Available on: PS2, PSP
Price: varies online
I played on: PS2
Notes: Please keep in mind that I’m not much of a platformer girl normally.
This game is part of an odd trend during the transition from the PS2 to the PS3 where due to how expensive the PS3 was a lot of games had budget versions for the PS2. These were often based on the same story and ideas as the originals but had a fraction of the resources used for them. The Amazing Allies Edition of Web of Shadows is one of these little side projects. It takes the open world PS3 game and instead tries to use the same ideas and plot in a 2.5D platformer.
While patrolling the city Spider-man gets ambushed by Venom and the two fight resulting in Venom exploding and Spidey passing out. When the Web-head comes to he finds he has a new cell phone and Nick Fury waiting to talk. After the battle with Venom, it seems the symbiote started to reproduce faster than ever before and now all of New York is at risk of the symbiote invasion. Although I did enjoy this story when told through cutscenes with full voice acting here it uses text boxes and minimal voice acting. Sadly the story is butchered and honestly never really feels like it carries any weight. The ending of this game sums it all up perfectly as after you fight a rather dull final boss the only thing you get is a pop-up congratulating you. After dismissing this textbox you’re booted back to the main menu. Although the PS3 version of this game had the issue of poor voice acting and some awkward animations during cutscenes, at least it felt like it cared about its own story. During the Amazing Allies Edition, the story seems to be more of an afterthought.
Gameplay consists of you starting on the left side of a map and having to use web swinging, wall crawling and web zipping to platform your way to the right where a boss will be waiting. Between you and this boss will be a number of bad guys for you to fight your way through. The maps have quite a bit of height to them which is nice and if you hold down L1 your Spider-sense will point in the direction of your objective.
You can talk to NPC’s who will, in turn, offer you little quests which will net you red or black suit points and XP which you can use to upgrade yourself. Combat is based around light and heavy attacks as well as building combos. You’re able to use power-ups which grant you temporary advantages or you can summon other characters to aid you. Once summoned, the character will perform a simple animation and any enemies on screen will take damage. Like most of this game, this is disappointing. In the 7th Gen version, your allies will come into combat and help you in real time instead of just using a short cutscene and nothing more. Seeing that this demake is named after these allies I would have expected a lot more from this system. As it is the allies are anything but amazing.
The Graphics are not terrible but also far from impressive. The music is forgettable and the voice acting is mediocre at best when it’s even there. I ran into some rather horrible frame rate issues during my play-through which made the game nearly unplayable for a while. I’m not that bothered by low FPS if the game looks and plays okay. The issues I ran into had the game chugging along at around 10FPS and lower almost breaking the game.
If I had to describe this game in one word it would be disappointing. I compared this PS2 version to the PS3 version a lot here and that’s because it’s still Web of Shadows and as such deserves to be compared. The fact is, this version is nothing on the amazing game we got for 7th Gen consoles. Only pick this one up if you really need a PSP Spider-man game because it’s mediocre at best and broken at worst.
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