Scary Because It’s True

I hate it when it happens. Mostly while creating comics, but sometimes with games. And for some reason, where I live, any time it rains in the summer, you can be sure that the power is going out.

I played through the new batman game Amazing Spider-Man. It is not what I would call a “good game”. But there are things to like. The sense of vertigo, for one. The wanna-be Arkham Asylum/City combat? Not so much. It’s too jerky. It’s like they stole the foundation of Batman’s combat but forgot to go back and steal the rest of the building. In AC, when you get to new game plus, all visual alerts that let the player know when they will be attacked (and by what) are stripped away, leaving the player to recognize hostile animations and react accordingly. This would be impossible in The Amazing Spider-Man.

Fighting the Hunter robots in the sky, I thought, was executed very well. These moments felt very Spider-man. I never lost track of what I was fighting, all the while soaring through the Manhattan skyline, dispatching Oscorp robots.

Unfortunately, the biggest problem was anything story related. From the locales to the cutscenes to the pacing of enemy encounters, it was clear I was dealing with a second rate Arkham Asylum/City. Where those games show respect for the universe of Batman, and a true passion for the story they were telling, ASM shoehorns crappy dialogue and overly long cutscenes that feel flat. They could be part of any game, serving only to point you to your next objective. About halfway through, I started skipping them. It’s not as if it was hard to figure out what was going on anyway.

The gadgets in this game also feel completely useless. In the Arkham games, they serve as necessary upgrades that allow for progression to otherwise inaccessible areas, or as a new way to deal with enemies. A lot of times it’s both. Sure, Batman is a gadget-based superhero. He needs them shits. Spider-Man doesn’t usually require such things, but if you’re putting them in the game, make them count!

This sounds like a lot of naysaying, and it is, so let me at least say this: I never once had a problem with the webs seemingly sticking to air, as some have noted. It was fine.

I’m hoping Beenox gets a second chance at this type of Spider-Man game. This is certainly the right direction.