Everyone loves a good video game franchise. Who among us can say they haven’t played and enjoyed all 34 different Dynasty Warriors games? But sometimes when an IP wants to stretch its legs creatively, it has to spin off into something a bit different.
Gears Pop
It’s always fun to see which franchises will notice the newest fad and, without hesitation, attach a milking machine to itself like some kind of promiscuous cow. Sonic is notable for being a bit of a blue tart, while Tom Clancy’s name is constantly getting necroed so he can advertise some mobile game where Rayman can take part in a dating sim to marry Sam Fisher or some such nonsense.
Gears of War, however, is an interesting one. It was pretty much “normal” until 2019, wheeeen the wheels fell off harder than Funko in the stock market.
For a reason that I just still can’t quite figure out, oh yeah that sweet whale money, one month before the launch of Gears 5, Microsoft and The Coalition alongside Mediatonic decided to release Gears Pop! for mobile phones.
Right, quite a lot to unpack here. This is Gears of War, that gritty, brutal third-person shooter that taught a generation of dudes that crying is totally fine and expected because everything dies? Yeah, let’s take that, right, and make it into a Clash Royale clone with turrets and Funko Pop characters. What’s next, DOOM but you play as a little toy–hey now wait a minute.
Gears Pop was absolutely riddled with microtransactions, had little Gears feel to it, terrible sound design, and, worst of all, it made Lancers actually kind of lame? Taking the super proteined up Gears characters and making them into basically the plastic counterparts to Ty beanie babies was never going to end well, and so it proved — Gears Pop was shut down in 2021, less than two years after launch.
That is basically a lifetime for a mobile game spin-off, but still, this, the polarising Gears 5, and that pretty forgotten Tactics game the following year may help explain how Gears has been stuck in reverse this decade so far. Hey, speaking of forgotten Tactics spin-offs:
Onimusha Tactics
Yes, Onimusha Blade Warriors, the Smash clone with Mega Man is indeed a pretty weird spin-off. But at least it’s somewhat adjacent to the Onimusha games, you know? There’s hacking and slashing in a 3D space.
But a tactics spin-off for the Game Boy Advance, when no Onimusha game had yet been on a single Nintendo system? Yeah, a bit odd.
To be fair, Onimusha Tactics is basically a non-canon spin-off, though it would’ve been funny to have Nobunaga defeated essentially off-screen for everyone apart from the nine people who played this on the GBA.
So, how is the game itself? Well, it’s decent! Oh, I have to say more.
You play as Onimaru, a young buck who acquires an Oni Gauntlet to defend his home from Genma, who then eventually has to contend with that bloody Nobunaga. Nob! As far as actual gameplay is concerned, Onimusha Tactics really doesn’t do too much that others in the genre haven’t already done a little more excitingly. You move characters around a grid and then attack enemies. Level up to do that more efficiently until you beat the big bad, roll credits.
Tactics diehards may be a bit disappointed: this isn’t quite Final Fantasy Tactics, as there aren’t environmental bonuses or even weaknesses to exploit, and it’s all pretty straightforward, to the point stuff. It’s not a bad game, though: if you like Onimusha and want a simple, vibrant tactics game with some funny moments, you could do a lot worse.
Medal of Honor Heroes
The Medal of Honor series is one of the first that comes to mind when I think of a once gigantic IP that died a worse death than Talia in The Dark Knight Rises. She’s just sleepy!
The Medal of Honor name was really flying for a moment there, and even had quite a few handheld spin-offs. I’ve chatted about the surprisingly decent Game Boy Advance one before, but my favourite has to be Medal of Honor Heroes on the PSP.
Basically the Medal of Honor you know and love except shrunk way down, Medal of Honor Heroes was a pretty wild technical achievement back in the day.
Personally speaking, playing this made me a lifelong fan of the PSP. Going from getting traumatised in Frontline on PS2 to this in handheld was a pretty wild conversion, even wilder is that this is basically Medal of Honor Avengers.
Here, you’ll be swapping between characters from Frontline, European Assault, and Allied Assault, and one of the characters even marries Manon from Underground. You’ll be battling across Europe across a dozen snappy, objective-based missions, culminating in the famous Battle of the Bulge.
