🕑 Added 2015-03-04 02:44:50 +0000 UTC
Quick Critique: Amazing Spider-Man 2
Amazing Spider-Man 2 was made by a studio that seemingly just didn't care. From the writing to the camera to the controls, nothing about ASM2 feels like anybody cared how it turned out. The swinging control is terrible and feels like a downgrade from the first game, and that was a title where you could web-swing off of clouds and nothingness. Here though, you can be between two skyscrapers and Spider-Man will complain that there's nothing to web onto and plummet to the ground. Not only is it frustrating that you keep losing your path and falling, but it means you have to keep listening to the annoying beep noise when it won't swing and listening to Spider-Man's terrible voice clips. Because web-swinging is so bad, you wind up zipping everywhere, but that makes the whole game feels like a QTE. Press R over and over to zip to your objectives, no choice in fights just mash and dodge as needed, QTEs to fight bosses or end encounters, and entire events that are played by QTEs. Mock the stupid "find the balloon!" events from the older games, but at least you actually interacted with the game to do that. The camera cannot handle tight corners and it swings around in combat. I think it's intended to be a camera flourish when you put an enemy down, but in reality it just means that the camera is no longer facing the other group of enemies trying to kill you. "Thankfully" the combat doesn't require any intelligence. It's an even button mashier version of the Arkham Asylum system, so just keep pressing punch and then press the counter button when the prompt appears and you'll be fine. A later enemy incorporated the oh so tricky "HOLD attack to stun him first". As bad as the combat is, it really cements that the Wii U Game Pad is a terrible controller for action games. ASM2 uses all of the triggers, the buttons, clicking in the analogue sticks, and even the select buttons, and so little of that flows well because of the controller's design. On the one hand, that's Nintendo's fault for releasing that atrocity, but if you know what you have to work with, you refine the game's controls to lessen its weaknesses. Forcing somebody to press R and ZR at the same time at a moment's notice is not using the hardware properly.
This game has loading times. Long ones. Frequent ones. Frequently long ones. Frequently long ones that are highly unnecessary. It loads into a "news report" after completing every tiny side-objective, but you have to do them or face a stat and gameplay penalty so you get stuck in them a lot. It even glitches during the loads. After a two minute load, I figured that it was frozen, but every time I pressed the power button, the game would lurch forward a little, and after repeated power presses, the game hiccuped back to life and drove its husk forward again. It would have been more merciful if it stayed dead. Once I got to the forced stealth section, I called it quits. I could get to the objective without being seen, but the game wouldn't progress, so I thought you had to kill all the enemies. After killing all the enemies, the "Awareness Meter" just kept going up and I failed. After failing six more times for reasons I wasn't really sure about or due to the crappy camera and controls, off to be sold went Spider-Man 2.
Even failing basic gameplay functionality, the game isn't a pleasure to look at either. The character designs are just weird. Everybody is really lanky and stretched out. Any time Spider-Man holds a phone to his ear, he has like gorilla arms that are way too long. The cutscenes are poorly written, the voice actors are passable (outside of Steve Blum, who I pray is just doing this to pay some debts), and the scenes have a feeling of "it's good enough". In your introduction to Aunt May, she spends the whole scene with her arm clipping through the pillow next to her. Not even just a little, everything from her elbow down is moving in and out of the pillow. The lip synch doesn't even remotely match the dialogue, either. Somebody really put a lot of love into this game. Stan Lee's comic store has a lot of real Spider-Man comic art in it, but it takes on a creepy tone when these are people that actually exist in the game's world. Stan has a boobs and butt shot of Black Cat next to him but to Stan, that's not a comic character, it's a real person that didn't pose for that shot and doesn't actually wear that costume. That would be like going to your local comic book shop and seeing sexy posters of terrorists off the FBI's most wanted list! That's super weird and I'm not supposed to go down this rabbit hole of thinking. And you shouldn't go down the route of actually playing this game.
