19 Years Ago, We Got One of the Worst TV Game Adaptations Ever

The PlayStation 2 was home to a truly ridiculous number of games, with the console’s ubiquity at the turn of the century leading to a historically deep game library. There were blockbuster epics, consistent sports franchises, bizarre indie darlings, and legendary thought-provoking horror titles — along with hundreds of action games, racing sims, fighting titles, and tie-in releases.

During this era, there were plenty of movie and TV adaptations that were typically poorly received. While there were outliers, it became a stereotype of the gaming industry at the time that tie-in games were bad. One of the worst examples of this is the game adaptation of The Shield, an action-crime game that’s repetitive and frustrating on a lot of levels. What makes the game especially harsh in retrospect is how it speaks to the worst qualities of that type of game from this era.

The Shield: The Game Was A Pretty Rough Game

The Shield was an intense cop show, a peer to The Sopranos and The Wire that helped cement FX as a fixture of modern television. The show (and the video game adaptation) centers on Vic Mackey, a corrupt police officer who leads a group of self-interested officers working the system to their advantage. In theory, a game that recreated the harsh violence of the TV show would be a good fit for the era of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and Saints Row. A mix of stealth and shoot-outs, The Shield‘s main difference from other third-person crime games like this centered around your role as a dirty cop, forcing you to plant evidence and avoid the attention of other officers.

Unfortunately, The Shield doesn’t realize that potential at all. The clunky controls, blocky graphics, and glitchy game design made it a rough experience, even for fans of the source material, with many critics decrying it as an instantly dated experience. The game’s tanky design and slow pace make it an absolute drudge to play through, with poor voice acting and blocky graphics reducing everything into bland settings. Even the interesting elements, like the act of planting evidence is undone by poorly designed CPUs and the slow pace. The entire game is drab, losing the grit of the original show in the translation to the game.

Critics at the time agreed with the sentiment. The game earned rough scores, with the PS2 port having a lackluster 36/100 on MetaCritic. The Shield is a bad game that lacks the elements that made The Shield such a subversive and challenging TV show in the first place, with the story ultimately meaning nothing in the long run of the series and tangentially connecting to the actual plot. and one of the most striking examples of why that trend from this era of gaming was such a disappointment in retrospect.

Why TV Adaptations Like The Shield Are So Frustrating

TV and movie tie-in adaptations were a fixture of gaming for a while, but as a trend has largely fallen out of favor. It’s more likely nowadays to see a franchise plan for cross-media exposure, with broader adaptations that don’t directly recreate the show. Something like The Shield probably wouldn’t even be considered today, despite having a potentially compelling central hook. The “dirty cop” game mechanics had some intriguing ideas that would have genuinely separated it from other games of the era. There’s potentially an interesting way to immerse players in Vic’s experience, forcing them to reckon with his corrupt actions, forcing a player to balance their own criminal necessity with what they can get away with in the light of day.

Having access to The Shield cast and creative team could have helped shape the game into a fitting part of the overall series while reflecting the actual themes of the show through the gameplay. It could have made the players actually complicit in the elements of Vic’s character arc that are compelling, instead of the basic shootouts and stealth missions. Instead, The Shield is just a basic GTA clone that suffers from poor controls, weak design, and a franchise connection that only becomes more dated with time — especially given that he politics of policing and views on the authorities have changed. Adaptations of characters from other mediums has always been a tricky proposition for game developers, with the best redefining their genres and the worst sticking out in gaming history as especially titanic failures.

The Shield is a prime example of why the worst examples stand out. On top of being a bad game, The Shield feels like a waste of potential, where more refined gameplay and a better story could have elevated a copycat game into something truly unique. There was the groundwork for an intriguing game, something developers have grown more invested in over time, thanks to greater interest in gaming potential and the greater overlap between the different industries. Instead, The Shield is glitchy, hard to play, and painfully slow — and lacks what made the show worth adapting in the first place.