Obviously a few concessions had to be made to get this thing handheld. The lack of right stick on the PSP means you have to move with the left nubbin and then aim with the face buttons, and the left d-pad is used for reloading and stuff like that, which is a bit odd. It also doesn’t really feel like you’re playing as anyone different each time, as there’s nothing distinct between the characters and the actual story isn’t really there.
But this is an FPS that runs pretty OK on the PSP that used to support multiplayer for up to 32 people. That’s kinda wild. The game did even get a pretty forgotten sequel called Heroes 2 that even came to the Wii as well, but for all intents and purposes, the wider Medal of Honor franchise is now pretty much dead.
Dead Island: Epidemic
You know what, I don’t think an IP has ever overextended its arm quite like Dead Island. The first game sold well largely thanks to that amazing trailer, and so publishers Deep Silver decided the next logical step? Obviously, an awful cel-shaded adventure game, a mobile game for traffic accident survivors, and this, an immediately doomed League of Legends clone. Well, kinda.
Already alluded to in our previous video on weird spin-offs—seriously guys I could do 100 of these—Dead Island Epidemic was a MOBA set in the Dead Island universe developed by Stunlock, who you might know from the much, much more successful V Rising. You might’ve thought you’d imagined me saying MOBA there, but yes, a MOBA. Cos nothing says lanes and bases to me quite like Sam B.
Who did they think they voodid?
But to be fair, this wasn’t like your average MOBA. There’s a good chance the players of this one might’ve even thought about taking a shower.
In Epidemic, you could choose from over a dozen different characters with three variations, including the ability to play as mutated versions, which changed things up in terms of how the game played and what you could do. You could even play as Sam B himself, along with Xian Mei as part of a story where a survivor travels to an island and uh-oh, somebody check its pulse, yep that island is dead.
While the game was far from a success, those who did play it for longer than 10 minutes out of curiosity seemed to enjoy it. The combat does look like it was kinda fun, and you could use over a hundred weapons and craft a lot of wild ones. It was also unique as you could play it as a PVP or PVE or PVPVPVE, where three teams would face off against each other and also zombies to capture flags and bases. It did look like a nice, brainless time.
But ultimately, it was just a weird sell for most people and the game struggled to find a large audience. After launching in December 2014 for Steam, Dead Island Epidemic was shut down in September 2015 having never left open beta, and that was the ender that.
Zone of the Enders: The Fist of Mars
Zone of the Enders. Man. Few franchises say early 2000s gaming to me quite like this series. The look, the feel, the mechs, the name that makes you pause and go “what?” It gets the people going.
Originally debuting on the PS2 in 2001 as everyone’s favourite way of playing MGS2 a bit early, Hideo Kojima’s space combat series set in the 22nd century deals in stuff like colonisation, artificial intelligence, and being in a cool bloody mech. The first game was a good start to the concept, though the 2nd game is where it really started to find its style and nail down the gameplay.
But there was a fairly obscure GBA spin-off called The Fist of Mars in the middle of them, and wouldn’t you know it, too, is a turn-based game, but this one’s more like Super Robot Wars with a lot of visual novel elements than another Final Fantasy Tactics rip-off. It was actually developed by the same guys who made some of the earliest Super Robot Wars…Winkysoft. That might be a hard-on to believe, but wood you believe it, it is their real name. Erection.
In The Fist of Mars, you’re playing as Cage Midwell, who ends up in one of those very cool LEV mechs and then eventually gets swept up in the intergalactic squabble between Earth and Mars. This boils down to a bunch of missions where you travel across a space grid with your army and defeat other LEV, with the turn-based battles letting you aim your attacks to do more damage, and you can even move your mech to try and dodge attacks.
There’s a decent chunk of kitbuilding here, as you can fiddle with your LEV to do some balancing, meaning you can choose to do more damage but hit less often, and then there’s the customary levelling up and upgrades to give you more and more utility. It’s not massively deep, but it does keep it fresh.
Sadly, while the actual gameplay of The Fist of Mars, it does have a key issue. Even though Kojima himself had very little to do with it, it pays homage to him with a lot of his favourite thing: blathering. The visual novel stuff goes on and on and on, and it’s not bad as such, but really you’re here to blow stuff up. Still, if you like ZOE, you know where to GOE.
Next up: let’s go from one game about piloting a mech to one that helped pilot its franchise into an early grave.
Wolfenstein Cyberpilot
What the hell were Bethesda doing at the end of the recent Wolfenstein run, man? The strategy behind it all, if you can call it that, felt a generation out of date, just chucking Wolfenstein into different genres and seeing what worked. Spoiler: nothing did.
