Better than most movie tie-ins, The Amazing Spider-Man is a fun, but predictably rough, game.
Cons: Parts of the game are dragged out; Controls and camera often fight you; Horribly ugly character models; Stealth mechanics could use some refinement
It's strange to look back and think that seven years ago Spider-Man 2 was the licensed game to beat. With slick web-swinging, fun bosses, and an appropriate tone, Spider-Man 2 showed what was possible for superhero games. Four years after that, Batman Arkham Asylum showed up and rewrote the book again, setting the standards for licensed games even higher. Spider-Man meanwhile failed to move forward. In a sense, it's clear that The Amazing Spider-Man is Beenox's attempt to both recapture Spider-Man 2's magic and one-up the Batman Arkham games. The end-product is something that feels like those two games were (somewhat haphazardly) stitched together, which actually works out surprisingly well.
Virtually everything in The Amazing Spider-Man can be traced back to those two games (save for comic book page collecting, which owes itself more to games like Crackdown). Web-swinging has a nice weight to it as you explore an open world and do small vigilante tasks, like in Spider-Man 2. But once you enter an indoor area, you dispatch enemies from above stealthily or fight them in a combat system that is practically ripped from Batman Arkham Asylum.
And sure I could rip The Amazing Spider-Man for doing nothing original, but ultimately, in using what works, Beenox has crafted one of the better licensed games I've played in a while (outside of the Batman Arkham games of course). Swinging around feels great (although the camera and loose controls usually don't want to cooperate) and the constant onslaught of collectibles and side-quests keeps you occupied as you move from place to place. And the combat works almost as good here as it does in Batman's games.
The stealth is a little wonkier though. Don't get me wrong, stringing enemies to the ceiling is always good for a bit of entertainment, but the stealth is not nearly as fun as it SHOULD be. The Web Escape button, which automatically pulls you to a safe and hidden location, is partially to blame, since it saps a lot of difficulty out of stealth encounters. But more annoying is that you end up relying on the button a lot, since enemies are unusually aware of their surroundings. If a guard is within twenty feet of another, with his back turned, he'll pinpoint your location the moment you silently grab his buddy from the ceiling-which naturally means that all of the guards instantly know where you are. Which means that you have to use web rush almost every time you take out a guard (if you want to play stealthily) since they are rarely more than twenty feet apart from one another. Still, stealth CAN be fun, rounding out the solid core mechanics.
The other issue that shows up from time to time is related to pacing and mission design. The game has a tendency to draw things out (which is strange, given that it isn't very long). Some missions, particularly some of the sewer crawling ones, just seem to go on forever. There's one mission in the middle of the game where you are chasing something through the sewers and it escapes at least four times, runs through the streets, and then leads you on another separate sewer chase before you finally catch it. You are ready for the mission to be over long before it actually is. The last few chapters of the game work like that too, attempting to build up to multiple climaxes. However, because those chapters go on too long, the last couple climaxes fail to have any impact.
So yes, The Amazing Spider-Man has flaws. It's kind-of-boring plot and terrible character models could also be added to the list. But the core here is strong enough that the game is fun. Is it good enough that I really recommend the game to everyone? No. But rest assured, The Amazing Spider-Man, is a good licensed game, and web-heads can certainly spend their time in worse ways.