The Amazing Spiderman is an arcade classic, which gives the player a real old-school style Spiderman game. Its functional 2d side scrolling game-play and lovely hand drawn graphics adds a neat touch to an experience, which most Spidey fans will appreciate more than the recent games on the Playstation, Xbox and Gamecube. The game relies on Spiderman’s superhero powers to add different game-play styles including the ability to crawl up walls and along the ceiling, which is very cool. The player also has the ability to shoot spider bombs and use a grappling hook which definitely adds dimension to the game.
The main story is that Mary Jane has yet again been kidnapped by one of Spiderman’s arch-nemesis’ and this time it turns out to be the evil Mysterio, who happens to have an egg for a head. This means its up to Spiderman to defeat Mysterio and rescue his beloved Mary Jane. The story leads you through lots of plat forming levels, where you encounter enemies that admittedly are quite dumb, but the game makes up for this through adding more into the game in numerous amounts. With a bit more time this could have been easily sorted with less enemies with more intelligence. For instance I ended up waiting near edges to simply and easily kill the enemy
from further away with little or no damage. This was the case for a majority of enemies which is a shame as so much effort has been put into some of the character models, which personally for me as a Spidey fan helps to engross me in a game which is frankly quite a few years old.
A major part of game-play which I forgot to mention was the inclusion of switches which are dotted around the levels and in most cases are keys to progression in the game. Sometimes these switches can be irritating as they can unleash monsters, such as Mummies that attack you without warning and can often lead to your death. Obvious this happens with a lot of games, but sometimes these attacks leave you with very little time to actually counter-attack to save your precious health fro dwindling into obscurity.
This game does have its faults but overall you can have a fun experience, especially if you regularly play retro games and not the recent generation of video games, for those familiar to the Playstation Spiderman games, the visuals and overall game quality might be lower, but there is a certain charm to the way this game has been put together that no Spidey fan should miss out on. A game for any dedicated fan!
