It would be easy to look at the negative reputation this title has and dismiss it as another one of the more insignificant, ignorable chapters in the wall-crawler’s long gaming history. Especially since Marvel’s Spider-Man released and set a new high bar for the level of quality players now expect from the hero’s open-world adventures. Writing it off entirely would be a mistake however, as after having played this for myself I can say with the utmost certainty that it was without a doubt the biggest source of inspiration for the 2018 hit. More on that in a bit though…

It’s almost hard to believe that developer Beenox could go from making one of the best Spider-Man games of all time (Shattered Dimensions) to this. Or at least it would be had they not made Edge of Time immediately after. Amazing 2 basically has the exact same problem as its predecessor, only to a much larger degree. Namely, having been rushed out to launch alongside the accompanying motion picture.

It’s not just ugly with generic placeholder fonts, menus straight out of a flash/Unity browser game, and graphics that would have looked bad on the PS3 (I got serious Magus vibes from this), but blatantly unfinished in some areas as well. The basics of web-slinging and combat work fine, yet trying to do things like transition mid-swing to wall-running or following the onscreen prompt to zip to that collectible comic book page is downright broken. The one innovative feature of a “hero/menace” system that will penalize you for not stopping random crimes around the city before they expire is honestly totally inconsequential as you can head directly to your next main objective before any penalties ever take effect and in the few instances where the story does automatically lower your reputation for you that “task force” you keep hearing will hunt you down never really bothered me. There’s clearly a final layer of polish missing on both the gameplay and presentation fronts that could have made the overall package more appealing.

Also, for a movie tie-in this has remarkably little to do with the film it’s supposedly based on. None of the actors lent their voices to the project or evidently their likenesses either as their character models look nothing like them. Plus, I highly doubt the devs were given so much as a rough first draft of the script, let alone saw any of the companion piece beforehand, because while the blockbuster’s villains do show up with similar origin stories none of its big moments are recreated here at all. Instead this does entirely its own unique thing narrative-wise. That’s not really a problem though, more just something I thought was odd enough to be worth mentioning. If anything its original tale is actually pretty good and bolstered by an appreciated surprise appearance from one of the more exciting members of Spider-Man’s extensive rogues gallery.

Although, by far the most interesting aspect of the whole experience is seeing exactly how much Insomniac’s critically acclaimed outing with the hero lifted directly from it. There’s a (sloppy) precursor for the ability to pull yourself to and perch on specific points in the environment, optional gang hideouts littered across the map, RPG mechanics complete with stuff like a skill tree, and the plot is borderline plagiarism levels of similar (a villain and a public figure team up to instill a corrupt militant presence in the city under the guise of trying to put a stop to the ever-increasing crime wave, one of Peter’s closest friends becomes a foe after losing his mind trying to stave off a looming medical condition, and symbiotes are experimented with to potentially cure a certain Osborn’s deadly illness. Sound familiar?). It’s as if they played this, saw the potential, and decided to remake it in a way.

So after all this talk, the big question is would I recommend this? The answer is no, but not for the reason you likely expect. Despite all of the aforementioned flaws, the expected mix of swinging through the air and beating up thugs Batman: Arkham-style proves mindlessly entertaining even in this incredibly jank state. Rather, it’s the price tag that’s the issue. Ever since this was removed from all digital storefronts following Activision’s license with Marvel expiring back in 2014, physical copies of the game can go for stupidly high these days. As a result I can’t suggest every Spidey fan go out and hunt one down for themselves. I do hope at least that I was able to show you how this is a bit more important, valuable, and influential than the general consensus would lead you to believe.

6/10

Resumindo: Esse jogo é extremamente medíocre, mas é divertido as vezes.

É quase impossível errar com o Miranha em um jogo. Pra mim pelo menos, tendo um web swing legal, o resto pode ser qualquer coisa. E é exatamente o que esse jogo tem. A mecânica de web swing, além de diferente dos demais jogos do personagem, é divertida. Não é um Marvel’s Spider Man (2018), com movimentos plásticos e afins, mas divertida e relativamente impressionante pra época.
O combate é uma versão simplificada do de Arkham. Nem melhor, nem pior, só mais simples mesmo. Pra ser sincero eles se inspiraram até que de mais em Arkham. Desde os aspectos de gameplay como o combate e visão de detetive do Batman, até do fato do traje se deteriorar ao longo da campanha, quase tudo que foi visto na quadrilogia da DC tem algum equivalente aqui.
A história por sua vez é básica e só uma justificativa pra andar por Nova York. Tem seus pontos interessantes, principalmente se você conhece a mitologia do Aracnídeo da Marvel, e apresenta boas mudanças em relação tanto aos filmes do The Amazing Spider Man, quanto dos quadrinhos da Marvel. Mas ainda assim é praticamente esquecível.
De pontos negativos, acho que apenas o sistema de moralidade - que é de longe um dos mais hediondos e desnecessários que eu já vi - e a parte gráfica entram nessa categoria, sendo que os gráficos são meio que qualquer coisa até mesmo pra época.

