Available on: Xbox One, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, PC
Price: Varies Second Hand
I played on: PS4
Notes: N/A
The Amazing Spider-man 2 attempts to continue on with the events of the last game while also telling the story of the film it’s based on. The result is a mess of a game with fun combat and not much else.
The plot here is atrocious with some of the worst pacing I have seen in a game. We start with Peter Parker reliving the night Uncle Ben was killed. We’re then moved to present day just after the events of the first Amazing Spider-man game to find Spidey hunting down Uncle Ben’s killer. This narrative ends almost imminently when we find Uncle Ben’s shooter murdered by a vigilante calling himself the Carnage killer. Just as you get familiar with this story we get another with the King Pin and Harry Osborne setting up an anti-vigilante task force. The plot has so many different stories going on at once that each one is hastily finished just as they start so we can move along to the next one. This creates a really jarring and unenjoyable narrative experience with every character feeling rushed and underdeveloped.
The graphics are very pretty until you get close to them where you find low-quality textures, objects and characters clipping through the terrain and more. I love the design of the Spidey suit with nice big eyes and bright colours. The enemy designs are not quite as impressive with most of them just looking strangely ugly with Wilson Fisk and the Green Goblin being the worst. The sound design while not amazing didn’t stand out as awful which is a little grace.
As with the previous game as well as the Arkham titles combat is based around attacking and countering when your spider-sense goes off. This makes hand-to-hand combat very enjoyable until enemies start to use guns. You’re able to use L1 to disarm enemies but it takes just too long even when fully upgraded meaning normally while disarming one enemy another will be able to get a hit in. This is just annoying and feels poorly designed. Stealth combat consists of hiding in the shadows sticking to walls or hanging from the environment until you can safely pick off your target. This is somehow less fluid than the previous game due to having to use R1 for both your stealth attack and web-zip. I all too often ended up in the middle of a bunch of enemies while trying to take out just one target from the shadows.
Web Swinging around the city once again relies on having buildings and solid objects to swing from. The downside, however, is that all the fluid movement, style and precision we got in Web of Shadows has been removed leaving you with just the bare bones of web swinging. The only time I enjoyed this was when moving really fast but other than that it felt slow, uninvolved and boring.
This is a game that does one thing well with its hand-to-hand combat and gets everything else wrong in some way. The story spent more time on the annoying and forced as hell Stan Lee cameo than it did most the actual characters in the game. The stealth gameplay took a step down from the previous entry and the web-swinging felt bare bones at best. Not the worst Spider-man game I have played but also far from the best.
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