(PC VERSION)
Straight up: The Amazing Spider-Man is an over-budgeted attempt to cash in on the homonymous Hollywood remake.
The game picks up where the movie left off. Some creepy dudes break free from Oscorp, some other dude makes robots to kill the first dudes, most dudes in the city get infected by the first dudes and Spidey has to save the day. I'm not sure if this is cohesive with the comics, but who cares? At the end of the day, it feels like a very poor plot lacking in substance.
The presentation is basically something that resembles a sandbox open-world action game but that it's in reality closer to a bad beta or a DLC pack from some other game. The missions feel completely ripped out from the rest of the game. To keep it 'sandboxey', there's a few secondary objectives and a couple of collectibles that you can waste time on in-between missions. There's nothing wrong with the formula, since that's what most modern action games do, but in this case, it just feels bland and empty. Needless to say, the side-missions are scarce and repetitive. In the spirit of keeping it fancy, there's power upgrades to choose from and different suits to wear. Whoopie-do.
Graphically, based on the options that you can tweak before launching the game, an educated guess would be that the game looks fantastic and it has a lot of potential to be shining, shimmering and splendid, but it's just a guess, after all. Is it because my computer can't run it? Nope. It's because this is a terrible, terrible port and you have a 50/50 chance that your PC will go full retard in the FPS department for no apparent reason. I had to download a 'fix' from the interwebz that basically runs the game on DX9, hence disabling a lot of the eye-candy settings. But hey, "Texture Quality: AMAZING" sounds pretty good to me.
The combat is arguably the strongest point in this game, but it's not really anything new. It feels like a less polished version of Arkham City's combat system. Sometimes you'll try to hit a guy and you'll punch nothing but air and some other times the combat sequences are a bit more fluid. I love me some inconsistent combat. Not. There's also a 'stealth' element to it. Noticed the quotes? *Wink* *wink*. Obviously, this is all sprinkled with fancy webbing-tricks and acrobatics to add some flare. Some of the animations are okay, but nothing too spectacular. Some epic boss fights are good and stand out as probably the best bits of this title. To top it off, it's something no one's ever done before. Oh, wait. Every action game for the past 20 years has done it.
The one thing I truly liked about the game was the web-strike or whatever is called, which is basically a time-stop first-person view that enables you to shoot a web to a wall or enemy and get around (besides having other, more ordinary mobility skills). It's a neat mechanic and probably the only truly original thing I've seen in the game. However, this is kind of overshadowed by the fact that the control scheme is down-right weird. Here's the kicker: I couldn't even use my gamepad to play this because the game is so poorly ported that it would mess up the button assignment (i.e: vertical right analog stick axis = horizontal camera axis). Couldn't find a fix for this so I had to go with my good buddies Mr. Keyboard and Senor Mouse.
Overall, The Amazing Spider-Man was a huge let down for me. Sure, you can play through it once because big companies are behind it so it's not a complete flop, but it could've been so much more. This is just one of those games where you get the constant feeling that the developers just didn't give two craps about what was going on and it was all about the monayz. Maybe Marvel or Universal had some kind of package-deal for when the movie came out and they just had to fulfill a contract or something. Who knows? I would steer clear of this unless you're an absolute fan.
