Ahh Spidey, I've missed you old buddy, old pal. We all love a Spider-Man game, as they were the best superhero games... until the Batman Arkham series showed up. It's not even worrying when a Spider-Man movie game is released as Spider-Man 2 was arguably the best SM game around. The Amazing Spider-Man movie however, sucked. The game, not so much.
What I liked about the game, was that it wasn't just a game of the movie, it sort of expanded on it. It seemed to take place straight after the movie, so it was all new missions and not playing levels from the movie. The story was about all new human cross species, just like the Lizard. This was great as the game tied in Rhino and Scorpion, some of Spider-Man's popular villians. As it was a movie game, the graphics were awful, but, Spider-Man himself looked great, his suit sparkled in a dull game, the voice actor of Peter Parker did a great job too. The game looked great in daylight, the sun and lighting looked wonderful, as did the night, it's a shame they didn't really try with the other character models.
There's plenty to do outside the story, albeit mostly boring. There's time trials, saving civilians, secret lab missions and a lot more. It's all repetitive though and only worth doing to get better upgrades. The combat is pretty decent, it's a poor man's Batman Arkham combat, but that combat is so good, even a shoddy version is decent. Even though Spider-Man isn't often stealthy, you can stealthily take out enemies and it's always good to use stealth to make it easier for yourself. The problem was stealth takedowns could be really slow animations, causing you to be detected and making stealth attacks utterly useless.
The camera angles were awful, Spider-Man is very fast at swinging, climbing and fighting, the camera just can't keep up and is flailing about. The hard difficulty wasn't too bad, it would just take a full minute for your health to recover. There was nothing worse swinging around in circles, surrounded by enemies, waiting for your health to recover and then dying. It wasn't really hard, it was just ridiculous trying to recover your health. Ninety percent of the game had you traversing the sewers or laboratories, you'd be constantly in either if these and felt you'd been there many times, there was no diversity in where the game took you. The open city boss battles were probably the best bits, as there were seemingly no limits on how far you could go in the city during them, the cross species boss fights always felt the same, just in a different enclosed area.
This game causes a lot of frustration too, constant indicators about a comic book collectable being insight, as there was 700 of these atrocities, it was made even worse by the fact you'd press the button to fly directly to it, only to find out you pressed it too late and Spider-Man would start flying somewhere completely off track. This was the same for attempting stealth, it would suddenly switch to web strike, which would alert all enemies. When completing side missions, the screen would fade to black and load you near where you started the mission, then sometimes it wouldn't load you and you could freely play, it was annoying not knowing whether the game would let you start travelling to your next destination or if it was going to cut you off and load you, it was so inconsistent.
There were some nice features though, the web rush was cool, it would let you slow time and let you choose where to send Spidey. The beautiful red and blue suit would rip and tear the more combat you entered and you could always repair your suit by going back to the safehouse. Stan Lee even made a cameo in the game and was even a playable costume, why wouldn't you want to web-sling as Stan Lee? However, there were more problems, long loading, phone call story dialogue repeated after every death until you proceeded with the story, bad checkpoints that lead to unskippabke cutscenes, Spider-Man not casting a new web to continue swinging no matter how many times you pressed him too only for him to decide to as he practically swung down to the ground.
Spider-Man games are always something I enjoy, I grew up with him and Spider-Man on the PS1 was the first game I ever completed. I'm very happy to see Spider-Man is still around in the video game industry and I'm very excited for the upcoming PS4 game. Movie games are never really impressive and this was a game of a pretty poor movie, but the game took a nice turn by continuing the story of the movie. I'm definitely gonna give the Amazing Spider-Man 2 game a try as the movie was also better than the first too.
6.5/10
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