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DS

North America

Spider-Man: Friend or Foe

by Aaron Kaluszka - October 26, 2007, 10:39 pm EDT
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The game turns Spider-Man’s foes into friends, but may turn your friends into foes.

Overshadowed by its console brethren, the DS version of Spider-Man: Friend or Foe is a different game, but the genre is the same: brawler. Perhaps rightly overshadowed, the portable edition falls well short of the console version. The game’s button-mashing gameplay includes little of the interesting attack combos found on the Wii, and it isn’t even pleasing to look at.

Like the console edition, players will successively battle various Spider-Man villains who are under the control of an arch-nemesis. Spider-Man is joined by his various rivals once they are freed from mind control. Players can transform between characters they have recovered. Spider-Man can do a little more than attack; for instance, he can swing from building to building using his webbing, though this particular move seemed somewhat unreliable.

Unfortunately, the menu screen graphics may very well be the best in the game. The futuristic rooms are reminiscent of Metroid Prime Hunters; however, in the actual game, the environments are much drabber and feature painfully low polygon counts. To its credit, Friend or Foe makes use of both DS screens, rendering 3-D views of two different perspectives of the game. Sometimes the multiple perspectives indicate two different paths that Spider-man can take, such as a rooftop jaunt versus street-level stroll, each of which may yield different bonuses. The split perspective is particularly useful in boss battles where the boss may fly around the area and otherwise be much harder to track. The boss battles appear to be much more difficult than the main portion of the game. A boss battle mode is also included as an unlockable.

The game includes several unlockable mini-games, each of which involves some type of lock picking. The mini-games test both spatial logic in as well as speed. For instance, in one of the lock picking games, players must trace wires. In another, numbers in a combination lock are rotated through using the stylus. Spin them too quickly and you’ll miss the unlock cue, but don’t rotate fast enough and you’ll fail. Yet another mini-game flashes red numbers on the screen. Occasionally, one of the numbers will instead flash green and must be tapped at this time.

Spider-Man: Friend or Foe also includes a multiplayer mode where a second player can join in place of the CPU. Friends can play through any part of the story in multi-card play. However, the limited appeal of the game makes this possibility unlikely or just plain undesired.

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Spider-Man: Friend or Foe Box Art

Genre Action
Developer A2M
Players1 - 2

Worldwide Releases

na: Spider-Man: Friend or Foe
Release Oct 02, 2007
PublisherActivision
RatingEveryone 10+
eu: Spider-Man: Friend or Foe
Release Oct 12, 2007
PublisherActivision
Rating7+
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