Spider-Man's been called Spectacular. Sensational. Astonishing. But in The Amazing Spider-Man for Nintendo's 3DS, he's not quite worthy of such impressive adjectives. Good? Certainly. Fun? No question. But "Amazing" would be a bit too generous.
The game picks up where this summer's new film leaves off, meaning anyone too concerned about story spoilers will want to wait until after the movie actually opens in theaters to bring this one home – you can get along just fine without any connection to the flick, though, as the basics are the same as always. You're Spider-Man, you've got super-strength, can crawl on walls and have tons of webs to throw around, and you've got a whole lot of thugs, robots and would-be super-villains to knock across the screen.
Previous adaptations bringing Spidey into video game form have emphasized different aspects of his character, particularly the freedom of his webslinging around New York City. Beenox's latest interpretation here pulls back on that go-anywhere approach, though, and instead more commonly boxes our hero into a series of contained interior environments. It's concerning at first – Spider-Man without huge, open spaces to zip around at your whim seems like a limited idea – but the claustrophobia ends up working in the game's favor by highlighting the hero's considerable combat variety.
Say you're entering a room filled with gun-toting security guards – a common scenario. You can choose to dash straight in on foot, hammering the Y Button to punch-and-combo the enemies into submission. Or, alternatively, you could crawl in on the wall and target the same foes from a distance with web attacks – "Web Rushing," as it's now called – to fly straight at a target, kick him in the head, then just as quickly retreat back to the safe position you started from to be out of range of retaliation.
Then, beyond those approaches, you can also pick to play most missions in full-on stealth mode – hanging out on the ceiling, targeting enemies from above, and dropping straight down to encase them in web cocoons that you then lift straight back up and attach to the ceiling. The other enemies in the area look around, confused, wondering where their friend just disappeared to. And then you rinse and repeat the process, until the whole room in cleared of goons and decorated with suffocating, web-wrapped bodies up above.
This is when The Amazing Spider-Man is at its best. Having so many different options at your disposal for dealing with the same groups of enemies opens back up that sense of freedom that you might have feared would be lost by the game's lack of wide-open spaces to websling across.
It's when that feeling of freedom is compromised, though, that this experience feels less than Amazing.
Some sequences feel far too scripted. "Web Rushing," which works by slowing down time to represent Peter's Spider-Sense, is relied upon too often – there are boss battles in particular where it feels like all you're doing is activated the slow-time mode, looking around to find the next highlighted target and zipping along almost on auto-pilot. These sequences are cinematic and look great, but aren't as much fun as when you're allowed to choose your own approach in dealing with a situation.
The game also drops the ball on navigation from time to time, breaking the flow of a mission – you'll effortlessly jump from one situation and battle to the next, then occasionally get stuck in a room with no good clue of which way "forward" is supposed to be. And, speaking of getting turned around, the angles the camera swings between to keep track of a hero who can literally turn any interior surface into "the floor" can become dizzying – especially in 3D.
The 3DS system's signature visual effect adds depth and definition to Spider-Man's environments when you're progressing at a slow enough pace, but the webhead moves so quickly and the camera whips around so wildly to showcase his animations that it's hard to imagine most players will keep the 3D turned on long in this one.
Other unique aspects of Nintendo's handheld are utilized too, but none really enhance the experience – simple touch-screen mini-games are peppered throughout many missions in traditional DS system style, and the 3DS gyroscopes briefly come into play when this version of Peter Parker picks up a camera partway into the adventure.
Source : ign[dot]com
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