Titanfall as a card battler? 5 more mobile conversions that are nothing like the originals

You may have seen the news that Titanfall: Frontline has soft-launched in the Philippines. Hooray! We'll soon be jumping into house-sized mechs and stamping on our friends, just like we did in the Xbox One original.

Except, no we won't. Titanfall: Frontline may share its IP with Respawn's 2014 multiplayer FPS (and its imminent sequel), but that's about it. In fact, it's a card battler.

That's not to say that it'll be a bad game by any means, but it got us to thinking about all those occasions when a big property has come to mobile, only to turn out to be something entirely different.

The original Halo game and its immediate successors pretty much set the template for console first person shooters for a whole generation. They blew the doors on the tight corridors and scripted action of the '90s FPS and created a more open, less predictable strain of the genre

There are two Halo games on iOS - Halo: Spartan Assault and its follow-up, Halo: Spartan Strike. Neither of them are first person shooters.

Instead, they're twin-stick action games with the view pulled right back and above our armoured protagonists. We actually reckon that this was a sound decision, as it successfully captures the essence of Halo without forcing you to put up with fiddly controls.

If there's one console first person shooter that's better known than Halo it's Call of Duty. So what form would the militaristic multiplayer-focused shooter take on iOS?

Why, a single player third-person tactical strategy game, of course.

We're being a teensy bit disingenuous here. It's quite possible to flip into first person view and start shooting bad guys the old fashioned way in Strike Team. But the game is clearly focused on taking the long view.

The Sacred series is a popular trilogy of old school action-RPG games for PC. We've seen such meaty, top-down experiences on mobile (or tablet, at least) before, so this conversion made a lot of sense.

Except, Sacred Legends is nothing like the original series. It's a rather simplistic battler, as your hero auto-runs from turn-based encounter to turn-based encounter. All you need do is select the appropriate attacks.

Don't get us wrong, Sacred Legends is a perfectly enjoyable experience for what it is. But fans of the original(s) will probably be left feeling a little underwhelmed.

The original Deus Ex set a dauntingly high standard for intelligent FPS-RPG hybrids with multiple paths to success. In 2011, Deus Ex: Human Revolution successfully rebooted the series by keeping those core principles intact.

Deus Ex GO on mobile, however, is a zoomed-out puzzler with set solutions to its boardgame-like levels. It's very good, but really nothing like the host series.

We could have chosen either of the other GO games for this piece, of course. But there's something of Hitman's careful planning that makes it a more direct fit for the GO template, and it's Lara Croft GO, not Tomb Raider GO. Visuals and storyline aside, Deus Ex GO is a proper outlier.

Tekken Card Tournament reveals its hand (in more ways than one) with its title. This isn't the one-on-one beat-'em-up us '90s kids remember.

Rather like Titanfall: Frontline, this is a card battler - though in this context it actually makes a surprising amount of sense.

The tactical one-on-one fights map well to the format, as you select from a distinctive cast of characters and pre-select your move-set from a bunch of cards. It's then about the tactical employment of those move cards, as you attempt to counter and pre-empt your opponent's moves.