The mostly interior levels do little to capitalise on Spidey’s unique strengths – wall-crawling, web-swinging and acrobatic leaps – and when there is a lot of vertical action, nasty switches of camera angle contrive to make it all a bit confusing. Where thought and creativity was lavished on Shattered Dimensions, Edge of Time seems to have come straight from a super-hero game recipe book. There are set-piece fights, some simple puzzles to solve, doors to unlock, keys to find and the occasional boss battle to get through. Interspersed with all the brawling we get occasional action sequences which see Spidey 2099 gliding down a shaft and avoiding obstacles, which is exactly as much fun as it sounds, or timed challenges where a location has to be reached or several switches pressed before something disastrous ocurrs. It works OK, but there’s nothing that distinctive or satisfying about it. The close combat – as with nearly every other second-rate superhero epic of the year – bears the influence of Sony’s God of War trilogy, with plenty of hard-hitting combos and a gauge that, when filled up, allows you to pull off an even harder-hitting super move. Spidey 2099 has a special move which leaves his enemies attacking a decoy while he bashes them, while Spider 2011 has a hyper-sense mode which allows him to move fast and whack his foes before they get a chance to whack him back. There are some differences between our two heroes. At this point, the action shifts from one Spidey to the other. Every now and then something dramatic happens, or something one Spidey does changes the reality of the other Spidey in an interesting way. At each stage, Spidey or his 2099 compatriot play a chunk of level which usually involves a spot of wall-crawling, a bit of web-slinging, and a whole dirty-great wodge of battering baddies. Some weird pseudo-scientific nonsense link means the two can communicate. What’s more, if our two Spider-Men can’t change things, the present-day Spidey will die at the hands of Anti-Venom (the latest version of Venom, for those of us who don’t follow the comics). Spider-Man or Spider-Man 2099 are fighting against a menacing scientist who has travelled from 2099 to the present day and changed history to put him and his company on top.
#SPIDER MAN EDGE OF TIME PC GAME SERIES#
Worse, where Shattered Dimensions gave us a series of distinctive and sporadically brilliant levels that were effectively running battles against the best Spider-Men villains (and their henchmen), we now get a single, slightly generic tale of time travel and mad-science featuring a villain you don’t really care about and a load of rent-a-mob robots, mutants and security troops. Instead of following up on the creepy monochrome delights of Spider-Man Noir or expanding on the nostalgia magic of the Amazing Spider-Man, Beenox has decided to focus on the less well-known (and less enthralling) Spider-Man of 2099 and a less stylised version of the familiar Spidey, which ditches the classic comic look of the Amazing Spider-Man in Shattered Dimensions. Now, you’d think that if you had a successful Spider-Man game that was split into four separate parts with four separate Spider-Men, you might decide to focus your follow-up on the parts that were most successful. What we do know is that Edge of Time – while hardly a disaster – is certainly a small step backwards.
Did Beenox run out of puff? Did Activision push too hard for a one-year turnaround? It’s impossible to say. Well, who knows who’s to blame for Edge of Time. The mix of four styles of Spidey with four styles of gameplay was a bit awkward, and even the Amazing Spider-Man sections, celebrating our hero in his sixties pomp, weren’t as superb as the Spider-Man Noir sections, with their Arkham-esque stealth take-downs and twisted villains, but there was a promise in the game: a promise that one day, the team at Beenox might come back with a genuine web-slinging, wall-crawling classic. Shattered Dimensions wasn’t Arkham Asylum brilliant, but it was smart and very enjoyable.
#SPIDER MAN EDGE OF TIME PC GAME HOW TO#
Last year’s Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions gave hope to friendly neighbourhood Spider-fans that, finally, the character was with a developer that understood the character, knew his history and what made him tick,and had some idea of how to use all this stuff in a video game.