Spiderman: Edge of Time
Spiderman, Spiderman, Edge of Time does some of what a
spider can. In Spiderman: Edge of Time
some douchebag is trying to mess with time again which allows you to be part of
a Spiderman/ Spiderman 2099 team-up.
Peter David, one of the most entertaining and gay friendly writers in
comics and every manner of geeky novel, scripts the game and starts off pretty cliché,
but the pacing picks up and the writing befits Spiderman and his
franchise. If you are a fan then you
should pick up this game. The spidermen
look great and the pace is frenetic.
Walking on walls is hard.
To get on one you just push towards it and then the compass is spun and
up is right (or is it left). Unlike
Spiderman: Shattered Dimensions wall crawling is not crucial or trap-laden and
you don’t have to fight disoriented, but it would be nice if they could give
you a little compass to let you know which direction is which. Comparisions to the last Spiderman game are
inevitable, the same company, Beenox, produced both games, and has done better than
most in translating Peter Parker and company into a video game.. Fighting in both games is button mashing, but
in SD I felt more like Spiderman, agile and powerful, controlled, in EOT I was
just flailing around until they all fell down. EOT looks nice, but SD had more
variety and personality. In Edge of Time
you are in a futuristic factory building for the entire game unlike Web of
Shadows where you were in a Jungle, a city, dreamscape, burning factory, a
circus. The art style switched for each
different Spiderman in Web of Shadows, supersaturated and bright, sepia toned
for noir, darker for for symbiote spidey, neoned out for 2099. In EOT you get offices and basements and more
sewers (why must we always be in sewers- there is nothing sexy or stylistic in
sewers- sorry scat fans).
They worked the Spiderman switching a little better in this
one and the stories of the two were much more connected; each Spiderman played
differently, but I’m not sure how I feel about the multiple spidermen. I think I would prefer more variety or
tighter gameplay with one. The game was
enjoyable, and I was caught up in the story by the end, but more visual variety
would have been nice. And a targeting system.
Many things were improved or cut from this version, there is less
webswinging and wall crawling, or at least it is less necessary for both, which
was nice because the control of those things was sometimes rough in Shattered
Dimensions and frustrating when it became life or death when spidey lost his
sense of direction. Beenox made definite
decisions about what they thought was important, hiring Peter David to do the
scripting made the writing better, the two Spidermen added variety to the
gameplay and made the story less convoluted, Spiderman has his spider moves,
but nothing is quite as good enough to draw you in and not make you feel the
formula (fight, slam a bunch of buttons, explore and move plot along, fight,
slam more buttons, etc).
Overall, the game is entertaining, and does Spiderman
justice, but I was left wanting more and a bit better. I would say rent or wait for the price to
drop.
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