I dunno. I don't think this game is bad enough to call it soulless shovelware garbage, but I don't think it's good enough to be called a good game too. It just feels like somethings missing but I can't quite put my finger on it. The swinging looks great, but feels like nothing. The combat looks great, but has no substance. The city looks amazing, maybe actually the best a city has looked during the seventh generation (yes I am including GTA V) particularly the night, and dawn settings, but it feels flat. The city is filled with things to do, and details littered throughout but feels empty. I just don't know.
What I do know. This game has loading screens. A lot of them. And they are LONG. Like 3+ minutes for every one. And, if you start mission, end a mission, reach a checkpoint, die, do some mundane task, beat an enemy, beat a boss, your reward is another 3 minute loading screen. It gets worse. This game crashes. A LOT. The longest I've played without a crash is only 1 hour and 30 minutes, and what do you know, every time you open the game, you get greeted with another 3 minute loading screen. It's terrible. I almost dropped the game because of it. I thought I had installed it on my slow hard drive but nope. It was on my SSD, it's just that slow of a game to load.

I’m not sure what it is with the Spider-Man series, but the movie based versions are always the best. This is usually opposite with video games, but it doesn’t deny this strange truth with Spider-Man. The best Spidey game, in my opinion, was Spider-Man 2 based on the Sam Raimi movie. The huge open world was unheard of a game like this back then, and the graphics, at the time, were astounding. It felt high budget, and despite copying the movie, was really amazing. TASM follows suit as well with some tricks up its sleeve.


This game is actually a sequel to the recent movie and is highly entertaining. You play as Spidey and are trying to take down the cross-species that Oscorp created. The bad guy here is Alistair Smythe who runs this place, and this is how the movie ties in. Spidey needs Doctor Connors to create a cure, but he’s locked up in an asylum after the events in the movie. The story is entertaining, but none of the actors from the movie take apart here which is probably good. The characters resemble the movie characters but look a little different. This is how you do a movie based game right.

The game is more cinematic than previous entries just by the way the camera is angled. The combat is pretty satisfying with using just one attack button, but the animations are so fluid and entertaining that you won’t care. Spider-Man doesn’t have a health bar but regenerating health. When you take too many hits (he can only take a few) you have to use the retreat feature which has Spidey flying off into a corner away from enemies to heal. Use Web Strike to immediately go right back into the fight which is awesome. Once enemies are stunned you can use special moves, and all these moves are upgraded by finding tech pieces throughout the game. One of my favorite things is the stealth mechanic which is done right for the first time in a Spider-Man game. Crawling on the ceiling shows a purple web radius under you and when guards are on it Spidey will drop down, wrap them up and hang them from the ceiling. The health system makes you use this feature because you can’t dodge enemies with guns. Your Spidey sense will turn red and this means the attack isn’t dodgeable. Use a quick web retreat and try the stealth again. Very satisfying and well done.


Of course, this wouldn’t be a complete Spidey experience without a huge open Manhattan to explore with side quests. Like Spider-Man 2 there are many missions like saving citizens from crimes, various timed side quests, collecting comic pages, police chases, and various others. They are a lot of fun at first but grow repetitive towards the end. Swinging around as Spidey is just so much fun and the well-done animations help this a lot.

The only big issue is that the layout of levels repeats often. Disable this lock, take down these turrets, beat up these enemies, turn this valve. It’s all very mundane, and even the boss fights are really easy with little challenge. Thanks to all the other elements being very solid you can look past this enough to get through the game. At least the graphics are fantastic, especially on PC. Beenox took the time to give PC users higher resolution textures and better-looking everything. This is rare in a movie based game to see such attention to detail. There are some game breaking bugs and glitches that were never addressed on PC and that is a real shame.


Overall, TASM is a solid Spider-Man game and probably one of the best yet. This is how you do movie based games right. The story is entertaining, the combat is solid and fun, and exploring Manhattan is a lot of fun. The graphics are amazing, but I can’t help but feel annoyed by the repetitive level layout and easy boss fights. This is well worth a purchase, and even if you don’t like the movie you will enjoy this.

