Every Marvel Villain's Nightmare: Multiple Spider-Men

The last Spider-Man game I tried was Spider-Man: Friend or Foe, which was disappointing. The opportunity to play alongside the Prowler was enjoyable, and the writing was pretty humorous, but the actual gameplay was not so great (the camera didn't help). Which didn't dissuade me from trying Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions.

For the second Spider-Man game in row that I've played, the main villain is Mysterio, though he's more of accidental arch-foe this time. He tried stealing the Tablet of Chaos and Order, Spider-Man stopped him, it broke and scattered across the multiverse, and Madame Web sent the various Spideys to get the pieces before something bad happens.

The gameplay is largely the same as for Friend or Foe. You enter an area, you fight enemies until you can advance to the next area. In some cases you can skip the fighting and leap and swing your way to the next area, but that's not a constant. The combat is a little more variable, since you can unlock different combos and moves for the characters as you progress. The one thing I loved was the Defensive Stance, which you trigger by holding down one of the trigger buttons. In that mode, if you hold still, Spider-Man will twist or dodge attacks, or you can move the control stick and set him to leaping and dodging, even through a mass of enemies. Which is nice, since you will face many masses of enemies.

It's really the first time I've played a Spider-Man game where it really captured his agility and speed when it comes to avoiding attacks. You can attack from Defensive Stance, but activating makes Spidey focus on one character, and sometimes you can't be sure which one the computer picked. So I have started attacking expecting to hit the guy next to me, but Spidey's swinging in the direction of some guy standing 10 feet away. So great in theory, and a lot of fun in boss fights (where there's typically just the one enemy), but not entirely great in execution.

There is some variation among the different Spider-Men. The Noir Spidey has a lot of stealth work in his levels, which can be fun, but wow, the game is really strict about it. If you are spotted, you have to escape sight, you cannot fight. You could try, but you will die very quickly. Noir Spidey is a real lightweight when it comes to damage in stealth mode. Once you're actually supposed to fight, he's as tough as any of the others. Ultimate Spider-Man's wearing the symbiont costume, so he has more range on his melee attacks, and if you activate the Rage Meter, he can really lay waste to a swarm of baddies. 2099 Spider-Man has diving sequences, where you plummet from some great height. Sometimes it's to catch a fleeing enemy, other times to escape something. You have to judiciously accelerate so you don't keep crashing into things until you die. He also has Accelerated Vision for the fight scenes, which makes everything move in slow-mo, so you can beat up people faster. I never thought to see if you could use it during a diving sequence. That would have come in very handy.

Something for the next playthrough, and I'm pretty sure there'll be another one, since I didn't finish all the challenges. Completing challenges unlocks upgrades, new attacks, alternate costumes, stuff like that. Most of them are basic, like grabbing a certain number of Spider Emblems, or defeating bad guys in a specific manner. Others are time based, or whatever. I got somewhere around two-thirds of them the first time through, but I can go back and play specific levels at will, so I don't have to play the whole thing over again, which is nice.

The dialogue isn't bad, unless you take too long to get through an area, in which case certain phrases tend to repeat a lot. That can get annoying quickly. The game has a cel-shaded look which is a little more realistic (or less cartoonishly exaggerated) than Friend or Foe, but it looks pretty nice. The backgrounds are detailed enough, especially the futuristic 2099 ones. The credits sequence was strange, though. They recap every level of the game, complete with funny shots of what's happening to all the villains now, but they use this very bombastic, percussion heavy music. My coworker compared it to God of War, which is not a musical choice that seems appropriate. Just because the combat is similar - except Spidey is much better at balancing and jumping than Kratos - doesn't mean everything else has to be, too.

As Spider-Man games go, it's pretty good. I found it best to play one level a day, because more than that makes the repetitive aspects stand out, but taking the levels individually, they can be a lot of fun. There isn't an opportunity for a lot of web-slinging, like Ultimate Spider-Man or Spider-Man 2, but the game did an excellent job of capturing Spider-Man's agility and ability to attack from different angles abruptly. There are a decent variety of villains (and I wasn't expecting any of the 2099 ones). I feel like, given that in each level, the boss villain has a piece of the tablet they use to amplify their abilities, it might have been an opportunity to use some lesser villains. Some of the villains used are a handful under normal circumstances, amped up, it's amazing Spidey can handle them. An amped up Shocker or Beetle could be a difficult challenge, but one where you can tell it's the Tablet that makes them that big a threat. Maybe I just want more variety in villains in the games. A mixed bag, overall, certainly not a fantastic game, but enjoyable on the whole.