’re profoundly different.

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