MadCap's Game Reviews - "Spider-Man: Edge of Time"

I've made it absolutely no secret that my favorite superhero in the entire world is Spider-Man.  You can take your Batman with his dead parents issues and ridiculous power set (seriously, you want to give Superman a hard time for that? Really?) and shove him.  The story of Peter Parker is a timeless one, one of a young boy who becomes a man learning that with great power comes great responsibility. With a set of powers granted him by the bite of a radioactive spider, Peter takes the mantel of Spider-Man and proceeds to learn from the death of his uncle in order to protect the people of New York from danger.  It's a timeless story and one that preaches the philosophy of might for right, that a person who has power should do good things because they're the right thing to do.

Which is why I get irritated at such things as One More Day or Superior Spider-Man which either completely ignore or invert that...but that's not why I'm here.

Spider-Man:  Edge of Time is technically a sequel to Shattered Dimensions, with a passing reference to it in the beginning as well as a nifty little addition to the game if you've played that game - unlocking several zippy cool alternate costumes (including the original Scarlet Spider, which was a big one for me).  So I began the adventures of Peter Parker (voiced by Josh Keaton of Ultimate Spider-Man fame) and Miguel O'Hara, the Spider-Man of the year 2099 (voiced by Christopher Daniel Barnes, who you may remember from the 90's Spider-Man animated series and the voice of Spider-Man Noir in Shattered Dimensions).

For those not familiar with Marvel's 2099 imprint, here's a quick crash course:  it's the Blade Runner future and everything kind of majorly sucks.  Okay, now you're familiar.

The game begins with Peter getting beaten down by the stupidly named "Anti-Venom" (Eddie Brock with a palette swap) and killed.  In the future of 2099, Miguel O'Hara uncovers a plot by Alchemax scientist Walker Sloan to go back in time and found the company years before it's actually founded (doing it in 2011 instead of in 2013...oops), and this somehow causes the future to start going screwy.  Stealing some of the Parker genetics from the laboratory, O'Hara makes a SCIENCE thing that allows him to communicate with Peter at the time of the distortion, because that's in any way how genetics work.  With this link established, the two can communicate across time and work to solve the problem of the screwy things going.

As far as the gameplay goes, it plays almost exactly like Shattered Dimensions' non-Noir sections.  You swing, you punch, you kick.  Fun times.  Added into this comes the unique powers that are added in for Spider-Man and his 2099 counterpart.  In addition with the Spider-Man traditional "Spider-Sense", the Amazing Spider-Man receives a "hyper sense" that allows him to move around enemies and giant laser beams without getting burned alive.  2099 trades in bullet time from Shattered Dimensions for the ability to create a "real-not real" clone of himself that enemies will temporary focus on, allowing him to counterattack or to move about the area unhindered for a short time.

Oh, and 2099 has the free fall sections again through a variety of dangers that make it ever so pleasant.  Have fun with that.

Both also get move sets for swinging around and/or beating down enemies into a fine paste that can be upgraded through the use of experience beaten out of enemies and collected from fragments of "portal energy" that can be found.  Health and stamina can also be upgraded through the use of golden spiders that are hidden throughout the levels.  There's no real strategy to pick out anything for success, since - like most beat 'em ups - the only real strategy here is to pummel them with your fists, feet, and webbing until they stop moving.

The entire game takes place within Alchemax, both in the "present" and in 2099. This allows for actually having a reason for the linear and self-contained levels, as opposed to Shattered Dimensions that decided giving us fantastic city-scapes that we could look at but not interact with in the 2099 sections was perfectly alright.  The change in Edge of Time is both a good and bad thing, giving us an actual reason for not having the wide areas that Spider-Man is most known for swinging around in...while not having the wide areas that Spider-Man is most known for swinging around in.  We don't have the wide cityscapes of New York like Spider-Man 2 or the newer The Amazing Spider-Man games have done, and I really think the game suffers from that.  In particular because the places within Alchemax really aren't all that interesting.  As on the nose as it may be to say it, the entire place looks like a dull version of a comic book mad science laboratory in the present, and a FUTURE! dull version of a comic book science laboratory in 2099.

Like Shattered Dimensions, this game isn't bad.  It's not really that great, but it's...alright.  Like I suggested with the previous game, if you're a diehard Spider-Man fan, go for it.  Otherwise, you're not going to be too hung up on missing it.

Spider-Man:  Edge of Time is now available from Beenox and Activision for Nintendo 3DS, Nintendo DS, Playstation 3, Wii, and Xbox 360.

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Also, it's a week late, but Happy 52nd Birthday, Spider-Man!