Hey, guys!
I don’t have a whole lot to say today, but I wanted to take a second to introduce a new feature for the Wednesday blog: Wrobel’s Wednesday Review!

Every Weds (or, as often as he has them ready) my I will include a video game review written by my friend, Brian. I will be copy/pasting his reviews so don’t blame me for any errors and definitely blame him for his opinions! This first one is a little on the simple side, but I’ll be working with Brian to maybe punch them up a bit (perhaps with some pictures!) going forward. Brian’s a good friend and an avid fan of a plethora of geek-related…stuff…as well as a dedicated gamer, so I feel he’s fairly qualified to write a weekly review for the site. This was his idea, but I like it and I may expand on it in the future.

Anyway, without further ado, I present to you, Brian’s first review:

The Amazing Spider-Man 

If I were to ever pick my favorite comic book character of all time, the answer would be simple: Spider-Man. I own numerous Spider-Man comics, collectables, and even the movie poster for the first Sam Raimi movie that was actually ordered to be destroyed by the studio. As much as I love this character, I have been known to pick apart everything that has been done with him from the comics, to movies, and even to his video games.  So one might imagine my hesitation when I learned there was going to be a reboot to the movie franchise as well as a video game that went along with it. Surprisingly though the new film and game rose above my low expectations.

The Amazing Spider-Man was developed by Beenox and Activision, the same duo that has produced the last 2 Spider-Man games; Shattered Dimensions and Edge of Time.  While I was a fan of Shattered Dimensions, Edge of Time felt flat with me and I just did not care finish the game half-way through.  Edge of Time left a bit of a sour taste in my mouth and I was going to pass on The Amazing Spider-Man until I saw the game was going to feature an open world environment, something I haven’t experience playing a Spider-Man game since Ultimate Spider-Man.  That feature alone regained my interest in the game.

Without giving too much away, the events of The Amazing Spider-Man game take place after the movie of the same name. A disease breaks loose in Manhattan and it is up to you to help find, create, and distribute a cure for all the New Yorkers infected.  Of course the task is not all rainbows and sunshine. Along the way you get  into plenty of fisticuffs with some classic Spidey villains with a new twist on them. There also happens to be an appearance from my favorite feline fatale. Eat your heart out Selina Kyle.

The gameplay is straight forward and easy to get used to, with just a few annoyances.  Web slinging in a Spider-Man game has never been easier from what I remember from its predecessors.  While some Spider-Man games came up with a brilliant idea of using two buttons to web sling, Amazing just has one button to use.  A feature in the game that I fell in love with instantly though was the web rush. At any point in the game (standing or in midair) you can hit the right bumper and bring up any number of spots that Spidey can instantly zip to. This is extremely helpful when avoiding enemies or collecting items throughout the world map.  A carry-over ability that I first encountered in a Spider-Man game in Shattered Dimensions is the stealth take down. First off, let’s face it, this was to the Spider-Man games after the success of Arkham Asylum. A rip off? Yes. A nice feature? You bet.  More on that later though. You’ll want to take advantage of this ability whenever you encounter more than one enemy with a rifle. Bullets slow Spider-Man down quickly, and end his web slinging days even quicker.

The game also features two different types of “leveling up.” One is achieved by gaining experience points through various acts of defeating enemies to finishing a level.  Once you gain a level you can upgrade an ability of Spider-Man or even the suit itself.  The other type is achieved by obtaining tech pieces.  These can either be found on various levels or earned by defeating robots.  Once you have enough of these tech pieces, you can upgrade various abilities of the web shooters.  The leveling up in the game is simple, easy to understand, and drives you to complete side quest in order to level up faster.

Side quests you ask? It wouldn’t be an open world environment if there weren’t any side quest involved.  I believe this is one of the many reasons why I a huge fan of this feature; it helps keep the game from becoming too linear. There are eight different side quests through-out the game, with the photo journalist quest being the most original out of the eight.  This was important to me, since most of the side quest became repetitive quickly.  The best example of this is the two side quests saving the infective and picking up people from the mental hospital. Your job, if so choose to, is to web sling these people to either a hospital or police station.  This would be fine, if it wasn’t for the fact that the hospital or station always seems to be on the other side of the map on where you are at.  Added in the fact that there can be as many as twenty five of these missions at a time; these quests take its toll on you.

There are other draw backs in the game as well. As improved as I said the web slinging was as to the prior games, there can be times where good old web head can swing into a wall and get stuck for a bit.  I had even experienced a bit of a glitch by somehow web slinging through the ground and hence, out of the map entirely. It was fun just to see Spidey float there in mid space for a bit though. Wall crawling was ass. The camera never seems to figure out where you were once you cling to the ceiling. You’ll have to pay attention to objects on the map to really figure out where you are in adjacent to where you actually started the level.  If you don’t, more than likely you’ll end up crawling your sorry ass back to the start of the level.

I mentioned before that stealth system is taken from Arkham Asylum, well, fighting in general is taken from Asylum. Amazing has the same free flow combat that both Arkham Asylum and Arkham City have. You can’t blame the developers from doing this though.  If you are going to copy a combat system, might as well copy from a game that did it well.

After playing this for several hours I’ve found, that despite a few flaws, I generally liked playing this game, and wanted to continue to play until Spider-Man saved New York City. The open world environment and abilities such as web rushing, kept me coming back for more.  I would like to see a bit more variety in the side quest and better handle on the wall crawling aspect, but again, they didn’t hinder my experience too much.

I give The Amazing Spider-Man a solid 3 out of 5 web shooters.

Next week I would love, I repeat, LOVE to have a review on Darksiders 2.  I fear that I won’t have enough time with the game to give you an accurate assessment of it though. So instead, I’ll keep with the super hero theme and review Lego Batman 2.