Spider Amazing City Fight

While on an after-hours tour of Oscorp with nanomachine specialist Alistair Smythe, Peter Parker finds himself caught in the middle of a predictable outbreak of cross-species experiments and Smythe's robotic "solution" to the problem. The Spider Amazing City Fight picks up after the movie's credits roll, instead of retelling the events of the film, which allows Bea a bit of freedom in shaping the narrative (although there are, you know, spoilers). The strife eventually breaks its way out of Oscorp and into the streets of New York, sending Spidey on a quest to find an antidote and save the city from Oscorp's menaces both biological and mechanical. Bea has picked up a few things from previous games and the superhero genre at large; combat is streamlined and fluid, mimicking: Arkham City's attack, dodge and special (read: web) triumvirate, allowing for far more acrobatic strikes than past games and a new dynamism to the camera during battles. Spidey is as powerful as you would expect, however, which means that swaths of generic enemies pose little real threat. We have no doubt that Peter Parker would completely smoke a room full of thugs without breaking a sweat, but in a video game this sense of strength makes encounters too easy — and where Arkham's fisticuffs reward precise timing, The Amazing Spider's lack of rhythm makes combat feel a touch heavy on mashing. While combat is fluid, the graphical presentation is less so — like Edge of Time, it's obvious that certain concessions were made to get Spider Amazing City Fight running on DS, and visual pleasantry has seen some hefty sacrifices. Shadows are virtually nonexistent, lending a flat and dreary quality to the world that does the generic story locations no favours, and animations lack frames, stuttery when the framerate dips. We also encountered a number of glitches, ranging from sticky movement to dropped sound and one console hard lock after a contentious boss battle.