Maybe a few light spoilers!
I'm at Chapter 9 at the moment. And the game is good. It causes vertigo for me unfortunately so not in a hurry to marathon it. It seems it's at its worst when I swing too low to the ground, less uncomfortable when I swing up high, though that's not always something I decide in case no tall buildings are nearby. Basically reminds me of going into a roller-coaster which has never been a fun experience to me.
Good points:
A good story compared to Edge of Time. There's a bit too little happening for my taste. You spend way too much time chasing the cross-species for example. I mean, you find one of them, and then spend 20-30 minutes actually chasing it from one room to another. It's extremely annoying. And then there's encounters which are just too short.
The concept of having real comic pages in the freeroam world is great. It's fun to grab them, and even more to read them. I was afraid that you'd need to wait at least until you had collected 250 pages to have a full comic book issue, but it turns out that the first 10-20 pages you find are curiously all from the same issue. Not realistically but great. Sure, Amazing Spider-Man borrows heavily from Arkham City, but here is one fine feature that Beenox didn't borrow from AC. Rocksteady need to implpement this fine feature in their next game. I would love to read about Batman's first encounter with Joker, The Penguin and Killer Croc.
The best enemies in the game are definitely the robot encounters. I recall the fight against the Spider Slayers from the 90's Spider-Man when I fight those, and generally just getting to fight in open New York is a lot of fun.
Getting to play in the Sam Raimi Spider-Man costume was a nice surprise, and I am hoping to find out how to unlock the rest. I find getting other costumes for Spider-Man a lot more interesting than Batman's. Maybe because Beenox didn't make it a pre-order thing.
Bad points:
Checkpoints are too few. I sometimes have to repeat 10 minutes of gameplay because I made a small mistake. It's pretty annoying. Spec Ops: The Line has this same issue. I guess I am too spoiled from PC games? I'm only playing on Hero so won't even attempt the Spider-Man difficulty.
Well, then there's the vertigo. Really? None of your testers thought it was slightly uncomfortable to web-swing? It would be nice if it was an option in future Spider-Man games.
Rhino, Scorpion, Vermin and Iguana. I was hoping they'd be able to talk, but they can't. Which is a shame, the encounters with them don't last for long either. Wikipedia calls them the main antagonists in the game which couldn't be further from the truth.
Rhino Challenge. I got it from GameStop, but this is kind of disappointed. I thought we'd get to play as Rhino, and not just steer him while he's running down a street attempting to wreck as many cars as possible. Sure, we'd probably be stuck to the ground, but it could be fun regardless. Stan Lee's pre-order thing looks to be better.
I'm giving the game a 7.5/10.
Things Beenox need to improve on for their next game:
- better villains who can talk (Venom, Carnage, Green Goblin, Doc Ock, less known enemies like Anti-Venom, Michael Morbius, Puma and Shocker would be interesting as well)
- less repetitive objectives (an improvement over SD and EOT, but still there)
- no vertigo please
- a stronger story (one with choices would be cool as well, better would be a grey area like Witcher 2)
- random encounters
That's what I would like to see, but chances are they'll be doing another movie tie-in for The Amazing Spider-Man 2 which will feature the limitations as this game. Asn aftermath after the second movie. But it's not like they can't do it. Who says they couldn't have featured more characters like Felicia Hardy? I guess development time, but now they have a lot of great things down so they can focus on adding a lot more things for the next game.
