This game is a whole half hour long or so (It took me 27 minutes), so there isn't a lot to say here. I commend Rare for trying to give this game some meat with a unique boss at the end of each world in a bit of a Mega Man style, but it wasn't exactly uncommon on the original Game Boy (Super Mario Land 1 had this as a launch title, let alone many other games) and the fights are fairly bad. They range from stupid simple (stand to the far right vs. Green Goblin and unless you miss hitting him on the pattern you cannot be hit) to extremely frustrating (The final boss, my god). Probably the most annoying thing is that this was a beat 'em up / platformer hybrid, but your attack range feels tiny: I particularly found it difficult to hit bosses without taking damage back, sometimes without it even being during their attack but just due to the hitbox of it being so small that I got too close and got hit. I would not have beaten this game were it not for the fact that when you die and get to full health, boss HPs retain their damage. I was on my very last continue when I won.

Basic enemies have this issue where due to your range, all fights are one of two things: The enemies just run into your fist (the bats in the subway level and some other flying enemies) OR they come at you and due to your range you either have to hit during a small window before they ever attack or get hit, there's very few alternative attacks and the jumping is too chunky to reliably dodge opponents. The low enemy variety also makes it overall boring. The wall climbing segments I think are actually a neat idea, the spidey-sense warning of falling objects as a kind of obstacle course dodging is a good implementation of the idea but they make the obstacles fast enough that you really can't react to it and some randomness in the patterns led to parts where I think I had no choice but to take a hit. It's also too easy to one hit kill yourself by jumping on these parts and I don't know why you have to jump into a window when you reach the top to finish the stage...especially since you always then end up on the rooftop rather than inside. Web-slinging was also inconsistent even once I realized the odd control scheme and led to a pair of unfortunate deaths.

There's only two good things about this game: The music with David Wise on the team is kinda boppin' and the cutscenes are cheesy in an intentional, old Spidey cartoon way that frankly makes them pretty funny. Why does Spider-Man answer the phone in his house dressed as Spider-Man? It's not worth playing the game for but, hey, it is something!

Reviewed on Aug 27, 2021


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