Monday Impressions: The Amazing Spider-Man

Iron Man 3 just hit theaters and strangely enough, we haven't seen a Marvel movie game tie in after The Avengers. The most recent Marvel movie game we got was The Amazing Spider-man, the Spider-man game that was thought to bring life back to open world web swinging. The Amazing Spider-man was developed by Beenox, the same studio that did the two previous Spider-man games up tp this point. Now while I can say that Spider-man: Shattered Dimensions was a decent game and personally have not tried Spider-man: Edge of Time. Edge of Time looked boring just from the few gameplay trailers that came out. When majority of a game's trailers do not show gameplay and only show developers talking about how "good" it is, it's usually not.

Shattered Dimensions had you control four different Spider-men across different universes and Edge of Time had you control two Spider-man from the present and the future. Both games had web swinging but were not open world. The Amazing Spider-man returned you to the city of New York where you are free to swing around where ever you please. The previous Spider-man game that featured and open world was Spider-man: Web of Shadows, which I honestly think is a good game.

The story takes place after the events of the movie where Doc Conners is in jail and Oscorp continues his research and mutates animals into familiar Spider-man villains. The mutation becomes a virus that the animals spread around the city turning people into monsters and it's up to Spider-man to stop them. The story fits the movie's lore and the voice acting is also pretty spot on. But maybe they should have picked a different person to voice Spider-man instead of using Donatello from the 2003 TMNT series.

Alright, my main gripe with The Amazing Spider-man is the web swinging control is far inferior compared to Web of Shadows. Jumping, wall crawling, web swinging, and web zipping are all very floaty. In the context of the open world just being a medium for you to travel to the mission areas, it's functional but after Web of Shadows and Spider-man 2 giving such a fulfilling web swinging controls, this very gimped version of swinging is a step back. Oringinally I thought that it was fine since there's not really anything in the open world for you to do but then I found out that there are collectible comic book pages that you can find to unlock comic book issues in the gallery mode. Instead of zipping to the exact building or water tower I want, I end up going to the wrong building 3 blocks down and losing sight of the collectible.

Combat is pretty mundane as well, being a copy of Batman: Arkham Asylum's counter system where Spdiey's spider sense ripples would appear above his head when an enemy is about to strike. It's not bad by any means and the ripples makes sense with Spidey's power but it just doesn't feel right. Combat is floaty, there are no combos to speak off aside from hammering the attack button and occasionally hitting the circle button to web enemies to the floor or walls. Landing counters feels very vauge as well since the animations for combos and counters look very similar.

Long story short, The Amazing Spider-man is by no means the best Spider-man game out there but it's decent and is probably the best Spider-man game from Beenox. If you can get this game for a good price and like the wall crawling hero then go for it. All my gripes mainly stem from my liking of Web of Shadows.