The Amazing Spider-Man is anything but

Posted by on July 9, 2012 in Reviews

The nicest thing I can say about the Amazing Spider-Man game is that it’s better than the hilariously incompetent movie.

After the jump, it’s all downhill from there

The Amazing Spider-Man is a bantamweight middleware flavorless attempt at the formula that made Batman: Arkham City so good, but with none of Arkham City’s gravity, detail, character, variety, love of lore, sense of place, and so on. It feels like the licensing cash-in that it most likely is, coming out the week of the movie’s release.

This being a Spider-Man game, you can tell pretty quickly what you’re getting with the web swinging. In this case, you’re just holding down a trigger button. At which point web swinging happens. This is a fine way to keep a game from having any meaningful Spider-Man flavor. Web swinging should never just happen. Web swinging should be something you do. It should bring with it some sense of accomplishment, exhilaration, and interactivity. It shouldn’t be something you watch. We have movies for that.

The kiss of death in an open-world game is an uninteresting world. You have to care what’s on the other side of that building. If you don’t care, the game has failed. Spider-Man fails. Despite attempts at lore and story with a photography minigame, this is New York City at its most rote. It’s small. It’s unambitious. It’s awkward. It doesn’t even look good. Open world games can no longer afford to look this perfunctory.

Although Spider-Man is a lot lighter on his feet and more twirly than the average Kratos or Caped Crusader, the combat is so Arkham City. The experience points, the upgrades, the combos, the dodging. Even the stealth is entirely familiar. During stealth missions, Spider-Man jumps from point to point to hide from bad guys shining their flashlights up into the rafters. He picks them off one-by-one, being particularly careful of the ones with guns. As if not having gargoyles up here makes it it’s own thing. It’s all such an uninspired riff on Rocksteady’s Batman masterpiece, with the stink of a mandate from a boardroom to make it like that Batman game that did so well. But Arkham City was built from the ground up because it suited the character. The Amazing Spider-Man is entirely borrowed.

1 star
Xbox 360

  • Pogue Mahone

    I like your repurposing of the term “middleware” though it did confuse me a bit at first. But having not played a Spiderman game since the Atari 2600 version you used as a screen cap here last week, I guess I will continue my streak of avoidance.

  • tomchick

    I confess I don’t really know what “middleware” is supposed to mean. To me, it’s just something middling, usually made with a generic engine, with generic artwork, with derivative gameplay, and so forth. One of these days I’ll actually figure out what the word means for real. As near as I can tell, isn’t it just another word for a driver?

  • Clay

    Middleware is the “generic engine” upon which games are built. Some are good, some are as generic as the engine. For instance: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamebryo

  • Pogue Mahone

    Close enough, dude! I also suggest that really terrible games are referred to as “backend software”, if you know what I mean.

  • Jarmo

    Middleware is a software package software developers use to avoid writing that area of needed functionality themselves. You can get middleware packages for handling audio, video playback, AI, pathfinding, drawing nice trees (really!), physics and what have you.

    I guess game engines could be called a kind of middleware but they’re usually such an integral part of the whole, handling major functionality, that usually they’re just called the game engine and “middleware” is reserved for smaller modules (though they can still be pretty big).

    Havok Physics is one well-known middleware package you see used in games a lot.

    Middleware is what makes creating such advanced games as we get today possible without going into even more insane headcounts and budgets for AAA game development. They also let smaller houses compete with the big boys. They’re pretty important.

    When you create a really good piece of software handling some special area chances are you can package and sell it as middleware. This is what many game houses end up doing and some are even transformed into middleware houses in the process. Not all great software developers can create great games, but many more can create great middleware. (That doesn’t mean middleware is somehow less important than games, it’s just a different craft.)

  • tomchick

    That’s what I thought it meant most commonly. But it seems like it originally meant drivers that go between the hardware and the software, right? Ergo, middleware.

    But enough boring programmer talk. How about that webslinger?

  • Jarmo

    I hear he’s boring this time around.

  • DiggyDog

    I actually had a lot of fun with this game. I picked it up on a whim, not expecting it to be very good, but looking forward to swinging around Manhattan.

    It was definitely heavily inspired by Rocksteady’s Batman games, but I was OK with that (I really enjoyed those games). It was not as polished or as deep, but it was a fun diversion.

    I’d give this game a solid C overall: a little rough, mostly derivative, but a fun way to put me in Spidey’s shoes.

  • DiggyDog

    Hey, where’d my comment go? Maybe it needs to be approved before it’s posted? I’m posting this one to test that theory out. Apologies for spam.

  • DiggyDog

    Hrm… no, looks like comments are immediately posted.

    Was my first comment deleted or something?

    Here it is again (condensed version):

    I had low expectations for this game and found myself enjoying it as a slightly cheap knock-off of the Arkham games done in Spiderman flavor.

    For whatever reason, I really enjoyed swinging and crawling around Manhattan (enough so that I went around finding all 700 comic book pages). The indoor sections were mostly “meh”, but I felt the game was a fun diversion which let me feel like Spiderman.

  • DiggyDog

    Ha! So all my comments are here now. Now is the time when I apologize for multiple posts while making yet another post!

    Happy gaming, folks.

  • Shahab

    Fearless Tom Chick telling it like is! This is why I read QT3. That and the awesome podcasts.

  • PearlJam

    Can someone explain to me why EVERY spider man game that is shown in trailers or previews looks pretty damn good but the actual product itself is shit? =/

    I blame game journalists as well. Hyping games in previews, etc. to no end calling it an amazing game but when the game comes out oh it’s shit =.=

    PS: That wasn’t directed at you Tom. Just venting at the gaming journalism industry in general. That’s just something that really pisses me off. Every preview I read for this game was talking about how this was the spider man game we were waiting for and of course it’s shit like all the others…

  • BDGE

    So sad to read this. I really enjoyed Beenox’s Shattered Dimensions game. Though lacking the open-world antics, they did a pretty noble job of culling from the Spiderman comic-verse and wrapping an entertaining game experience around decades of that legacy.

    At least I think so. I’ve never been a ‘fan’ to really know, but Dimensions nearly made me one. Was hoping this would end up as much a gem.

  • Anonymous

    You know…your reviews are one of the few that read like an actual human being wrote it instead of a lot of other game critics whose work just reads like a bunch of bullet points. Whether I agree or disagree with what you think of a certain game you are a very good reviewer and I consider you right alongside the good people at Rock Paper Shotgun. You can say in a few short paragraphs what it takes others to say in two pages.

  • http://twitter.com/happionlabs Jamie Fristrom

    As the inventor of the seemingly lost-in-time swinging mechanic in Spider-Man 2 it was great to read this. I totally agree – even quoted you in my blog:
    http://www.gamedevblog.com/2012/07/this-looks-promising-critics-want-energy-hook-even-if-they-dont-know-it.html

  • tomchick

    Thanks for the shout out, Jamie. Now please make another Spider-Man game.

  • http://twitter.com/happionlabs Jamie Fristrom

    Would you settle for a 3d swinging game without Spider-Man? energyhookgame.com

  • Taranto

    Que babaca. O jogo é bem legal sim. Achei até melhor que Batman. Esse otario ainda tem a coragem de dizer que o filme foi ainda pior. O filme foi excelente.

  • http://twitter.com/SatchmoBronson _

    Spider-Man 2 was pretty fucking good.