Available on: PSP, PS2, Xbox 360, PC, Wii, DS
Price: varies second hand
I played on: PS2
Notes: N/A
Friend or Foe is a Spider-man game aimed at young children which is nice as a lot of the Wall-Crawlers adventures tend to aim at young adults and older.
Once again we have a Spider-man game where someone is trying to use symbiotes to take over the world. This time they are combining holographic technology with the symbiotes to create what are called Phantoms. How are holograms able to punch and be punched? Well, the game never brings it up so it’s just one of the many plot holes this game has in its tired story. A bunch of Spidey’s villains are also having their minds controlled. Upon defeat, these villains are freed from the mind control and they decide to join forces with you. This is a nice idea but sadly the gameplay doesn’t allow this to shine.
We start the game with Spidey fighting all the villains from Sam Raimi’s Spider-man trilogy at the same time with a little help from Harry Osborne’s New Goblin. This is a bit odd as at least 4 of these characters are dead and Harry seems to not be bothered by the sudden revival of his Dad. Obversely this game only borrows the character designs from the films and not the continuity. During this fight, everyone is attacked by a bunch of Phantoms before they all get picked up by the S.H.I.E.L.D helicarrier. This acts a hub where you can run around, change out side-kicks, upgrade characters and select missions to start.
Due to being for kids, there is little difficulty, if you die you take a small hit to your experience points and respawn with full health. I’m all for variety and accessibility so it’s nice to see an easier experience for young kids. You start in an open area fighting one of 4 types of enemies and then run down a small hallway until you get to another open area and fight more enemies. This continues until you reach a Boss which only appear every 4 stages. This just means the game is incredibly boring, honestly, I have not been this bored playing a video game in a very long time. You can attack, web and jump and that’s all, Spider-man can’t even crawl on the walls. You’re able to play as a number of other Marvel heroes and villains but they all play too similar to each other so there is not a lot of point outside of appearance.
The art style here is very nice with all the characters looking how they would appear in a Saturday morning cartoon. I can see children really enjoying these stylised graphics and they also stop the game from ageing as badly as others such as Spider-man 2. You will be going all around the world and the areas all look very varied but sadly this doesn’t change how dull and boring the gameplay is. The voice acting is not bad but due to very limited one-liners from Spidey and his friends, it does start to become annoying after a while.
This game is not broken, it plays well and I had no performance issues but sadly that doesn’t stop it being mind-numbingly boring. I was fed up of this game within the first 2 hours and it only got worse from there with the same format repeating until the game thankfully ended. Very young children might get something out of this but beyond that, this game has nothing to offer.
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