As well as the far more infamous Youngblood, a co-op spin-off that somehow skipped the cliffhanger set up at the end of The New Colossus so you could play as BJ’s two annoying zoomer daughters, we also saw Wolfenstein Cyberpilot, a really forgotten virtual reality game where you’re a hacker who yoinks Nazi war machines.
It’s a cool concept on paper, as proven by Zone of the Enders. Big mech, big good. But Cyberpilot, as is the case with so many virtual reality spin-offs, just felt like more of a tech demo than a fully fledged game. It doesn’t help that you can beat it in around 2 hours with zero boss battles, and a lot of that playtime is spent on training and tutorials with lots of rather dull sections of people chatting at you.
I enjoyed Pacific Rim, but I really wish there was more talking!
Bethesda did put a lot of stock into virtual reality for a while there, converting both Skyrim and Fallout 4 to VR, and another one I will get to in a bit. It’s strange how Cyberpilot turned out then. Wolfenstein VR sounds like a slam dunk considering its pedigree as an FPS, and it was even a team up of MachineGames and Arkane Lyon, the minds behind Dishonored 2. Don’t worry, they weren’t the Redfall ones.
Wolfenstein Cyberpilot is one of those spin-offs where it’s kinda hard to say much about. It feels a bit like an internal experiment that kept going until they had just enough to make a game, and then sold it. Seems like nobody bought it, though.
Hey, speaking of FPS spin-offs.
Doom RPG
You don’t get Doom without Wolfenstein, and you don’t get Doom without flipping open your Sony Ericsson. Wait a minute.
Yeah, despite being around for longer than 30 years, there hasn’t actually been that many DOOM games, though there are a few odd spin-offs.
DOOM VFR, the random VR game where you play as a teleporting cybernetic soldier during the events of DOOM 2016, could’ve also been featured here, but I know that these days talking about virtual reality can make some people go a bit umm clicky offy and go elsewherey, so let’s go over DOOM RPG instead.
A Java game released in 2005, DOOM RPG is a surprisingly faithful and…decent adaptation of DOOM into the world of turn-based role-playing, though obviously it’s a bit low on the role-playing side, what with it being a mobile phone game released before the peak of mobile phones.
In it, you play as Doomguy as he travels around a UAC installation and does stuff like put out fires, collect keycards, chat to NPCs, and shoot weirdly yellow cacodemons.
There are actually like 40 different enemies, which was a lot for a Java game. You’ll travel square by square across pretty massive maps, politely taking it in turns to trade blows with the demons you encounter while kinda marvelling at the weird, wonderful little tweaks John Carmack made to the DOOM formula here. Only having 30 health is the weirdest one of the lot.
That formula did actually return for a Wolfenstein RPG, also for mobile, while Carmack would go on to use what he learned here to make Orcs and Elves for mobile and the Nintendo DS, which also used the same engine. We even got a DOOM II RPG in 2009, though that one was much less eye-catching as it was released in a post Tap Tap Revenge world.
I hope you got as big a nostalgia rush as I did when I remembered that whipper.
Considering it’s a Java game that’s older than two out of three of the Costco guys put together—see I’m topical—obviously it’s hard to play DOOM RPG natively these days, but you can play both DOOM RPGs on your PC right now thanks to some amazing reverse engineering, and you should. It’s a strange experiment, but it works!
Death By Degrees
It’s not a great game, it’s not even particularly good, but we’re never going to get a video game spin-off like Death By Degrees again, and that makes me sadder than people who thought Heihachi was actually dead for good. Of course he wasn’t: he’s deus ex Mishima!
A Tekken spin-off that launched not long after what many believe is still the peak of the series, Death Degrees follows Tekken’s Nina Williams as she goes off on her own adventure. If you don’t believe me, it says it right there on the box.
Developed without the legendary Harada’s involvement, Death By Degrees is certainly an…interesting game. Nina must batter her way through a criminal organisation known as Kometa in order to stop a project involving a lot of huge bubbles to basically sink ships while her pain in the arse sister is a pain in the arse. Oh yeah, this is Tekken baby. While the story has all the silly twists and turns you’d expect, the actual gameplay is where Death By Degrees shines. Well, “shines” might be a bit strong. Flickers, maybe?
