The Amazing Spider-Man (PS3) Review
Mark Adams / Jul 17th, 2012 No Comments
The Amazing Spider-Man : Review
In all honesty, I like Spider-Man Shattered Dimensions more than I like this new title. The Amazing Spider-Man offers an open world, free roaming World, filled with various quests taking part after the events of the film. This in itself is a huge problem for film buffs, as characters from the film appear in the game, so you know the outcome of the film on who survives and who doesn’t! You’ll find Spider-Man adversaries such as Rhino, Iguana, Vermin, Scorpion and Felicia Hardy in the game, and they all resemble their Marvel characters in quite some detail, along with using their characteristics to attack Spider-Man and generally try and make his life hell through the twenty plus missions.
Spider-Man of course would not be Spider-Man if he couldn’t use his webs to fly through the streets of Manhattan. This has always been a hit or miss affair in Spider-Man games, however this time the web-slinging seems to be just right, with new mechanics making the swinging easier and more fun. It’s called the web-rush, and one press of the shoulder button kicks in the slow-motion mode and you can see various locations that you can aim for while moving around. This is the part of the game where you can use the PS Move controller and it actually feels quite good to accurately pick out a building point and send Spider-Man to it with ease.
Taking out your enemies is standard Spider-Man fare and you can either go it all guns (webs) blazing, or you can go the stealth root and stay in the shadows and take out your opponents one by one. Shattered Dimensions handled stealth and combat well, and thankfully The Amazing Spider-Man handles these just as well. If anyone has ever played the latest Batman games, they will see the similarities that each game has. That’s not to say that Spider-Man is copying the Batman games, it’s just borrowing a great technique and applying it to the Spider-Man world.
The one problem with most open-world games is the monotony of doing missions that seem the same over and over again. Sadly, The Amazing Spider-Man suffers the same issues. You may be rescuing civilians, going through a timed event or fighting a boss, and although they may look different, they just feel the same. Fighting can be done by button mashing, and although there is an art to getting the combinations of button presses right, it really doesn’t matter when you mash.
To add depth to the game you can collect 700 comic book pages, plus other various pick-ups that unlock various things such as costumes etc. For a completest, this can be a challenge, as even I had trouble finding many of these pages. On my first run-through of the game I collected around 450 pages and the game took just over 11 hours. Now, I looked hard for these comic book pages, but I guess if I do another run-through then I will have to search even harder. Bosses are also placed in strategic places to make the game last longer, but once you discover their weak spots, they are quite easy to destroy and progress to the next level.
The Amazing Spider-Man for PS3
Sonically the game has some good tunes and some great speech. The original movie cast were not used in the making of the game, but the performances for the most part are impressive. What isn’t impressive is another common Spider-Man (and other heroes to be fair) problem of repeating the same sayings over and over again. Some things are best said once… but Spider-Man and his enemies like to repeat ad nauseam. It’s annoying!
Overall The Amazing Spider-Man is a good effort, taking the look and the feel of the film, and once again just missing out on perfection. It’s one of the better Spider-Man games, but there is still a huge room for improvement with this franchise. The potential is there for a Spider-Man game to be a stunning masterpiece, however I guess until consoles have greater power and game makers take more responsibility in their titles, there could be a long wait for a truly spectacular Spider-Man game.
Overall Ratings – The Amazing Spider-Man (PS3)
Gameplay: |
8/10 |
Sound: |
8/10 |
Graphics: |
8/10 |
Story: |
8/10 |
OVERALL SCORE: |
80% |
Mark Adams
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tags: activision , review
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