It looks rough on the Wii, and I'm dying to play the Xbox 360 version when I get one, but even still, I enjoyed the fresh approach to playing as Spider-Man. Swinging is basically the same as in the first movie tie-in game back in 2002 (at least for the Wii version) so it's not a problem for me as long as the controls are responsive.

At first I was disappointed by the fighting, which is mostly based on timing and then Spidey does everything else for you, but when I learning to mix things up I enjoyed shaking the Wiimote on time and watching him beat robots, freaks and crooks up.

Can't help but feel a little robbed when I watch the gameplays of the other versions but I have FOUR other games that have that (SM, SM2, SM3, Ultimate, Web of Shadows) so I kinda appreciated just going straight into missions.

Unexpectedly, I got really into it and enjoyed the plot a lot. It was better than the movie's. Wish we could have see this on the big screen instead, Garfield would have better reputation as Spider-Man.

The Amazing Spider-Man was special to me as a teenager. I was a Nintendo kid, and back in 2012 my house was still over a year out from owning an HD TV — not to mention any consoles that could take advantage of such technology. to get my gaming fix, I had the Wii and all its access to Virtual Console games, and my beloved Nintendo handhelds. all this to say: I was used to getting the short end of the stick when it came to current gen games, and content to play watered down ports if they came over to the Wii at all. so when this game got a 3DS release — one which bore the weight of everything but the open world from its console counterpart — I was suitably amazed.

I bought The Amazing Spider-Man the day it released, a month before the movie came out, spoiled the hell out of the movie’s ending, and had a great time. then I gave myself that great time again, and again, and again. long car trips, at friends' houses, suspended above my head on late summer nights in my teenagerly loft bed; The Amazing Spider-Man went with me wherever I brought my 3DS. what the handheld port of this game was able to achieve is still impressive, and now after playing both the slightly upgraded Ultimate Edition on Wii U as well as its original release on the PS3, I can say with certainty that it is the ideal way to play. The Amazing Spider-Man benefits tremendously from the lower expectations that come with gaming on the go.

playing this game on a big screen, eight years later: its failures are impossible to ignore — and so are its petty thefts. The Amazing Spider-Man is a cheap Arkham clone through and through. normally I would hesitate to draw direct comparisons — I hardly think the Arkham games are great enough to cudgel other games against — but this game is blatant about lifting the design philosophy of that series. problem is, it lacks all of the polish of their combat and exploration formulae.

items are strewn across levels seemingly at random, often blending into the drab and forgettable environments. upgrades those items help you unlock are very clearly gated behind specific narrative points in the game, so it never feels like you’re any more powerful than the game intends you to be. there are only ever a few (if more than one) open upgrade tracks to apply your tech/level points to. the game could have rewarded the player with a new ability at the end of every story mission, and there would have been no difference in the pace of progression. there is no purpose to the EXP system, as a result. just a nice little bar-go-up animation, which sure feels like progress — until you think about it for any longer than it appears on screen.

as for the combat system, enemy attack animations are finicky and the reach of their attacks are never concrete, at some points allowing them to slide halfway across the floor to reach you. Arkham’s harder difficulties test the player by taking away attack indicators and shortening response time, while keeping animations consistent. if this game were to do the same, it would be virtually impossible, as attack patterns and animations are much too imprecise to telegraph anything to the player. you need that buzzing Spider-Sense to survive, no matter how skilled you grow to be at mashing the punch and dodge buttons.

all of this is made dramatically worse the second the game throws a giant robot at you. here's one way in which this game is genuinely unique from the Arkham series: Batman never got to swing around at mach speed fighting mechs.
with these boss battles, Beenox has offered an addition to the formula they spend the rest of the game ripping off, though much like WB Montreal broke the combat system's back with shitty additions in Arkham Origins, the folks at Beenox completely lose track of the design at the heart of their stolen combat system.

for context: this time around I played the game on the hardest difficulty. this was both an effort to speed up the acquisition of PSN trophies, and because I’ve played the game a dozen times in my life. the god darn robot bosses were the worst part of the experience. on every difficulty, they’re glorified quick time events. you wait around for them to finish whatever laser they’re blasting, maybe shoot them with some webbing, then press the Spider-Man Stuff button (R1 on PS3) and watch as Spider-Man does an attack for you. if you’re unlucky, that attack may require you to mash the circle button to make him punch/pull/web extra hard. riveting stuff. on Super Hero difficulty, the already repetitive boss fights become rigorous exercises in tedium and frustration, as said laser attacks —

