Spider-Man 2: Enter Electro Preview

By Miguel Lopez, GameSpotPosted Aug 13, 2001 6:45 pm PT

We go hands-on with this upcoming PlayStation sequel.

Last year's Spider-Man was a definite hit on the PlayStation. Developed by the team responsible for the technological marvel Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, Spider-Man was arguably the first video game ever to faithfully translate the comic book experience. Neversoft's Spider-Man really could do anything his newsprint counterpart could: swing from rooftop to rooftop, wallcrawl on any surface, and even perform a host of elaborate web tricks. While the game was technically a bit temperamental--an overly functional camera often undermined the onscreen action--the inconvenience was never serious enough to warrant putting down the controller.

Doing that swing thing.

The game's upcoming sequel, developed by Vicarious Visions, uses the same solid technological base to deliver an experience with an altogether different flavor. Titled Spider-Man 2: Enter Electro, the game seems to put a bit more of an emphasis on combat, resulting in a game with a greater feeling of impending violence than its predecessor. Also somewhat new to the sequel are a series of free-roaming stages, which force you to do a bit of exploration as you tackle nonsequential level objectives. These stages, at first, seem a bit disorienting to players of the original, though they do explore an aspect of the wallcrawler not touched upon in the first game: that of the street-peeping, silent sentinel.

The game's foundation, however, has changed little. Certainly, it's difficult for Vicarious Visions to go wrong--aside from the solid technological base at its disposal, the developer is working with one of the most intricately workable control schemes designed in recent times. Somehow the developers of the original managed to map most of Spider-Man's powers to the PlayStation controller, and--even more surprisingly--they made it all work coherently. As you'd imagine, a whole bunch of web functions had to be coded in to successfully achieve a believable Spider-Man. And impressively enough, most of the web tricks you'd associate with the superhero--if not all of them--are available: You can use your webs to swing from platform to platform, entangle enemies, create projectiles, and even erect exploding web shields. Most of the offensive functions are mapped to the triangle button, requiring you to input different directional commands for each effect. The movement-associated web functions, conversely, are mapped to the shoulder buttons, with R2 enacting the webswing and R1 triggering the impressive zip line. The latter effect is especially useful and functional--it causes Spidey to automatically "zip" to the surface opposite him, be it from ground to ceiling or wall-to-wall.

Spider-sense looks cool, and works even better.

Some subtle contributions have been made to Spider-Man 2: ice and shock webbing. Though you could use fire webbing to defeat the symbionts in the original game, its effects didn't really do much other than up the amount of damage you did. These two new types, however, have some pretty defined effects. As you'd imagine, the ice webbing freezes enemies, while the shock webbing momentarily paralyzes them. While they don't quite add a new dimension to the gameplay, it is fun--as such things tend to be--to mess around with their effects.

In any event, we managed to spend quite a bit of time exploring Spider-Man's latest virtual playground. Read on for impressions of some of the new areas.

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