Não tem muito o que dizer sobre o jogo, é só isso mesmo. Se você busca jogar um jogo do Homem-Aranha e está no PC ou PlayStation, na minha visão não vale a pena ir atrás desse jogo. Dentro desses sistemas têm outros jogos do personagem que são ativamente melhores e que conseguem agradar mais. Agora, se você e está preso ao Xbox meio que essa é sua única opção. E se você estiver disposto a pagar a nota que pedem na mídia física dele (já que a mídia digital foi removida das lojas), vai fundo. É um jogo divertido o suficiente pra te agradar um pouquinho que seja pelas 7/8 horas que ele traz.

23

The most obvious tie-in game ever made; it seems no effort was put into any aspect of it. The combat is shallow and tries too hard to be a Arkham City rip off with none of it's charm and fluidity, you'll just be mashing buttons most of the time with half baked mechanics like the signature moves and ionic webs which feel OP and unbalanced if you're using them on normal enemies. The swinging can look pretty cool occasionally but its very janky and gets old fast because of the repeated animations and how limited it truly is. (Web rush is a stupid fucking mechanic)

The open world is extremely empty with some side content like races and gang hideouts that are the easiest, most repetitive and boring activities to do and require no skill whatsoever. You'll also be doing 30 photo investigations where you have to take a picture of the same 3 things; 10 times each, with Spider-Man repeating the same three lines despite of where you are in the story which end up not making any sense at all. There's also of course the usual tedious collectibles like the comics, oscorp crates and audio logs. Along with all of that; they introduce... the morality system and it single-handedly stopped any fun that you MIGHT of had in the end game as it basically forces you to stop petty crimes because if you don't then your menace meter will fill up and there's going to be a bunch of obstacles in the open world such as robots, turrets and these transparent walls that stop you from swinging if you hit into them... who the fuck thought that was a good idea to put into a SPIDER-MAN GAME?

The weird thing about the story is that instead of having an actual premise and a theme, the game decides to insert random fucking villains into every corner which make ZERO sense as to why they're there. The movie had problems with too many villains and they only really had 2/3, this has 7... and ALL of their boss fights are ass.

The voice acting is hilarious too, it's like they were trying to sound like their movie counterparts but completely failing at it. AND THE ANIMATIONS ARE SO UNBELIEVABLY EXAGGERATED, it literally looks like Spider-Man is drunk in every cutscene because he's swinging his arms around, almost falling down; it's genuinely funny and I applaud them for doing that because it's so bad that it's good.

I guess I only really liked the beginning of the game because it started out with that banger of a cutscene that has genuinely good writing, and it had some mindless fun from time to time, so at least it's not a complete failure.

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This is so close to being a decent game. So so close.

It starts the story awkwardly by showing Uncle Ben's death scene following how it was in the previous movie, then doing a time skip over some time after the previous game. Spider-Man starts out chasing after the mugger that shot Uncle Ben, again awkwardly mirroring the previous movie, but it ties into interrogating a soon to be Shocker who reveals a gang war, in combination with a serial killer that murders criminals, has all of them on edge and constantly struggling to get firepower on a level over the other gangs. Soon after, The Kingpin starts an agreement with Harry Osborn to create a new military police task force to keep crime in check, however this is obviously a plan by the Kingpin to prevent other gangs from having too much influence and keep his illegal business at the top, what's more, they also constantly pursue Spider-Man from this point on, using Jameson's narrative of the menace.

Spider-Man needs to learn how to better deal with these criminals, and Kraven the hunter takes an interest in training him. This story is initially set up at this point in an interesting way, but it seems like Sony and Activision weren't gonna let Beenox avoid adapting the movie this time and the movie plot points get thrown in. Meeting Max and Harry is done so awkwardly and their characters barely develop. There's a dialogue system that lets you choose question to ask characters during some cutscenes, but they don't really change anything and just boil down to if you want all the dialogue or not.

