Full of potential but flawed and broken to the point of being frustrating
Odd little alien, Spidy, has lost his friend (possible girlfriend?) Virgi, while she was on a mission to earth. At least that's what I think is going on during the games wordless intro.
Her ship as apparently made a crash landing on earth and Spidy has taken it upon himself to find and rescue her.
Ultimately this simplistic story doesn't matter whatsoever, really the game is a score attack style affair. At its most simplistic the game is a 2d platform puzzler that encourages speed running and repeat plays.
The problem is every single aspect of the game makes the whole thought of playing a level more than once terrible.
You're supposed to be able to traverse through a stage collecting point orbs at high speed to chain for point rewards and finish with the highest score possible.
Traditional platforming is built upon with Spidy's ability to shoot webbing and swing through the environment.
The problem is that almost every single aspect of the game is at odds with the players enjoyment. Much like Super Meat Boy, Alien Spidy respawns you instantly on death, this makes sense as a mechanic on its own. Here though the stages are sectioned up with checkpoints. Die, get stuck or select to skip back to the last checkpoint with the Y button and your score is deducted. This isn't so bad by itself, but when you see your score is too less to complete the current challenge you have to restart the whole stage or quite out. If the level just placed you back at the start like it does with the checkpoints there would be no issues. Restart here though and your faced with a full level reload and a needlessly long load screen.
On some occasions we chose to restart the stage we were on while the start of the level was still in view on the screen. Every single time the same slow load screen appears and your punished for wanting to play again.
These level issue can be overlooked with a game that plays well, but Alien Spidy doesn't really feel good to play. It's important for a fast paced plat-former like this to feel good to control but everything you do in Alien Spidey feels terrible.
Running and general movement is just awkward, jumping is in-precise and floaty, often pushing jump wouldn't register at all. Bring in the "swing" mechanic and things just get much worse. You use the right stick to shoot web in a direction and use the left stick to control your swing. Sadly the left stick is often more likely to cause you to stop still and climb up or down your web. You loose momentum and often will find it impossible to get it back.
Shooting the web with the right stick is also quite clunky. Shots will miss more then often and the webbing you have available is short and hard to judge with regards to your own place in the world.
Once you do connect the web with something and if you do manage to keep your momentum the erratic way you will flail about in the air is just as likely to detract from what little control you had to begin with.
It might have been nice if the game allowed for the use of the D-Pad but it's utterly unused. Even navigating menus is devoid of the option to use the d-pad. While the stick is fine the lack of a d-pad option in a 2d plat-former is ridiculous.
While playing through and completing the basic stages is overly easy to progress to all of the worlds in the game you need to collect as many stage complete stars as you can. It's more than likely that you'll come to the end of world 1 and not be able to move to the next area.
You're forced to move back through all the stages you already completed and complete them again to obtain better scores and unlock more stars. The max for a stage is five stars and while at your best you may have no trouble getting the high score to unlock four or five stars. You cant unlock the four or five star ranks though, until you unlock the star below, effectively forcing you to play through a stage five times over at least to get the best rank possible even if you technically already have hit the score needed.
Once more you want to play and once more the game punishes you for doing so.
It's a game that lacks the fun of a hard yet fair and challenging experience and instead makes things harder by creating steep and unnecessary requirements for progression.
This is a massive shame as the game in concept has the potential to be so much more then this.