Death by Degrees

Death by Degrees was an attempt to pull a side character from the Tekken fighting series into her own standalone title made exclusively for PlayStation 2. Nina Williams, a professional assassin and one of Tekken's iconic faces, got her own action game in 2005, meant to show players what her work looks like outside the tournament ring - namely a slow, methodical infiltration of an enemy research facility full of close-quarters and ranged eliminations, combined with hacking security systems and gathering equipment along the way.

Namco tried to bring part of the Tekken combat system into a full third-person action game, where stealth sections alternate with short combat sequences resolved through quick button combinations similar to quick-time events. It turned out, however, that the move from a closed arena to more open locations didn't suit the series well - the camera and character movement controls felt clunky, attack animations weren't as fluid as in the original fighting game, and the level design quickly grew repetitive. Reviewers at the time rated the game as one of the weakest major franchise entries of the PlayStation 2 generation, despite a solid graphical rendering of the character and an attempt at a cinematic, almost spy-thriller atmosphere. One particular game detail earned special attention: Nina loses her high heels early in the story and fights her way through the rest of the game barefoot, with her bare feet paradoxically giving her an advantage in combat over any shoes found along the way. This small, somewhat bizarre idea became one of the most cited curiosities of the entire game and is still talked about more often than the rest of the story, whether as a bold design decision or as a symbol of how the creators tried to squeeze originality out of a simple concept that the rest of the game unfortunately failed to back up with quality execution.

Why play it: Death by Degrees will mainly appeal to Tekken fans who want to see Nina Williams in the lead role of her own story and don't mind clunkier controls in exchange for a piece of the series' history that was never repeated on any other platform.