‘The Amazing Spider-Man’ for iOS and Android game review

‘The Amazing Spider-Man’ is an iOS and Android game that’s based roughly on the events in the 2012 movie of the same name. This version of the game came out around the same time as the PC and console version, but has different story and missions and has been developed by Gameloft instead of Activision.

Although this game has been available for a while now, it often appears in the top charts on both the App Store as well as the Google Play store. So we decided to give it a try and see just how amazing ‘The Amazing Spider-Man’ really is.

Gameplay

In ‘The Amazing Spider-Man’, you control Spider-man as he goes around New York City trying to save people from bad guys. One of the advantages of being Spider-man is that you can swing from buildings using your web shooters and even if you fall down you don’t die, regardless of the height.

You shoot the web using a button on the bottom right of the screen and keep it held to swing around. You don’t necessarily need to aim the web shooters at anything particular. Simply pressing the button shoots the web and Spider-man pulls himself up and starts swinging.

You never actually see where the other end of the web is and at times you are in a completely open environment with nothing to sling the web at and Spider-man is still happily swinging from his web, which just attaches itself magically somewhere in mid-air.

You can roam around the city all you want but you would have to begin one of the missions in the game to progress through the story. Missions appear on the map and you usually get a couple of them at a time. You have the option to do them in any order you like.

Touching the mission selects it and the game then points you in the direction so you can swing around and reach the point on the map where the mission begins. If you are too bored to actually go there, you can press the fast-forward button and the mission begins automatically. You then usually have to sit through a couple of cut scenes (you can skip them as well) before the actual mission begins.

The missions usually involve saving someone and almost always has you punching a bunch of bad guys. You attack using a single button on the right. Enemies have a health bar so you can see their health degrading as you hit them. There is a Spider Sense button that glows when an enemy is about to hit you. Hit the button at the right time and Spider-man dodges the attack and responds with one of his own.

You can also use the web shooters to pull enemies towards you and shoot webs at them, which temporarily incapacitates them. This can come in handy if you are faced with multiple enemies.

The game also allows you to upgrade Spider-man using points you earn by defeating bad guys. You can upgrade to different combos and attacks and also buy healing items to be used during missions.

As for the missions themselves, they are too repetitive and usually not very interesting. The game has some other minor challenges that you can do in between that involve doing things like taking pictures of the Spider-man for Peter Parker or completing objectives such as swinging around for a specified amount of time or swing to a particular height. Unfortunately, these aren’t particularly interesting either.

I also had issues with the controls, which often hurt the fairly enjoyable experience of swinging around the city. The web shooter button often fails mid-air even if you keep it pressed. At times, even after repeatedly pressing the button Spider-man does not shoot the web. This often results in him falling down, which fortunately, does not kill him, but does kill the flow of the game.

It’s also painfully difficult to get him swinging in the right direction. You can’t just swing and quickly turn around. If you accidentally fall down from the roof of a building, you have to swing around the block to be able to get back to where you were. Unlike Batman’s grapple, you can’t just look up at the roof of a building and just hoist yourself up using your web, although there is no reason why you shouldn’t. Instead you have to take giant swings around the place to do the simple act of climbing on top of the building. This can be very annoying, especially on missions with limited time.

Graphics and Sound

Unlike The Dark Knight Rises game that we recently reviewed, ‘The Amazing Spider-Man’ looks downright terrible most of the time, especially on the new iPad. The game clearly isn’t optimized for the Retina display, even though it came out last month (The Dark Knight Rises was) and even then the textures look horrible.

The game also has really bad texture pop-in, where buildings look horribly pixelated until you get close and then suddenly the textures are loaded and things clear up. This issue was present in The Dark Knight Rises to some extent but it was within acceptable limits and was hidden due to the dark theme of the game. But it looks really bad in this one.

Admittedly, the game looks better on smaller screens but it’s still not a patch on some of the recent games we have seen.

The in-game sounds are fine but the dialogues are horribly cheesy, particularly Spider-man’s, who just seems to be trying too hard to sound cool and funny. This ended up in me skipping most of the cut scenes so I don’t have to hear him talking.

Conclusion

Honestly, there is nothing amazing about ‘The Amazing Spider-Man’. The missions feel repetitive, the graphics are poor, the controls are glitchy and the dialogues are annoying. At $6.99, the game feels like a complete rip-off, with nothing to justify even half of that. The game is just built to cash in on the fame of the movie and unlike the movie itself, which was fairly enjoyable, ‘The Amazing Spider-Man’ game is a complete disappointment. Your $6.99 will be better spent elsewhere.

Rating: 1/5
Pros: Swinging around using web shooters can be fun
Cons: Linear, repetitive missions, poor visuals, cheesy dialogues, glitchy controls, overpriced

Download: iOS | Android