Quick Points
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The Amazing Spider-Man as you would guess is based off the new Spider-Man movie in theaters. The story takes place after the events in the movie and there will be some minor spoilers to the movie though if you know the Spider-M an story it’s not much of a spoiler. This game takes inspiration from a lot of different sources, from old Spider-Man games to Batman: Arkham games. That being said there are still issues with Spider-Man’s mechanics that have persisted in many Spider-Man games. As I said the story takes place after the movie where Dr. Connors is now in jail after he turned into The Lizard. Oscorp has taken over Connors’ research and started creating cross species, combining human and animal DNA however they find out how dangerous they are and try to dispose of them. While Parker is taking a tour of Oscorp he sets off these cross species in containment and they get free infecting many of the doctors in the building including Parker’s love interest, Gwen Stacy. Now you’re tasked as Spider-Man is to get a cure before the whole city is infected. This game is open world with several indoor locations throughout the game. The open world it takes a lot from other open world Spider-Man games with many events happening within the city which you either participate or ignore. There is a larger variety than in the past though you still have old favorite of beating up muggers and carrying people to safe places. There are also a couple of cop missions which either has you stopping getaway cars or stopping gunmen who are held up in a particular place. Blimp missions will have you showing off Spider-Man’s moves. The last types of missions are given to you by a reporter which will have you either photographing something or infiltrating places to find information. There are also photographing opportunities in each of the missions of the game and with each type of enemy to get a bio on them. Most missions happen indoors which helps because the loading times going in and out get to be exceedingly long, though one early mission has you going in and out several times which showcases this flaw. Aside from your main objective each mission has different things to collect or photograph including comic pages, audio evidence, tech upgrade, and pieces. The game allows you to replay missions if you miss any. The game encourages stealth on missions because some of the enemies can kill Spider-Man pretty easily. The game gives you an on-screen indicator telling which enemy is in your stealth take down zone and a prompt when you scroll over the enemy telling you that you can act on that enemy. This ability can be upgraded to take down as many as two enemies at a time. The combat is taken straight from Batman: Arkham series with you having an attack button and a dodge button. Spider-Man will have an icon appear above his head to indicate when to dodge. There are also similar enemies that play out exactly like Arkham enemies like shield enemies which you must jump over him and attack him from his back. Spider-Man does feature some unique abilities one which allows him to escape danger immediately to a safe place with the tap of a button and Web Rush Mode. Web Rush Mode is triggered with the R1 button; it allows you to either slow down time to pick somewhere to go or enemy to attack by holding the button down or to quick attack by tapping it. This feature is quite useful throughout the game especially picking up the 600 comic book pages in the city. This game takes the concept of Arkham of making the player feel like Spider-Man which should be acrobatic in nature. This works part of the time like when you build up your combo Spider-Man will enter a takedown moves or when transitioning while web slinging. Web slinging around the city doesn’t work on occasion which can be frustrating when you’re trying to get somewhere fast. Unlike Arkham, The Amazing Spider-Man does not use Spider-Man’s cast of villains to any use. Only Alistair Smythe and The Lizard appear in a significant role with cameos of Scorpion and Rhino who are just cross species and don’t really have their own story and Felicia Hardy appears in one side mission. One of the weird aspects of this game is that with the amount of quick time events in the game there are some scenes where you would expect a prompt and not get one. Maybe they thought it was already getting out of hand with the amount they have. In the end The Amazing Spider-Man borrows a lot from Arkham style to make an acceptable product though has some flaws holding it back that could be easily fixed. They have a few good ideas that they could use going forward and if they can incorporate the full cast of Spider-Man’s villains it could make for a better game. It also has a Metal Gear Rex moment later on in the game which I can’t tell if it was a homage since the game relies heavily on robots or something else. |
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