1997 was hyped up as "The Year of Spawn" by Image Entertainment. It marked his first animated series on HBO, his first live action movie from New Line Cinema and his first foray into 3D gaming on the PlayStation. While the HBO series was met with universal acclaim and awards and the movie has since found a growing cult following, Spawn: The Eternal remains the unloved black sheep of the trio. Is it as bad as its reputation has made it out to be?

Well, right off the bat, I can say that the graphics definitely get a bad wrap. By original PlayStation standards, I think they do a great job capturing the mix of Gothic Fantasy and Urban Horror that the comics were so grounded in, and if you're a big fan of the 90s Spawn comics like I am, you might find the visuals here really cool. Hell looks properly disgusting and I love how the gateway into Earth is through a subway track. I wonder if Little Nicky stole that concept from this game. As you progress through the game, there's also a solid variety of environments to engage in that Spawn comic fans should be familiar with. You have the inner cities that Spawn calls home, a Medieval kingdom, a Prehistoric wasteland and, finally, Hell itself.

The game is mostly a platformer, but will actually switch to a Tekken style fighter any time combat is engaged. While the combat is actually pretty satisfying, with great sound design, brutal finishers and a surprising amount of strategy involved to take down enemies, the platforming is where the game severely suffers. Spawn himself relies on tank controls to move, which I don't necessarily mind, since Spawn himself has always been more of a tanky character, but jumping never seems to go as far as you want too. Even when you carefully plan out your jumps, there are a lot of poorly designed pitfalls in the game that you'll only get through on dumb luck. While fun, the levels are very repetitive. You collect orbs, fight a couple henchmen, collect more orbs and move onto a boss.

There also isn't much of a story, beyond awkward and jarring cutscenes with painfully distorted audio (which is very odd, given how solid the sound design in the actual game is), which is a major disappointment. I suppose it's better to have minimal story than a bad one, as we got with Spawn: Armageddon, but with the repetitive design of the levels, there's little reason to push through unless you're really a hardcore Spawn fan, other than the decent variety of world designs and surprisingly satisfying variety of boss fights.

Contrary to what a lot of people may claim, Spawn: The Eternal isn't the worst PlayStation game. It's not even the worst Spawn game. And if you're a huge fan of the Spawn comics with a soft spot for early polyganal PlayStation games, like I am, you might find the game pretty cool. It's got a solid combat system, some eerie sound design and an authentic visual aesthetic taken straight from the comics and properly translated within the limitations of the PlayStation's graphics. I won't die on a hill defending this game like I will the movie, but I still have a lot of fun with it despite its flaws.

Paul Dini is what annoying people on the internet incorrectly think George Lucas is; a shadow of his former self, a hack who puts spectacle over story.

Arkham Asylum is what people incorrectly think the prequels are, minus the claims of bad acting those films get, as the cast is...Mostly fine. The wickedly talented Arleen Sorkin is so off her game I didn't even recognize her and Mark Hamill's performance is nowhere near the quality of what he gave us in The Animated Series. Hell, he's scarier in DC Universe Online than he is here in an overdesigned Joker where I can't even tell what direction they were going for. It's almost as bad as what was done to the character on Gotham. That being said, Kevin Conroy, Tasia Valenza and Dino Andrade turn in great performances and I'm an enormous fan of all 3. But the character writing is absolutely atrocious. It's the kind of thing that would be laughed at if it were in a comic and compared to a Rob Liefeld story with art design that's the shitty imitation of a 90s Image comic. Just total grimdark nonsense where nobody is a character outside Dini just projecting his weird misogyny that was rampant in his work around this time (look at his Detective Comics run and it feels like it was written by an incel)

Boss fights are unimaginative and none of the characters feel like who they're supposed to be. Bane has no intelligence, Ivy is a strawman of an eco-feminist, Scarecrow is weak and totally ineffective, Joker is weirdly brute force focused in a way that feels like Dini was poorly attempting to write The Violator rather than the Clown Prince of Gotham.

Fuck this game. Arkham Knight is the only good game in this wretched trilogy even with all its flaws in gameplay. It has a story that's interesting and coherent and characters that felt mature and fleshed out as people and not just caricatures.