Tweet
This isn't a sentence you expect to read all that often, but I was quietly excited to play Spider-Man: Edge of Time when it came out back in 2011. Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions wasn't a classic by any means, but it had a pacy, light-hearted script, surprisingly elaborate set-pieces and four different versions of Spidey himself, some of which were actually pretty entertaining. Best of all, though, each level threaded the guest-villain boss battle right through the middle rather than tacking it on at the end, providing a decent approximation of what it would be like to play a Silver Age comic book. I wish other people would nick that. Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions - much better than I expected it to be.Spider-Man: Edge of Time - a bit disappointing, really. Actually, let's be honest, Edge of Time is rubbish. I didn't expect too much, but I had hoped for what's known in the biz as 'a similarly zippy romp', each level taking me somewhere new as I hopped between one incarnation of the web-slinger and the next. Instead, I got just two Spider-Men to choose from (neither of them were classics) and a campaign that seemed to be largely set in a single building. I couldn't even tell you whether there were boss fights strung through each level, because the whole thing, in my memory, plays out along one long, drab interior. Spider-Man: Let's Visit an Out-of-Town Commuter Motel might have been a more appropriate title. Oh, and it had Val Kilmer doing one of the voices.
A few weeks later, I admitted to a friend that I was slightly let down by all this, and my friend quickly informed me that I was a massive idiot. Firstly, what was I really expecting from a licensed Spider-Man game as I creaked ever closer to the full, rich bloom of middle age? Secondly, what was I expecting from a licensed Spider-Man game that was such an obvious stopgap?
Read more…
More...