I like Spawn, its an Arcade game. Fun for multiplayer, but for anything else, no.
I recently picked this up at a flea market for five bucks. For a game that came out just a few years ago, that sounds insane, but then you play it. And realize its a dreamcast game. But hey, the dreamcast was really good. It was just the gamecube of 99. This is a fighting game, so you should already realize its going to be short and kind of dull to play by yourself. But at least you've got a good license, guns, and swords. Oh, and the Violator. The absolute coolest thing for me, so far, has been the ability for you to turn into the Violator at will as the clown. Whats even cooler is it starts you off with the clown unlocked.
I guess its time to rip into it:
Gameplay: ARGH! Why do licensed games have to play like balls? The recent Punisher game played really well. So have the last two Spider-Man games. So why can't spawn get a decent game translation? The one on playstation was beyond redemption. This one to be honest isn't so bad. Its just like any other fighting game it has a few throw away characters. Not that the characters themselves are week, its just that when you have Spawn, The Clown, and guys who are robotic and giant, who wants to be a regular human?
The game has two modes: Arcade and Tournament. In Arcade mode, you pick your character and fight against boss characters in a set enviroment. Most of them are decent, but a few feel like copy paste jobs with just a little tweaking done to make them look different. A few stages are really big and contain multiple layers, fire pits, that sort of thing. Tournament mode is basicly the same, except multiplayer. You try to beat another team to get points by killing them. But you can also set up arcade as a multiplayer game. The controls are decent at best, I've been unable to find a block button though. X attacks, A jumps, B changes your weapon(of which you have up to four), the back right trigger is another attack, and Y and the left trigger held down makes you go into a first person mode. Some of the later bosses are cheaper then Baraka or Goro could ever be. Their about 4 times your size, breath out fire, and are just plain butt.
Graphics: Their okay. Nothing to go down in history books like Shenmue or Sonic, but for a 3D game they are pretty good. The character models anyway. Some of the stage textures look like ass. Ever see a tree with ass on it? Well play spawn and you'll see a lot of them.
Sound: ARGH AGAIN! The music is pretty bad. Rock or Techno are the choices. Except you don't have a choice.The sounds are about like a comic books pow, zip, slash, whatever noises. Guns sound like guns.
If you like Spawn, you'll like this. If you own a DC and want a multiplayer game and hate sports. You'll also like it. Split screen works really well and you've got a big set of characters (if you unlock them, which I'm working on doing myself now) and stages (again, unlockable) to play in. You can't really rent DC games anywhere anymore, so if you see it buy it. I got mine for 5$ and for a game of this quality, thats exactly what I'd expect to pay. I've not noticed a hint of a story in this thing yet eithar. So if you're expecting the Spawn mythos in game form, you're mistaken. Really, if you want the Spawn experience but don't want to read a bunch of books and put up with the image multiverses crappy ripoff characters (like chapel or supreme) you should just watch the movie or cartoon. But for the real Spawn, read the first 20 books. I can vouch for those as being good. After twenty it goes to hell, in more ways then one.