Ghost Rider

The chain is the whole argument. Every melee weapon in a 2007 licensed action game had to justify itself against Kratos's blades, and a length of burning motorcycle chain is a genuinely good answer: it sweeps, it yanks enemies off their feet, it hangs in the air long enough to feel heavy. Climax Studios built their Ghost Rider adaptation around that weight, and when the combat is working it has a satisfying, scraping metal quality that most film tie-ins of the period never bothered to look for.

The structure is lifted with no real attempt at disguise. Fixed camera angles, locked arenas, a combo list that unlocks through collected souls, quick-time finishers on the larger demons, a health bar that only refills when the game decides you have earned it. Reviewers in 2007 said so bluntly and the game offers no defence. What it does have is a secondary idea that God of War did not: the bike. Several chapters hand you the Hell Cycle for straight-line runs along burning highways, shooting hellfire and ramming traffic, and these sections work as arcade palate cleansers rather than as driving in any serious sense.

What stops the whole thing cold is the enemy design. Waves of interchangeable demons arrive in rooms that look much like the last room, and the chain's best tricks stop mattering once you learn which two strings clear a crowd. The difficulty spikes are blunt rather than instructive. Boss encounters lean on patterns you read in thirty seconds and then execute for several minutes, which turns the game's best-looking moments into its most tedious ones.

It also looks better than it had any obligation to. The PS2 was eight years old by release and Climax pushed the skull-flame lighting hard, letting it throw moving shadows across the geometry, which does more for the character's presence than any cutscene in the film it is attached to. The voice work is thin, the plot is a compressed retelling you will follow only if you already know it, and the bonus playable character unlocked at the end is the kind of flourish that suggests someone on the team cared.

As licensed action games went in that stretch between the movie's release window and the end of the format's life, this is firmly in the upper half: competent, mean-spirited in the right way, far too fond of its own template. Worth an evening for anyone who liked the chain the first time they swung it.