Best comic books games

So when the time came for the IDW comic adaptation, they took a different approach. It streamlined the storyline and tried to add elements that would work better as a comic.

The biggest new element of the comic is the artwork. Ashley Wood's art mimics the iconic box art of the Metal Gear video game series. Wood's art evokes series artist Yoji Shinkawa, whose messier watercolor style is beloved by fans.

It's a treat for fans to see iconic game moments rendered in this concept art-accurate style. Much like Sonic, Tomb Raider has had more than one series, and it makes sense that more than one team wanted to take a crack at gaming's most iconic heroine.

Top Cow, the publisher behind The Darkness , worked on a comic during the early aughts. This series did a lot to establish Lara's cocky personality and backstory more than the games did. The other series is from Dark Horse and focuses on the reboot version of the character. This run features excellent writing from comic book legend Gail Simone. As such, it portrays the character with more humanity and less gravitas than her pre-reboot version.

Both runs, both the grounded and original flavor takes, ended up being great. Team Fortress is perhaps Valve's most oddball franchise. While the studio was no stranger to humor, they were mostly known for their excellent science fiction writing. But the retro warfare mixed with the sardonic wit of Team Fortress 2 slowly grew over the years, spiraling out into a complex universe. Perhaps it was to be expected, as Valve debuted each of the game's playable characters with an The Office -like mockumentary video.

Each of the characters in the game developed fans not just of their gameplay, but also their personality. So eventually Valve published a series of comics focusing on the universe, that would both announce in-game events and add stuff to the world.

Characters had their in-game interactions canonized, their relationships deepened, and plenty of buck wild adventures. Also, plenty of characters, like Saxton Hale, appeared in comics before appearing in the game. While it never finished, the Team Fortress 2 comic series is perhaps one of Valve's best, funniest, pieces of work of all time.

James W. Potvin is a freelance writer for Screen Rant. This is is his first professional writing job, but he's been making infographics about nerd culture interests for years.

In the past, James has worked in education. He loves video games, and his favorite is Kirby. By James Potvin Published Dec 16, Share Share Tweet Email 0. Related Topics Lists. In the numerous issues released over a plus year period, fans got a deeper look into Ryu's relationship with Sakura as her teacher, his struggles with the Dark Hado, and the defeats he suffers while on his journey to be the strongest.

It's not only all focused on Ryu though, as several other "Street Fighter" " miniseries were created to focus on the stories of Sakura, Chun-Li, Ibuki and more recently, Cammy.

The comic is great in that it shows the fighters having lives outside of the tournaments they attend. They have jobs, relationships and sometimes even a few bad jokes. The art behind each book is none too shabby either. UDON Entertainment is an award-winning art collective of comic book-inspired artists who all work on these issues.

Their involvement has made the art of "Street Fighter" suitably punchy, bright and unique. At the end of "inFAMOUS," hero or villain, depending on how you played it Cole McGrath manages to beat a time-traveling bad dude named Kessler and is preparing to battle an impending doom known as the Beast. At the beginning of the second, Cole is on a boat ready to leave Empire City and the Beast shows up. Luckily, the interim moments were expanded upon in the titular comic book. The fallout of Kessler's research and use of the Sphere is felt with the escape of one of his test subjects: a mutated conduit named David.

The electricity-powered superhero fends off the Sons and goes toe-to-toe with Kessler's failed experiment, finally shutting down Moya for good. However, the sheer amount of loose ends the book tidies up is a relief and makes the transition from one game to another have much more impact.

Fans of the cloak-and-dagger "Assassin's Creed" series were eager to dive into the third entry after Ezio's trilogy had been wrapped up. During the game, main character Desmond Miles gets ambushed by a mysterious Templar named Daniel Cross. Cross knows his name and much about the Assassins, but Miles was completely in the dark about him. Indeed, it left many players sitting with their controllers in hand, echoing his sentiment: "Who the hell is Daniel Cross?

What many might have missed was that Daniel Cross was fleshed out in a comic released the year prior, dubbed "Assassin's Creed: The Fall.

The book goes between Orelov's mission and Cross' own plot to kill the Mentor of the Assassins in present day. It's a short arc, but gives far more backstory to a character that quite literally appeared out of nowhere in the game and got about three lines of exposition.

As if the "Mass Effect" series wasn't grand enough already, the Bioware team worked with Dark Horse Comics to get a slew of comic books made to support it. Fan favorites like Thane, Wrex and Mordin all have their own respective books, as well as many others who could have done with more exposition in the game.

Most of the comics function as standalone stories for each character, but some have direct ties to specific events in the games. Greatly under-served individuals such as Jacob and Kai Leng are given more insight into what exactly they did before running into the infamous Commander Shepherd.

Kaidan gets more details regarding his training as a biotic and his struggles with his abilities. Kasumi gets a look back into her earlier career-making thievery, and readers find out just how much of a badass Zaeed really is. The list goes on, but none of the books feel like a waste. It's a bit surprising, given the immense size of a game like "Mass Effect," that it would be light on such characters' backgrounds.

The plots are concise, dialogue is fun and the art is downright fantastic. Another fighting game begets another fun comic to read. Based on the entry of the renowned super-violent series, "Mortal Kombat X" acts as a prequel story, but gives far more context to the events that transpired. He is shown as a fairly straightforward conqueror, but very quickly gets pushed over the edge by multiple betrayals that ultimately lead to the death of a loved one.

There is a large behind-the-scenes power struggle between Kotal's forces and Outworlds, which eventually spill into the main plot of the game.

It was only a matter of time that an ensemble cast like the X-Men would be featured in a game like it. Not only was the story a bit darker and more involved, the necessity of the Brotherhood of Mutants and the X-Men teaming together against Apocalypse demanded really interesting party compositions that saw unique interactions with characters and their powers really for the first time outside of the comic books themselves.

Spider-Man 2 is usually considered the high bar for Spider-Man games, but in a worthy challenger to that throne arose in the form of Ultimate Spider-Man. It took the things that made the movie game so fun — the weightless web-swinging, that dynamic quests, etc. Spidey would also share screen time with his nemesis, Venom, putting players in control of the brutish symbiote and telling and interesting story that showed the creature in a more relatable light.

The game makes a lot of great inside jokes and references to other games like Mega Man, Guitar Hero, and Mario, and is as celebratory of video games as the graphic novels were about comics. The side scrolling beat em up formula was tweaked in interesting ways thanks to the various RPG elements sprinkled into the mix. Bringing us into an alternate story in the comic book universe of TWD allowed us to experience a story with the same edge and brutality of the books, but with some of the charm and characterizations of the TV show.

Fairytale characters live among us, pretending to be normal people if they can afford to and trying their best to adjust to their lives as normal people. The game is prequel, taking place right after these characters we forced out of their world and into ours. The journey of redemption your tasked to make while attempting to be hard nosed enough to find a serial killer terrorizing your town is a complex series of thought provoking adventure game goodness.

The more controversial conversation is which among them is the best. But the world was small and compact, and it changed dynamically based on story elements, which often affected those decisions directly. Many of the boss encounters were simply just bigger versions of the pattern-based memory game action game bosses usually become.