If you
knew anything about me, you would probably note that I'm a massive Spider-Man
fan. I have various posters around my room, multiple ticket stubs from the
Marvel movies and heck, I'm even drinking out of a Spider-Man cup right now.
Needless to say, I was pretty excited to play Beenox's latest Spider-Man game, The
Amazing Spider-Man 2 for the Xbox One. Usually, I'm apprehensive about
playing a movie tie-in game, but he's my favorite hero. Even if it's an average
game I should be able to look past its faults, right? After playing the fairly
short campaign, I have to say this Xbox One iteration of the web-slinger should
have been squashed.
When
you first stumble into the game world, the opening sequence is a recap of Uncle
Ben's death from the first film. Of course, it may be hard to recognize who the
characters are just because of how different they look to the source material.
Here, Peter Parker looks more like Charlie Day from It's Always Sunny in
Philadelphia, especially with the jacket they've got him wearing. The opening
scene is total filler and doesn't add anything to the overall story.
Speaking
of the story, it's a complete mess. I understand that it's a movie tie-in, and
the developers might not get the full script from the accompanying film, but at
the end of the day the plot here is just too hard to follow. The movie itself
is already busy, but when the game adds their own villains from the comics into
the movie, the main antagonists from the film get put on the back-burner.
My main
beef with the primary storyline followed by the game, is that it completely
omits Gwen Stacy from the entire experience. Gwen is Peter Parker's greatest
ally, and in the Amazing Spider-Man 2 film she plays a massive role. I don't
understand why we needed Uncle Ben, who isn't even in the movie, more than we
needed Gwen Stacy. Just a bit of a head scratcher there, but one of the many
problems with the convoluted story.
Once
you get use to the scrambled plot, you'll take notice how funny the dialogue
is. This isn't a good thing unfortunately. What I mean is that the dialogue
could have been written by a four year old. My favorite exchange is when Peter
Parker first meets the dangerous hunter Kraven in his swank New York apartment.
Kraven explains how he wrestled a grown tiger and how much it angers him to see
the endangered animals hunted and killed. All the while, directly behind Kraven
there is a tiger pelt adorning his couch.
Thankfully,
the gameplay itself isn't as hopeless. Spider-Man moves with incredible agility
and web-slinging is now mapped to both the left and right triggers. There are
minor issues such as the need to be pin-point accurate while traveling, but the
game's 'Web Rush' mode helps with that. The city feels more alive than in the
previous Spidey games but it's still ultimately a poor man's GTA. Honestly, the
most fun I had with the game wasn't the combat, it was simply just swinging
from one side of the city to another.
When
the fisticuffs finally start happening, you'll notice just how clunky the
entire combat system actually is. With Amazing Spider-Man 2, Beenox tries to
copy the outstanding melee combat of Rocksteady's Batman titles. What you'll
get here is sloppy, broken, glitch-filled anarchy. I was fighting the camera
harder than I fought any of the bad guys. Even with the clunky viewpoints and
the floaty combat, the game was never challenging. Throughout the short six
hour campaign, I managed to die only once and that's because the batteries in
my controller died.
When
you're not busy fighting random gang members on the street, you'll have some of
the web-slinger's most famous adversaries to contend with. During the boss
fights, you'll rarely have anything to worry about with their mechanics. It
boils down to mostly dodge the incoming assault, then mash on the attack button
until you win. Granted, like Arkham City, once you defeat a boss you'll unlock
new equipment for your hero. Ionic webbing and seismic blasts to be exact, both
skills are just ways to defeat the cannon fodder later in the game and both are
incredibly lame.
If the
story and the combat wasn't enough to make you turn off your console, the
atrocious visuals within the game might. While playing through the game on the
Xbox One, I felt that this game was more on par with a PlayStation 2 launch
title. Mouths move out of sync, clothes have less pixels than Pong and the
environment looks something out of Rampage on the Nintendo 64. Visuals usually
won't make a game great, but when the other aspects of this title are so bad,
the muddled graphics pile onto the rest of the problems and the result is a
game that is, in a word, garbage. The first Amazing Spider-Man game that came
out in 2012 looks better than this game running on Xbox One!
As I
previously stated before, this game is a movie tie-in and we can't expect GOTY
material from it, but with an asking price of 60 dollars, I can't find any
reason to justify the price. The only positive thing I could say about The
Amazing Spider-Man 2 is that the game does include a bunch of unlockable
costumes for Spider-Man and there is quite the diverse selection. With
developer Beenox only making one actual serviceable Spider-Man game, it may be
time for someone else to take the helm. Stay away from this Xbox One title.
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