While Peter Parker is out trying to navigate his personal and professional lives, Spider-Man must now contend with a new crop of adversaries looking to settle some scores, with no regard of who they pull into the fray. Kingpin’s absence propels the city into chaos. With Wilson Fisk AKA Kingpin finally behind bars, life for the city will return to normal…being easy…idyllic, right? Wrong.
We have no doubt that Peter Parker would completely smoke a room full of thugs without breaking a sweat, but in a video game this sense of strength makes encounters too easy - and where Arkham's fisticuffs reward precise timing, The Amazing Spider-Man's lack of rhythm makes combat feel a touch heavy on mashing and simplicity.In Marvel’s Spider-Man, available now on PS4, an experience Peter Parker has been protecting the city of New York for the past 8 years. Clobbering enemies as Spidey is as powerful as you would expect, however, which means that swaths of generic enemies pose little real threat. Web rush is a great building block, though, and one we see as key for future games.īeenox has picked up a few things from previous games and the superhero genre at large combat is streamlined and fluid, mimicking Batman: Arkham City's attack, dodge and special (read: web) triumvirate, allowing for far more acrobatic strikes than past games and a new dynamism to the camera during battles.
The core problem may be now solved, but the implementation isn't quite perfect: there are so many web rush targets that it’s too easy to zip somewhere unintended, and Spidey’s overpowering strength and speed when navigating the city will often make precision platforming a chore.
Web rush is such an obviously simple addition that it's hard to believe that it took dozens of 3D games to figure out, and in a lot of ways it feels like the Rosetta Stone for translating Spider-Man's inherent quirks into fluid and viable gameplay. Manhattan itself is fun to explore but it too suffers from fatigue apart from some obvious landmarks, the overwhelming gloss and cramped size leave the city feeling somewhat limited over time. For the most part these side activities are the exact same types that Spidey has had thrown at him in virtually every open-world game he’s starred in, so while they’re able to offer a break in the campaign there’s little excitement in actually undertaking them.
By default there’s far more to do as well: Across the city are petty crimes to stop, challenges to best, photos to take, citizens to rescue and an absurd amount of comic book pages to collect.
Whereas those versions suffered greatly from a feeling of confinement, Ultimate Edition is a much smoother and cohesive experience now that Spider-Man is more in his element. The strife eventually breaks its way out of Oscorp and into the streets of New York, sending Spidey on a quest to find an antidote and save the city from Oscorp's menaces both biological and mechanical.Ībsent from the Wii and 3DS ports of the game, Ultimate Edition restores the city exploration found on other HD platforms to provide some much-needed cohesion to the world and a sense of place to the story beats. While on an after-hours tour of Oscorp with nanomachine specialist Alistair Smythe, Peter Parker and Gwen Stacey find themselves caught in the middle of a predictable outbreak of cross-species experiments and Smythe's robotic "solution" to the problem.
The same can be said for Beenox's movie tie-in: one of the better Spideys of the medium is trapped in an often inconsistent world.īecause of the movie there is only so much creative leeway afforded to Beenox for their third webhead adventure, and setting The Amazing Spider-Man: Ultimate Edition after the credits roll - instead of retelling the events of the film - allows for more freedom in shaping the narrative.
We're down with new interpretations and while the Spider-Man on-screen offered a lot of what we love about the character, the surrounding film was kind of a mess. Our friendly neighborhood wall crawler's cinematic reboot in last summer's The Amazing Spider-Man had us leaving theatres utterly torn.