Geekatana Game Review: Spiderman Friend or Foe

I've wanted to do the game review of Spiderman Friend or Foe for a while now. It has been on my to-do-list for months. And since Spiderman Into the Spider-verse recently hit around theaters in the Philippines now is a good a time as any to do this one.

I'm also a big superhero fan so mixing Beat Em Ups and superhero characters are always one of the best kind of beat em ups for me. Games like Captain Commando, Captain America and the Avengers and the X-men was some of my favorites.

Spiderman Friend or Foe is a beat em up game based on Sam Raimi's original Spiderman trilogy and promised to be a different take on the spiderman take on the movies and legend. A piece of the meteorite that brought the venom symbiote to earth broke off and landed on different locations around the world and causing chaos so Nick Fury enlist the help of Spiderman. With the unlikely help of Spidermans most memorable enemies they are off to save the day

Sadly as promising as the entire concept is the game fails to deliver and a lot of the important aspect that makes fighting games fun and challenging are all but none existent. The story feels broken and disengaging. The game is rushed out of a released date than polishing off its obvious bugs.

The gameplay just revolves on fighting a group of enemies that comes in three flavors, small, medium and large and its repeated throughout all the levels with very little in variety of their attacks. Sure they look different depending on the stage. The fifth stage enemies are basically taken down in pretty much the same way as the first stage ones.

The game feels like a pointless grind. You beat up enemies to trigger a bridge so you can advance to the next platform until you get to the boss of that stage. And you repeat this process in every stage. Sure the enemies look different to reflect their stages like mummies in the egypt area but that's just about it.

The characters have some nice moves and a team up moves but it gets boring since its only one super move. The dialogue is cheesy and limited too. The addition of unlocking new skills doesn't help since you can practically finish the game with the abilities you already have at the beginning of the game so upgrading feels unnecessary. The game doesn't support online play either.

The characters movement is a bit stiff and the character models looks ugly and unpolished specially when you imagine this game came out after the Spiderman 2 game for the PS2 which is leaps and bounds compared to this one in terms of graphics alone. The moves are nice but is unbalanced as Spiderman has most of the new moves to unlock. The voice acting is your typical saturday morning cartoon as well.

The game is obviously geared towards little kids and even little kids like a challenge and this game offers very little to none of it. Dying isn't a problem since you can respawn anytime and the hidden secrets of the game aren't so hidden either. The attack moves are dynamic but with fighting the same type of enemies again and again it feels more of a chore than an achievement.

Overall Spiderman Friend or Foe is a serviceable game if you don't mind beating up a bunch of enemies for hours just for the fun of it. The game is better with a friend to play with specially on a boring day. I'd want to give this game a higher score but theres really nothing that hasn't been done and done better by other games before.