The Amazing Spider-Man (Multi-Platform)

Play the game based on the movie based on the comics that were turned into a movie just a decade ago.

Late in Activision’s Amazing Spider-Man game, our titular arachnid hero is crawling through a wide industrial-grade vent when he stops to question his actions.

“What am I doing with my life? I should be studying, flirting with cheerleaders and playing WoW,” he says. “Instead I’m about to get killed in a robot factory.”
Oh, Pete. You’re right. You may have mechanical webshooters and possess genetically-altered DNA that’s given you superpowers, but deep down, you’re still just a teenager.

Spider-Man—or more appropriately his nerdy alter ego Peter Parker—has historically been considered one of the most relatable heroes. Canon has by and large depicted Pete as an actual person with real life problems, to the point where Steve Ditko wouldn’t necessarily draw him in-costume for more than a few panels in some early issues. Trading adolescent social anxiety and encounters with bullies for responsibility that comes with personal loss (and subsequent heroism) is a story we can all relate to, even if Peter is both superhuman and, conversely, in high school.

Yet there are worse monsters than supervillains at that age, the biggest perhaps being the quest to find one’s identity. Beenox’s Amazing is a bit of an unruly teen; if the metric of all superhero games is to make you feel like the source material’s protagonist, wise-cracking, freewheeling Spidey is probably among the highest in demand. The problem is, ol’ webhead can’t figure out who he really wants to be.

Technically Amazing is a film-tie in, at least using Spidey’s film costume and sporting an aesthetic that seems like it’s in line with the general visual style of Marc Webb’s reboot. This is one of the weirdest aspects of the game. For whatever reason, no one bothered to go through the legal rigmarole to use the digital likenesses of Andrew Garfield and company, despite Spider-Man and the Lizard looking just like their cinematic counterparts.

But the events of the game take place after the film, in an original story. It creates a nonsensical franchise paradox where, picking up on a narrative extrapolated completely from the reboot’s script, a handful of classic Spider-Man villains are introduced as though they’re part of that universe—essentially repurposed through its interpretation of Oscorp.

These identity-less, nearly lineless “fake” movie villains aren’t really who they’re actually supposed to be in the comics, either, adding nothing to the plot or general interest (with the exception of fake movie Alistair Smythe, played with goofily increasing mania by Nolan North). They’re basically so much web fluid fodder, offering a few more one-off tussles to help undulate the pacing. So my question is this: with lookalikes rendered on-screen, sound-alikes in the booth and a plot that has nothing to do with the film (and could have easily been written as a standalone story), why is Beenox’s Amazing a tie-in at all?

Narrative and art direction aside, Pete seems to be a little mixed up over how he should act, too. When he is swinging in “open-world” Manhattan (a term I use loosely in a design sense), the wall-crawler feels authentically spectacular. While not quite offering quite the animation nuance of, say, Nathan Spencer’s swing in the ill-fated Bionic Commando reboot a few years back, flying through the air with acrobatic ease is a lot of fun.

Several times I caught myself web-swinging among the skyscrapers just to see how high I could go, or to collect the myriad comic pages scattered around the city, or just to see how much I control I had in varying Spidey’s movements while thwipping around the skyline.