Developer: Beenox, Gameloft
Publisher: Activion
Platform: PC, Playstation 3, Playstation 4, Xbox 360, Xbox One, Nintendo 3DS, Android, IOS
The Amazing Spider-Man 2 – Review
As almost every Marvel movie has been made into a game, The Amazing Spider-Man 2 isn’t an exception. Crawling alongside the walls, swinging between buildings and punishing bad guys, that’s what Spider-Man is all about, isn’t it? Now you have another chance to put on the spider costume in the all new Spider-Man game.
Story
You play as the beloved Marvel character Spider-Man, who has attained special powers thanks to the bite of a special spider. Being able to shoot out spider webs out of your hands and possessing senses far beyond that of a normal human, you go out into the city of Manhattan punishing bad guys who terrorize the peaceful lives of the citizens and putting them behind bars.
Following the footsteps of Peter Parker, you are off in search for the killer of your uncle Ben, who has been shot by a criminal. After two years of training and developing your new powers, you find clues that would lead towards finding out who has something to do with the killing. While dealing with a group of bad guys who are smuggling weapons, you learn about the boss of the one who shot your uncle. After capturing and interrogating this man named Herman Schultz, you learn more about the killer. His name is Carradine, and he makes deals with a lot of different groups of people, even the Russians who are at a gang war. After giving enough information, he escapes leaving you with at the knowledge needed to find and capture Carradine, leading you to new encounters along the way.
After many different events, you come in contact with a couple of the well known villains of the comic books series, like Carnage, the Green Goblin and Electro.
Graphics
The graphics look pretty nice, but do seem rather simplistic. While swinging between the many buildings it will mostly feel as if you have seen the buildings before, which sometimes can getting a bit confusing since swinging goes rather fast. Here and there you will notice some glitches, like you or an enemy getting stuck in something, which shouldn’t happen to be honest. But overall not the graphics are nice and the scenery that you get while standing on top of a building does make it quite pleasing to look at, although nothing really special is to be seen.
Sound
Sound-wise, the game has its own separate soundtrack in contrast to the movie. However, the music isn’t that noticeable, as you’ll hear more sound effects and dialogue throughout the game. The voice-acting is also different from the movie, as the actors in the movie are different from the once in the game. While not bad, it isn’t impressive either, especially since the intonation doesn’t quite make the cut.
Gameplay
The game let’s you play in a rather open world, or rather open city. The main focus is the fluent combat, where you have the option between 2 standard moves: Attack and Dodge. Attacking multiple times helps you build up a combo, which then gives you a chance to do a signature move. This, however, is more of a fancy finishing move than actually something special. During combat your spider senses also kick in. These senses gives you a prompt warning whenever an enemy tries to attack you, giving you an opportunity to dodge out of the way and allowing you to flawlessly keep up you combo. This type of combat seems similar to that of quick time events, which results in being rather repetitive and unchallenging.
When defeating enemies, you’ll gain XP allowing you to improve your suit and learn new and more powerful moves. There is a total of 6 different abilities, each having an additional 3 tiers of improvement. The more you improve, the more XP the next tier costs. Some examples of these improvements are: enlarging your senses in order to keep track of your enemies, or using your web to disable the enemy weapon, thus forcing them to attack you head on.
Aside from completing story missions, the game offers you a ton of side missions to choose from. Doing these side missions helps you fill up your Heroic meter, while not doing them (as there is a time limit in which you need to complete them before they disappear) fills up you Malice meter. Doing good deeds for the city improves your reputation and popularity amongst the citizens, thus giving you bonuses to your spider suit while not doing them lowers you stats. This, however, doesn’t really do much to improve the experience as most of the side missions are similar to each other.
Outside of combat you are free to use your spider webs for moving around the city at rather high speed, but it is rather tricky to control since it is rather sensitive .They also give you the ability to use a web rush, which makes it a tad more easy to precisely move from building to building.
For the collectors amongst you, in the comic book store of a man named Stan (a friend of your uncle Ben) you can view all the different collected figurines, comic books or concept art. There is also some kind of mini game, where you fight waves after waves of enemies, thus unlocking new collectibles. This isn’t any different from normal combat, so except from the collection items, it isn’t that enjoyable.
Conclusion
Aside from having a repetitive combat system that isn’t really fleshed out, not having much impressive features and having a couple of glitches that force you to restart the level, The Amazing Spider-Man 2 isn’t that bad. The swinging is enjoyable and for the completionists there are a couple of things to unlock.
The Amazing Spider-Man 2 - Review,
No Comments