Pretty goofy. Spidey has Namor, Black Cat, and Hawkeye tagging along for some reason (well, the reason is that this is a beat 'em up and Spider-Man doesn't really have any sidekicks for players 2 through 4 to be) and despite that seemingly varied bunch, everyone looks and plays the same, i.e. incredibly basic belt-scrolling brawler moveset. The look is all over the place with scanned-in background elements clashing with hand-drawn stuff, but most awkward is the gigantic character sprites, which all appear to have been rotoscoped from the same goofy-looking reference actor, so all these superheroes and villains are tall and lanky and have bad posture. It is hilarious to watch a gangly six-foot-eight Spider-Man loaf around the screen with a hunched back - seriously, look up some shots of this.

Anyway, it's pretty stiff and boring. The only halfway-interesting idea is these weird interludes in each level where the camera zooms out, the sprites scale down, and it briefly becomes a very strange run-and-gun platformer that doesn't work well at all. Kudos for trying to spice the levels up and introduce some scale, but like everything else in this, it's awkward and cut-rate.

Not Sega's finest hour in the arcades. Nor Spider-Man's. Maybe Namor's though!

Reviewed on Dec 15, 2021


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