Futurama: The Game is "almost" a decent licensed PS2 game. They clearly put some effort into (threw some money at) it - it looks good and features the writers and voice actors from the show - but the core gameplay ranges from simply boring to absolutely putrid. I'm glad licensed games mostly went away. Read more and watch Futurama gameplay here.
Futurama: The Game hit PS2 and Xbox back in 2003. Even though that was only four years after the show started, I was surprised by how many memorable fan-favorite references they managed to cram into the game. That just goes to show that most of the memorable stuff seems to have happened in the first few seasons, though I do remember enjoying the later stuff too. Futurama was never like The Simpsons or Family Guy where it overstayed it's welcome. If anything, Futurama was killed off far too soon (the first time ... maybe not the second time).
The game is a bland boring 3D third-person action game / shooter that sucks. You play as Fry, Bender, Leela, and Dr. Zoidberg and explore familiar locales - and also sewers and other generic video game tropes - while solving simple puzzles and blasting away with a laser gun. It plays really, really bad. The camera is awful. The platforming feels bad. The shooting feels bad. It's all pretty bad.
The story and presentation, however, are much better than this poopy game deserves. The voice actors all reprise their roles for the game and do a good job. The story was also written by the writers from the show and is pretty solid. It really feels like an extended episode of the show. The story here is that Professor Farnsworth sells Planet Express to Mom, which gives her 51% ownership of everything on Earth, thereby giving her absolute control to rule however she sees fit. The Planet Express crew try to make a run for it and escape Earth, but need to fix their whanged up ship first. It's funny. It's well done. It plays terribly, but the humor is "chef kiss" vintage Futurama perfection.
If you want to play Futurama: The Game, it's pretty damn expensive. And it sucks, so I don't recommend it. "borrow" it from the internet and play it with PCSX2 instead.
