I don't feel like a very cynical gamer. I can find enjoyment in virtually any genre, and production that varies between an annual military-setpiece-a-thon and an interactive fiction video game about being in an interactive fiction video game.
I came into "The Amazing Spider-Man 2" (referred to now as "ASM2") with an honest readiness to enjoy myself with what I was getting. A multiplatform movie-based jaunt into the same basic open world we've been swinging in since The PS2's original "Spider-Man 2".
The fact that Beenox was developing this game was an immediate feather in its cap. "Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions" was a great game, and I'm willing to excuse the clumsiness of its spiritual successor. After all, ASM2 already has the theme, structure, and even the world itself laid out in many prior incarnations.
That's where the problems begin.
From the very first time I swung from a simulated line of webbing, Spider-Man was stepping into parts of the geography. The camera shook not with the roars of some aberrant villain, but because my point of view was struggling to rectify being near a building. ;If you haven't played a Spider-Man game, or read one of the comic books, or experienced one of the five(!) major motion pictures about him... Well, being near buildings happens a lot. Crawling, running, swinging, and jumping are all dumbfounded by being near pretty much anything.
It gets worse when you've entered one of these nightmare inducing structures, and at times I felt like perhaps some deranged Beenox programmer was channeling H.P. Lovecraft. Shattered dimensions, indeed.
The combat doesn't so much recall the genuinely enjoyable Arkham Batman games, as plagiarize the concept in the most messily diluted way possible. Bright red bolts flashing around the web-head's...uh, head...directed me to mash the triangle button instead of the square. What about jumping? What about spraying things with your sticky web fluids until they are immobilized and overwhelmed by its sheer volume? To do that, you'd have to aim. With the camera. Specifically, you need to place a small white dot on top of an enemy to do so. Once again, The Camera rears his chittering, twitching, Cthulhu-esque head to thwart my crime fighting.
And thwarting my crime fighting is a big deal, because now I'm becoming a Menace to Manhattan.
Wait, what?
The Hero/Menace system of ASM2 is a unique construct, in that it removes all of that pesky need for choice before consequence. For every good dead you do, you earn a chunk of "Hero" meter to balance the "Menace" bits that continually tug at the conveniently blue/read balancing act. Five minutes into the game, I was "Hero 3", which is by the meter's definition the pinnacle of all heroism.
Five minutes later, I was a menace to all civilized human beings. What had I done to betray the people I had sworn to defend?
Well for one thing, I'd picked up a couple of comic book pages. There are 300 to collect, and several dozen other vital knicknacks clogging every nook and cranny of the area. Apparently Manhattan's greatest adversary is actually just litter. Glowing, flying, comet-trailing sorts of litter. It's like what I imagine China's litter to be, wafting in the technicolor breeze.
During the brief time I spent diving at pieces of paper like a paranoid homeless guy, no less than five crimes had appeared on my map. Within seconds, those crimes began to flood my minimap with concentric circular red explosions meant to tell me I needed to solve these problems immediately. I quickly flailed my way toward the nearest one, only to discover two guys trying in vain to open a car window.
But it was already too late. Despite having no possible way to reach more than this one very boring "crime", the rest of them flashed over my screen to tell me I had failed the city. Boom. I'm a menace now.
A little later in the game (two tutorial missions or so) every time I missed one of these tedious city-crossing errands, drones would start chasing me. Can't-miss minigun-sporting, single-button-quicktime-event-killing drones.
Perhaps I would find solace in the campaign. I then discovered I was more than 1/3 through its narrative. All I'd done was go through a few tutorials, one 30-second-ish boss fight, and talk to my (presumably psychotic) Aunt May.
But how does it look?, you ask, hoping for a reason to buy the game, if only to Spider-Man your way around buildings in imitation of the carefree teenage power fantasy.
If a picture is worth a thousand words, ASM2 is an essay about the benefits of art education. The PS4 is indiscernible from its previous-gen counterparts, with muddy window textures that look more like someone has taped some of those errant flying papers to a tall blank rectangle. The animation is horrendous and robotic. Even switching hands while web-swinging is just a reversible canned animation that begs for the aid of presumably liittle-known Marvel's Chiropractor-Fellow.
If there's any consolation, it's that the game is over fairly quickly in absence of collectibles. And there is some fun to be had listening to the protagonist's commentary and the various so-bad-they're-hilarious audio recordings. Let's all be thankful that the villains have apparently decided to throw their deepest and most incriminating reflections onto the ground for lucky passers by.
For sixty dollars, there are a host of more enjoyable titles you can acquire for your console of choice. For the forty that the PC version will cost you, you can get even further by way of the various online retailer sales available. And for no dollars at all, you can read this review--which I have tried to make genuinely more entertaining than playing this offensively bad incarnation of a hero who deserves a much better game to star in.
In closing, I can't help but feel a bit insulted by the whole experience. Better games have been made with identical structure, all the material is readily available, and the development time wasn't any shorter or more demanding than many other, better titles. There is no reason for this game to be this bad, and its brief moments of entertainment are crushed under the weight of its ineptitude in every other aspect.