(often undodgeable! by the way! you just have to hope and pray that Spider-Man is at the right point in his swing animation to avoid them. hope and prayer are two game mechanics I was not expecting to encounter)

— will kill you in one to two hits and force you to fight through all the phases of the fight again, pressing R1 and mashing circle until either your finger cramps, your eyes dry out, or you fall asleep. these fights weren’t designed for Super Hero difficulty. neither was the rest of the game. it’s clear the only consideration involved in difficulty settings was swapping around a few numbers on enemy health and damage output.

the game isn’t too visually impressive either. it is not as egregious as its sequel; I mean, textures aren’t disappearing in front of your eyes, and you never have to stare down a painfully off-model Peter Parker face — but it's still not worth celebrating. even keeping the limitations of the PS3 in mind, this game is hard on the eyes. a painful yellow/sepia filter is put on the city in an attempt to look more realistic, and while that impressed me as a young teen watching an E3 reveal trailer, nowadays it makes the game look completely washed out. doesn’t help much that all the level environments are grey hallways or brown/green sewers, wherein the only flashes of color are the visually grating lens flares leaping off of computer screens or florescent lights. I’m glad I wore blue light glasses while playing this game; I may have saved myself another year before all my screen-staring makes me go blind.

there are plenty of other nitpicks. the fact that traversing the city to find comic pages feels just a bit too slippery, that webs are back to attaching to nothing, that the writing is truly hack (they take away Peter’s powers and then don’t use that as an opportunity to explore how his sense of responsibility works without them! he just gets them right back after you finish the “no web swinging” bit! how lame!), that the voice acting is so subpar even Nolan North sounds asleep at the microphone; but at this point all those things are just ugly ornaments on a tree that’s already falling over. I can’t say I’d recommend this to anyone other than the most seasoned Spidey fan, but if they’re like me, they wouldn't have a particularly good time either. I should have left this in my memory as a wonderful 3DS experience.

this game rocked my fucking world when i was like 13, it felt like the spider-man game i had always wanted. on replay (especially with the context of insominac's spider-man) a lot of that charm is gone but i still think this is really solid as a spider-man game! a lot of my bias is from my first play through but even on replay i think combat is solid and swinging is really flashy but nothing super special. i do think the comic book pages are really neat and a fun way to pass some time just swinging around new york.

I had the Wii version of this game, so before anyone says "it's not that bad..." it is.
On Xbox and Ps3 I could maybe see the game in a better light because it had the open world and a variety of suits (some more interesting than others:

Cross Species Suit, Raimi Suit, Amazing Spiderman Black Suit [interpretation based on the ASM1 suit], and the Raimi Black Suit)

The problem is the wii version only featured: ASM1 Suit, Raimi Spiderman Suit, and Black Suit (which did not have the Venom Logo) it was just a desaturated Raimi Suit. And thats it.

The story takes a detour from the movie, which is both cool and stupid considering it just makes the "movie" game feel more like a comic book adaption for a game. Which is great because it allows you to do ridiculous shit, but still it's pretty dumb when comparing it to Spiderman 3 PS2/PS3/Xbox 360.

The whole cross species genetic villians was both cool and stupid because they could've done what Spiderman 3 game did and have the the extra stuff take place during the movie stuff. Like KingPin, Kraven, Scorpion, etc, in between the moments like Sandman vs Symbiote Spiderman, or the final boss against Sandman and Venom.

But no this game doesn't have doctor Conners in it, just some smart dude in a wheel chair who wants to take over New York by using cross species genetics to mutate people... while riding a giant mechanical spider like wtf.

Maybe the Xbox 360/PS3 versions are great, but the wii version is awful. It doesn't have an open world, it just shoves you into a level. Also really don't like how this game essentially teases the death of Gwen Stacey... oh wait... nope this game just kills her off... like wtf. Like anyone heres who has watched ASM2 knows she dies. But because this game isn't based off the movie... sort of. It says "fuck it kill her now"
What an awful game.