The Amazing Spider Man 2, the game, is an abysmal trainwreck. Filled with terrible gameplay, poor dialogue, horrendous voice “acting”, it is one of the worst open world games I have ever had the unfortunate time of playing. Do not buy this game. Do not play this game. Stay away from this game. If you want to know why, keep reading. But I just had to let you know as soon as I could that this game is garbage and doesn’t deserve your time or money.
The Amazing Spider Man 2 was developed by Beenox, the same people who developed the last few Spidey games. Their last game, The original Amazing Spider Man game, returned the web crawler to an open world. I actually kind of enjoyed the last game. It had its issues but it wasn’t a horrible piece of shit. Unlike this game.
Right out of the game The Amazing Spider Man 2 shows you how little it cares. The first thing you do is watch and play a laughably bad recreation of your Uncle Ben being killed. The voice acting, the terrible animations and the fact that the city citizens around me were walking into walls and cars made it hard for me to care that my uncle was just shot. Why is this in game you might be wondering? Isn’t this a sequel based on the second movie, which is a sequel based on the last movie which was a reboot and already did the whole “Ben gets killed” part. Well the reason its here is to give Spidey a reason to chase a bad guy down or...I don’t know. I barely understood anything this game was trying to do.
So one of the next things you do in the game is save Stan Lee, yes the creator of many Marvel characters, from a burning building. And you visit him in his shop and see in his shop famous Spider Man comics. I know this was probably supposed to be a bit of easter egg, but when you MAKE players go here it just feels so weird. Why are their comics about me in this store? How do they know Im Peter Parker? At one point I read something in the game where Peter says he like the Ultimate universe Spidey the best, but they got the character wrong. SO WHAT the other ones you read got it right? How the hell does that work?
Its stuff like this that just made me quickly realize how little care or effort went in to this shit hole of a game. Like when I landed on the New York city streets and watched dozens of pedestrians walk into walls, glitch into cars, fall through the ground, get stuck on each other and more. Everywhere I looked this game seems barely made. Filled with half done ideas or systems.
Like the dialogue wheels, that looked ripped out of Mass Effect clone. You can choose what to say/ask...but it never leads to anything except more poorly written and badly voiced bits of story. I just skipped them after the first few, because even Beenox realized no one wanted to deal with this shit.
I actually enjoy Spider Man games, even the not so great ones. I love the Spider Man character and I think that web slinging around New York is such a cool idea. People point to Spider Man 2 for PS2/Xbox as the pinnacle of Spider Man games. It is pretty good, but mainly due to its web slinging. And The Amazing Spider Man 2 actually has some decent web swinging. In fact sometimes I had fun swinging around New York. Even if New York looks like a barely textured and poorly rendered lego city. But the swinging is far from perfect and never felt like I had enough momentum or control to be truly enjoyable. Then on top of that you have a camera that feels like it is constantly trying to make you fail. The whole experience is mostly a bad one.
But why WOULD I even want to web sling around New York? The game sure as hell doesn't want you to. You see at all times there are crimes happening in the game. These are crimes like breaking and entering, car chases, etc. Now the idea of being able to find these and save the day sounds great. But The Amazing Spider Man 2 actually punishes you for NOT doing them. If you let one of these crimes go on too long it will finish and you will receive more “Menace” points on your Menace/ Hero bar. That makes sense right? Want to explore this city and discover collectibles, you better go make sure that you are always stopping crimes why you do it.
To make matters worse the crimes and emergencies are so lazy and recycled. I stopped a bomb from blowing up at least 20 times in the same exact area. I stopped criminals from breaking and entering into the same building at least 10 times. And if you decided to let these crimes go without you intervening you discover that the city sends robots and flying police after you. And they will kill you. Now why doesn’t the city use these awesome tools to Oh..I don’t know stop the FUCKING crimes that are happening everywhere?!
And if you DO decide to stop the crimes get ready to see the same shitty 15 second to 30 second power point slide which sorta looks like a news report and the same voice over telling you how you save the day. OVER and OVER. It eventually drove me insane and I just stopped saving crimes and rushing through the city, dodging robots and trying to beat this game as soon as I could.
Even if I stopped to fight the robots I would be bored. The combat is so boring. You can win nearly every encounter by mashing the “Hit people” button and every once and a while hitting the “ Dodge stuff” button. It feels like they tried to make a fighting system based on Arkham’s famously good combat. But were given $10 and 2 days. And so there are basically 6 moves and 10 lines of combat dialogue. Some of which is so long that Spidey was still annoyingly spitting it out as other characters spoke or as I moved on to the next boring fight. There is also a skill tree but its so linear and unnecessary. They didn't’ spend any time on it. Why should I.
You will be glad to know you can buy Spidey outfits for this game, so thankfully they made sure to add that.
I didn’t finish this game. I have a rule. I only review games where I finish the main quest and as much of the side quests as I can. And this game, The Amazing Spider Man 2 beat me. It beat the shit out of me. It shoved shit down my throat and asked me if I wanted more. And eventually I did not. Eventually I gave up. I’m happy I did. I hated this game.
The Amazing Spider Man 2 is a terrible game filled with horrible missions, bad acting, shitty combat and awful...everything else. Honestly, don’t play this game. Run away from this game. If you see a copy just laugh at it. You’ll have more fun than actually playing it.