This realistic take on Spider-Man hopes to be the best yet.
http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/preview/30711
Update: I found some additional notes from the E3 demo and wanted to include this information before the game is released on June 26 in North America (June 30 in Europe). The game's story is an epilogue to the new film, allowing Activision to include several famous villains that you won't see in the movie, including Rhino, Black Cat, Scorpion, and Alistair Smythe's robotic Spider-Slayers. All these villains are receiving new origin stories to fit in with the movie universe, in which Oscorp creates additional bio-weapon experiments (after the Lizard) before eventually moving on to Smythe's purely technological approach. Spider-Man's new fighting style is directly based on Lucha Libre wrestling moves, and the game features lots of aerial combat requiring both manual inputs and judicious use of Web Rush. In the main console versions, Spidey earns experience points for saving civilians around Manhattan, but this feature may be removed along with the open city environment in the Wii and 3DS versions. Finally, you can unlock about a dozen digital Spider-Man comics stored within the game, which are complete issues with standard zoom and pan features found in other Marvel digital comics. Again, we're not sure these will appear in the Wii and 3DS versions due to these systems' lower screen resolution.
Original Preview: Beenox has been Activision's go-to developer for the past few Spider-Man games, but it doesn't take long to see that The Amazing Spider-Man is quite a different take on the franchise than their past few efforts. It's based on the new movie reboot, and the developer has been working with both Sony (the film studio) and Marvel Comics to create a virtual world that is true to the film while mixing in many elements from the comics that you won't see in Mark Webb's film. The first thing I noticed was Spidey's heavy breathing -- his posture, movements, and reactions convey the sense that there's a human inside the suit, albeit one with radioactive blood.
The camera is kept a lot closer behind Spidey than in other games, and it follows him through every crazy motion. This means web-swinging through Manhattan feels like a series of mini-skydives, with a real sense of speed (and vertigo) on each parabolic arc. You can completely turn off the screen icons and heads-up display, and I could actually see some players wanting to do that. In matching the movie's more grounded style (figuratively speaking -- Spidey is still a high-flying hero), Beenox has done away with the goofy web hammers and onomatopoeic descriptors of your exploits. The overall style is immediately distinctive from other Spider-Man games you've seen, even from this same developer (Shattered Dimension, Edge of Time).
Aside from presentation, the biggest change from previous games seems to be Web Rush. It's not an attack, but a new kind of movement that can be activated in two different ways. The first lets you enter a first-person view, which also slows down time (at least temporarily). Then, you scan around for icons placed in strategic places in the environment. Selecting one will send Spidey to that location, automatically executing all moves needed to do so. This seems a bit like the movement in Assassin's Creed, where you can just hold forward and watch the character perform whatever acrobatics are needed to proceed. Spidey can only move within a moderate radius for a given Web Rush move -- you can't select a point across Manhattan and then watch him swing for five minutes.
The other version of Web Rush is currently called an "expert mode" because it lets you select these destination points in real-time, while manually jumping through the environment or even during a previous Web Rush animation. So yes, you can chain these maneuvers together with good timing, allowing Spider-Man to traverse long distances and complex arrangements of obstacles without difficult control combinations or stopping to look around in first-person view. The developers want you to employ a mixture of normal controls and Web Rush to move through the game in a natural, seamless way. While the demo only showed outdoors areas, Web Rush also works for interior scenes. In this context, it's used more for stealth gameplay, retreating to dark hiding places after deadly guards have spotted Spidey. It's a clear progression from Beenox's popular Noir levels in Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions.
The Amazing Spider-Man is coming out very soon -- before the end of June, near the movie's launch date. The 3DS will have all the same gameplay and content as the console versions, while a separate DS game is more of a 2D platformer. (We didn't get to see either of these, or the Wii version, at E3.)
Topic: The Amazing Spider-Man Preview (Read 2592 times)
