Rating: 3 out of
5 Hours Spent Web Swinging
Plot
Synopsis: Venom shows up and
somehow causes a symbiote invasion that you have to stop.
The Good:
-Swinging through the city is very fun. That alone brings this from a 2 to a 3, I
felt really involved in the motion unlike the Amazing Spider-Man game. You can cling to walls, perform acrobatic
bounces, run on walls, web zip and even web swinging feels really easy and it’s
all pretty easy to link together. There
were times where things got frustrating, mostly in trying to be pin point
accurate, but for basic locomotion it’s really fun. Even the animation for the swings is just
really pretty to watch. You can change
how you web swing and go for speed by using acceleration and timing when you
let go and you can get going really fast which causes the visuals to change
slightly to accommodate. You can change
the timing of letting go and easily climb in elevation. You can go for a casual swing using long
swings, pole swings and cling jumps or something more artistic with fast
swings, web zips, wall runs, pole swings and the acrobatic bounces. It really feels like an old Tony Hawk game in
the way you can string awesome stuff together.
It’s a little toned down compared to Spider-Man 2 but it’s the closest
thing to that there is.
-Moon Knight is in it, I like Moon Knight and I rarely get
the pleasure of seeing him since he’s treated as a barely contained psycho in
the comic world. In the comics everyone
seems to know he’s a totally unstable violent psychopath and they keep away
from him so it’s weird to see him in something this mainstream.
-There are a couple of great battles. The Vulture fight is pretty interesting, as
is the Black Cat fight.
-Some of the interaction with the other heroes is pretty
great, especially with Wolverine who is especially cantankerous in this.
-There are two modes, Spider-Man red and Spider-Man
black. They are both very different
styles and can change up the game quite a bit.
Black suit Spider-Man feels incredibly strong and powerful while red
suit Spider-Man is quick and acrobatic.
-Every major plot point has a good choice and a bad
choice. I only made good choices so I
don’t know what that means for the game but I doubt I’ll ever play through this
thing again as a bad guy so who knows how much that changes the game.
The Bad:
-Combat gets really repetitive, it’s basically one button and
I had real trouble getting combos to happen consistently so I gave up and just
constantly mashed the button and let whatever happen happen.
-There is a lot of emphasis put on this web pounce ability
where at a touch of a button you leap into the air, shoot a web line at an
enemy and pounce on them. However I
could not get this to work consistently, most of the time the enemy would block
me or counter me and just leave me hurting so I stopped using it.
-Most of the boss battles are just wars of attrition where
you just exchange punches until one of you is left standing. It gets very boring.
-When it comes to pretty much anything but the web swinging this
game gets really boring and repetitive.
That’s the thing I spent the most time doing, I really only finished the
game hoping to open up the world back to a pre-symbiote invasion state so I
could go back to web swinging. Such is
not the case because…
-…after the game is done if you continue the game loads at
the credits.
-Quick time events show up randomly and if you fail you start
over at the beginning of the scene. The
worst example of this was the final cutscene which has four QTE’s. The scene is so long and the events are so far
apart that missing one means minutes of time lost. Which may not sound like a lot until you miss
several in a row like I did. Why not
just start a little bit before the next button press, why start all the way at
the beginning? It would be more
forgivable if the game’s story was a bit more compelling.
The Ugly:
-The sound cuts out during cuts scenes. Sometimes you won’t hear an entire side of
dialog.
Final
Thoughts: When I got to the
scene called “Final Showdown” I said to myself “I’m not in the mood for this
bullshit.” And shut it off. If
everything else in this game was any indication this battle was going to be
long and tedious and frustrating. So I
turned it off and found something better to do.
I played Skyrim until I was ready to come back to it. I was of course right, the final battle was
all those things I thought it would be but I wanted to open up the city for web
slinging. Of course that didn't happen.
But that is the game in a nutshell
for me. Speeding through plot points
when I got bored of web slinging so I could get back to web slinging. There’s really nothing special to see in the
game and the unlockable moves are incredibly limited. You unlock a base set of moves and abilities
early on and the rest of the game is spent unlocking either an extra hit in the
combo string or more power for that established move. The battles are, for the most part, tedious;
combat gets very tiresome and the story just isn’t compelling enough to really
move you forward. Top that off with a
seemingly half assed assist mechanic (using the team up never really did much
for me and all the characters seem interchangeable as far as ability) and you
don’t really have much to keep you interested.
Other than the web slinging, which is the second or third best mechanic
I’ve experienced (Spider-Man 2 and 3 may be tied for best but if you include
the poses you could do in Spider-Man 2 then Spider-Man 2 has the deepest
mechanic with equal fun value) so if you can get into that then this game is
worth playing. If that isn’t something
you think would interest you that much then I would stay away.
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