Difficulty:

Hard

Time Spent:

20 to 40 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Disastrous"

I hate Activision. I hate them so much. I swear they are bent on ruining video games for the entire world and have done more to destroy the industry then all the Jack Thompsons combined. Despite their best efforts to publish nothing but garbage, two of my top 5 games from 2010 were surprisingly awesome Activision published games; Spiderman Shattered Dimensions and Transformers War for Cybertron. Seeing that they achieved some minor success with these titles Activision decided to force both developers to produce a sequel within a year and with a smaller budget. Transformers Dark of the Moon was a travesty and it's no surprise Spiderman Edge of Time is even worse.

Just looking at the numbers objectively, Spiderman Edge of Time is a quarter of the game SD was. Instead of 4 Spidermans we have 2. Instead of 4 different types of Spidermans with separate worlds, combat styles, enemies and the awesome Spiderman Noire stealth sections. We have 1 of each thing I just listed and no stealth at all. Instead of over a dozen classic Spiderman villains that everyone knows and loves, we have three lame uninspired boss fights that last forever against obscure nobodies; Anti-venom (wtf), Black cat and her army of clones (wtf) and some goof that was invented for the game. Why even use the Spiderman IP if you're not going to use a single one of the villains?

The strength of comic book characters is that people already know and appreciate the canon. Just drop the name Venom and nerds like me are half way there. Batman Arkham City knows this and did a great job of taking a ton of established villains, giving them a great little twist and fleshing them out. Spiderman SD did this well too, but to a much lesser extent. Spiderman EoT tries to focus on a single, paper thin plot that is extremely poorly executed, makes no sense, and has no internal consistency, ignoring the strengths of the canon and doing a terrible job.

This isn't even really Spiderman. You have these time distortion powers that make copies of yourself and freeze enemies. Wtf does that have to do with Spiderman? These aren't his powers. Again, why even call this game Spiderman? Have some respect for the character and save him the embarrassment of being associated with this drivel.

This game is worse on every level and just stinks of less resources, time and effort. This feels like a second rate movie game. The Green Lantern game felt more polished, varied and complex. Spiderman EoT has all the hallmarks of a terrible game. One environment for the entire game. Three types of enemies repeated over and over. Backtracking across the exact same locations reused several times.

It's probably a bad thing that I just finished Batman Arkham City, the pinnacle of third person controls, combat and movement, because next to that masterpiece this disaster feels worse than brutal. Suffice it to say that as far as combat, movement, and controls, they all suck so badly in this game. The wall climbing is so nauseatingly frustrating it's mindboggling. Combat is an unresponsive mess. You basically just mash square constantly and hope that Spiderman decides to actually punch towards an enemy. And the powers used in combat make no sense. Sometimes using the time distortion blocks an attack, sometimes it doesn't. Against anti-venom he would charge, you use the decoy, he grabs your decoy, you move to the back to attack him and you still get hurt somehow while punching his back. It's nonsense.

Another annoyance is that everything requires mashing the circle button. Blowing your nose requires mashing circle. When will developers learn that it's just so freaking irritating? Just let me open a chest or a door or whatever with a single button press. There's nothing fun or exciting or redeeming about mashing a button for mundane in-game tasks.

This game is the definition of meaningless level progression. In good games, levels and conflict are tied directly to a story so that it doesn't feel like you're given tasks just for filler. In bad games meaningless problems are pulled out of thin air. Opps now we need 3 power couplings, opps now we need to retrieve a data card, opps now get some energy sources. And that's the entire Spiderman game! All 17 levels of this garbage game would be one, maybe two levels in a real game, that's how incredibly thin the experience is. And it uses the same gag of changing the past to affect the future like three hundred times.

I'm pretty sure this game is my front runner for worst game of 2011. The moral of the story is that if by some stroke of unholy luck Activision happens to publish a decent game... enjoy it because they will destroy the game with an awful rushed sequel within 8 months. Poor Spiderman...