As the story progresses the game keeps shuffling between trying to follow the movie and its own ideas, which ends up in the story threads either being rushed or leading nowhere, including the Beenox standard of fighting Black Cat to pad out some extra story. While the story in the first Amazing Spider-Man game was pretty average it at least followed its own thread and wasn't held down by limitations imposed from the movie, except for some basic concepts, I'm wishing Beenox had been allowed to follow their own ideas again as they had potential but ultimately don't amount to much as is.

Now for the gameplay... I'm very mixed on the combat, different suits will boost different stats but they don't feel like they matter, the upgrades also barely feel like they make a difference and the combo system feels strange. While it may seem more polished, the actual combat just feels less satisfying to me and it's just diet Arkham but you can mash buttons and win 9/10 times. Boss fights are mostly average and they're usually the most interesting with their QTEs, just like the previous game. People say stealth is better in this game but I found it less satisfying too.

On the other hand web swinging is improved over Amazing Spider-Man 1, now you actually need to be aware of if there's something to swing off of, the camera will give you more space so you don't get nauseous and you have to swing each arm with a separate button, it's fun to get into a rhythm using both arms and it's also useful to focus on one arm while turning, combining all this with the Web Rush mechanic that lets you aim at a point so Spider-Man can rush over it, you can go really fast and it's really fun to swing around the city like this. Unfortunately the story missions still use the Spider-Man 2000 cloud swinging mechanic like in the previous game, except worse because many of them take place outdoors as well, so it feels very limiting.

The biggest problem though is what everyone talks about, the crime events, small crimes occur all the time during freeroam gameplay, they all have a time limit and a short cutscene upon completion which makes it feel like an even bigger waste of your time. The crimes you stop will boost your reputation positively, giving you a hero status, but if you don't stop them you'll reputation will keep dropping and you'll be considered a menace, which will give Kingpin's corrupt task force an excuse to try to take you down. The task force will install electric shields and automatic turrets, as well as send out drones and patrols against you, this makes the freeroam part of the game a constant race to keep your reputation up just so they don't attack you all the time AND it also doesn't stop even in the post game after you beat all the missions.

Overall while the core mechanics usually don't feel as satisfying, I think the enhanced controls could have made this game more fun than its predecessor but the crime and reputation system completely sour them as they're constantly taking your attention, it sucks that I actually like the visuals and unlockables in this game more but actually playing it is such a stress, if you're hurting for more Spider-Man then you could do worse but I wouldn't recommend seeking it out specifically. It saddens me how much potential Beenox's Spider-Man games had that was never fully realized due to their circumstances.

UPDATE: After going through Insomniac's first Spider-Man game and remembering what I liked about this one, I think even I was harsh on it. The combat simply isn't as flashy as I would have hoped but it is decently paced and serviceable, but generally the open world ideas are usually great despite the menace system being executed so obnoxiously. In the end, I do prefer this over the first Amazing game and even Insomniac's offering, mainly due to it having good ideas that Insomniac barely improved on, or even downgraded.

So obscenely underrated.

This was my childhood Spider-Man game and I still love revisiting it literally just to swing around. They really nailed the web mechanics in this one.

Captures the Webb films very well and does a great job of keeping the tradition that the Raimi games did of adapting the stories of the films while also imagining what characters from the comics that didn't appear in the films would look like in that universe.

Rushed soulless game, Good/Evil system (while realistic) sucks ass and doesn't work for a video game. Good stuff in here tho, the costume variety (even tho most are reused models) and everything involving Stan Lee is great. It also really sucks that Gwen couldn't be involved due to movie spoilers ESPECIALLY after all the involvement she had with the plot and how good she was in TASM1 game.
Much like the movie when I first experienced this I was like "huh that was decent" but then as time went on I looked back on it and realized it's crap, I guess it's pretty consistent there. I also had "Huh that was pretty good" and kept looking back more fondness as time went to TASM1, so again, quite the mirroring these games have to the movies they're based on.

it improves on very little from its predecessor (swinging through the city now requires that webs actually stick to buildings, that’s it) and adds a bunch of stuff that actively makes it a less enjoyable experience; the story throws a thousand villains at spidey and and the incessant threat of being hunted down as a public menace if you choose to not complete the wildly repetitive side content that appears on the map literally by the minute. the whole thing feels janky as fuck but it’s still a playable and mostly engaging spidey game and sometimes that’s enough