Temporarily enhancing your skills and being able to locate collectibles is the kind of quasi pay-to-win fluff we can tolerate. Aside from bagging points to be spent on upgrades, the game also tries to nudge you into buying power-ups and health boosts. So do some of the micro-transaction options available. It may allow for a series of meta objectives to be rolled into the game but otherwise feels completely out of place. Equally annoying is how The Amazing Spider-Man 2 can only be played with an internet connection. Though an update is no doubt on its way, I couldn’t go for more than fifteen minutes without crashing. Menus are clean and quick to navigate, character models bear a modern aesthetic and voice work is, at time, much better than the higher-budget console versions – Electro and Spider-Man being particular stand outs. This attention to detail is hindered by performance issues, it has to be said. One thing the games does rather well is presentation. Though hardly extraneous, having to extend another finger while jumping and directing Spider-Man is one step away from a Twister-esque mini game. Using one button to jump/swing and a virtual joystick, Spider-Man’s movements feel mostly organic and carry momentum. The only real problem here comes down to the hardware as opposed to Gameloft’s design. Navigation has been left largely untouched as well. It’s a shame really, considering how, in the recent films, fight scenes exhibit intuitive use of Peter Parker’s web shooters. It’s a simple button-mashing system that throws in the occasional telegraphed counter-attack. I actually found myself liking several of the boss battles, featuring six iconic villains from the Marvel Archives. Combat outside of these scenarios mirrors the previous game, however, failing to bring anything new or substantial to the table. Though exhausting, the pay-off is occasionally worth the wait. Yes, there may be 100 of them, but here there’s an argument for quality over quantity. You can’t simply do one and move directly onto the next no, instead you’ll have to beat enough of the aforementioned secondary quests to meet a quota. Perhaps it wouldn’t feel like such a labour if the side missions were different every time.

The annoying thing, however, is the gap between Spidey 2’s story missions.

Gameloft spiderman games