Although I could be totally heroic for free in the microtransaction model of Champions Online, I chose Spider-Man as le mien actuelle superbe. The cause is simple: He follows my life since I was a little piglet, and though today I don’t collect his adventures anymore, but my adoration didn’t lessened a bit.
This is a silent adoration sitting deep in my heart, and it is highly selective, so sometimes I judge some products unentertaining. But this is another topic, I intend to write another article about them in the future. This latest version was released in December 2010, and was made amusing.
The story is embarrassing a little for me, because generally Spidey doesn’t used to meddle into world-saving quests — the comic book stories are mostly revolving around Peter Parker‘s common man characteristics, even during his super-encounters he mainly rather gets into a supporting role than being a tank of the team. In fact, in this game his teammates are he, he and himself.
Well, the fundamentals: One of the returning enemies of Spider-Man, Mysterio emerges again to get a powerful, magic stone tablet from the museum (’cause there is always a stupid director of the museum who tends to exhibit some brutal artifact with minimal safety).
I don’t wanna go into deeper analysis, but the above mentioned “common man characteristic” of Spider-Man are emphasized further by some of his adversaries, who are not necessary superbeings. For example, here is Mysterio, a well-learned but power-hungry prestidigitator, hypnotist and expert of special effects, without any superhuman abilities.
Spidey simply jumps through his illusions, then knocks him out by a well-aimed move. The usual neglectfulness of Spider-Man causes the trouble again: This well-aimed move goes through the problematic stone tablet, which scatters in the world. To be more exact, it scatters in four worlds, and the great adventure begins.
Shattered Dimensions takes the world of the Amazing Spider-Man as a starting point, and introduces three other ones. All of them were presented in various comic book series, so you get nothing new, except the unimaginably novel serving. The four settings (Amazing, Ultimate, Noir, 2099) and the characters belonging to them are offering four different gameplays, and so they give you four different game experiences too.
“Basic“ Spidey is the well-known funny guy in red ans blue dress, making acrobatic moves all the time, beating heaps of mercenaries and every kind of vengeful figures. The entertaining remarks are just like in the comics: Sometimes they are really funny, sometimes they are really annoying. Unfortunately, sometimes they are repetitive too.
In the Ultimate version the black spider dress is the actual fashion, prevented by Madame Webb from taking over the control of your body. The game is definitely not about this, though the Rage ability shows something from this dark section of Peter Parker’s life. Another thing: If I want to describe this setting shortly, the term “mad rampage” comes into my mind.
The environment of Spider-Man Noir conjures up the fifties, and the adventures are about stealth rather than open confrontation. His clothes are black leather pants and jacket, and the spider instinct is pretty new to him (Madame Webb helps a little here too). He takes the bad guys one by one, webbing them like a real spider does with the flies.
Finally, Spidey of the future is jumping among mile high skyscrapers, and sometimes he chases the superbadmen in free fall. There are some high-tech accessories built into his dress, which are influencing the gameplay not too much, but it looks cool. His adventures didn’t fit me well, because they are just continuous spinning and rushing — this rather makes me bored than excited —, but I won’t decrease the score just because of the style.
Why it doesn’t get a maximum(where is the game which can get a maximum from me???) is because sometimes the cutscenes are starting with difficulties, and the autosave is annoyingly console-like. Sometimes things happen and you have to get up from the chair, and you don’t want to leave the machine and the game on for hours, so it feels bad enough to play over the same hard parts again.
Of course, if you do it well, each level takes averagely an hour ho but this is an agility game which means much more time for me. OK, there are little saves (if you lose your life, you will continue from here) and big saves (you will continue from here when you quit and reload the game), but anyway, save is automatic and gives you no other options.
Perhaps, it wouldn’t be so hard to make a quicksave system besides all the work they did on the game. Because they did great work with the PC version! So great that it is easier to control Spidey with mouse+keyboard combo than with a gamepad. However, I used the pad regularly, because bigger battles can be won easier by a device made exactly for being hammered repetitively by a gamer finger. Here, developers made another serious thinking, because it seems to be a little thing, but in fact it is useful beyond measure to knock the switching between control modes off. You have to do as little as pushing any button on the control you want to use, and the game automatically switches to that device, shows hints by the marks of that given device, and changing the handling of the camera accordingly.
To sum up, the whole SM:SD made positive impressions on me from beginning to end. This game is stylish, well-programmed, well-built and -directed (I hated the speech of the narrator, but this doesn’t really matter).
I wish more of this entertainment to the fans of the agility games. Bravo, Spider-Man — bravo, Beenox!
—Garcius—
What I liked:
four types of gameplay
stylish
Noir!!!
What I didn’t like:
autosave only
some difficulties with the cutscenes
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