You see, this is a super ambitious game considering it’s just a spin-off. You’ll be exploring fixed camera environments to collect key items like Resident Evil, using stealth to break necks like Metal Gear Solid but much more awkwardly, and even attacking like a super rudimentary version of what we’d see much later in Metal Gear Rising.
The right stick is used to attack enemies, and you can even target specific body parts to break them and do more damage while racking up combos. You even get sick X-ray sections where you see the bones breaking. Unlike something like Bushido Blade, it doesn’t really inhibit enemies in any way though, which is a pity. But Death By Degrees does also have Silent Scope-esque sections where you get to shoot dudes in surprisingly violent fashion with a sniper rifle. There’s loads going on here.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t quite all come together. There’s a stiffness to Death By Degrees, get your mind out of the swamp you swamp beast, specifically when it comes to moving Nina and the camera around. There was a lot of fiddling with control scheme conventions around the mid-2000s, and Death By Degrees is kinda just a bit too fiddly itself. Chuck in some long arse loading screens and yeah, it’s no wonder why this one struggled to get much attention and is easily the lowest selling Tekken game to date.
As fighting games turned into beat em up spin-offs go, Death By Degrees is no Shaolin Monks, but it’s levels and levels above Mythologies: Sub-Zero. It’s a solid 6/10 that’s certainly worth playing, as it really feels like a PS2 game. It is 2005 as all hell. Stand by for the next entry to fall.
Titanfall: Assault
You might not believe it, but Titanfall 2 wasn’t the last Titanfall game. The last Titanfall game we’ll ever get, please make peace with that if you haven’t already, was actually a mobile game released in 2017, one year after Titanfall 2.
Don’t worry, I won’t keep you too long for this one, cos ultimately there’s not really a whole bunch to say about games designed for people who enjoy staring directly at the sun.
Titanfall: Assault was a free to play mobile RTS game with loot boxes that took liberties from Clash Royale, with you dropping titans and pilots across maps against other players while occasionally tapping buttons to ugggh I’m sorry, I just can’t make this interesting, or pretend to be interested.
To be fair, being able to call in titans during clutch moments looks cool, the music is actually pretty good, and it makes more sense than something like Gears Pop, but I look at the gameplay and monetisation for this and my hand reaches for a tall glass of paint.
No, I decided to put Titanfall Assault here because, for all of the many, many cancelled Titanfall projects since the second game, it’s weird that this is the one that got through. Not quite as weird as that cancelled card game, but still weird. Titanfall: Assault was only around for about a year until it was shut down in July 2018.
It really sums up where EA has gone wrong with this IP over the last decade, which started with making the original game an Xbox One exclusive, peaked with them releasing Titanfall 2 in between Call of Duty and Battlefield, and then culminated in Titanfall dying with a wet fart when they couldn’t figure out how to put Final Fantasy skins in a third game. Respawn now have gotta pretty much make peace with slightly changing the colour of skins in Apex Legends and charging £20 for the privilege until they, too, inevitably get taken to the back of the shed.
Remember developers: the next time EA comes to you and asks to invest in or purchase your studio, maybe politely decline. Would you rather die? No. Stalker.
Dino Stalker
Bizarrely a part of the Resident Evil Survivor offshoot of pretty awful lightgun spin-offs while also tenuously a continuation of the event sfrom Dino Crisis 2, Dino Stalker is an absolutely nutty game.
You play, right, as a World War 2 fighter pilot called Mike Wired—that’s not a real name, that’s an energy drink mascot—who’s just about to die before he gets teleported into the future where dinosaurs roam the planet. He links up with Paula from the second game in order to try and make things right, and it just gets weirder from there.
The controls are also pretty weird, too, as aiming with the right stick takes a lot of getting used to in that classic backwards Survivor fashion where nothing is as your brain has come to understand it should be. But apart from that, it’s a relatively straightforward, competent lightgun shooter where you blast dinosaurs and bask in the glory of some godawful voice acting.
Is Dino Stalker worth getting out the pickaxe to unearth the CRT from a nearby archaeological dig, or even to pick up a PS2 GunCon for? No, probably not. It’s not as good as the final Survivor game, and the actual best Resident Evil game of all time, Dead Aim. Dino Stalker doesn’t do much new, and it’s extremely brief at like 1 hour long, but if you want to play one of the weirdest, most mildly impressive video game spin-offs ever made, fire up your emulator and get blasting.
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