The game Spider Amazing Battle Fighting picks up where this summer's new film leaves off,
meaning anyone too concerned about story spoilers will want to wait until after the movie actually opens in theaters to bring this one home –
you can get along just fine without any connection to the flick, though, as the basics are the same as always.
You're heroes, you've got super-strength, can crawl on walls and have tons of webs to throw around,
and you've got a whole lot of thugs, robots and would-be super-villains to knock across the screen.
Previous adaptations bringing Spidey into video game form have emphasized different aspects of his character,
particularly the freedom of his webslinging around New York City. Beenox's latest interpretation here pulls back on that go-anywhere approach,
though, and instead more commonly boxes our hero into a series of contained interior environments.
It's concerning at first heroes without huge, open spaces to zip around at your whim seems like a limited idea –
but the claustrophobia ends up working in the game's favor by highlighting the hero's considerable combat variety.
Say you're entering a room filled with gun-toting security guards – a common scenario.
You can choose to dash straight in on foot, hammering the Y Button to punch-and-combo the enemies into submission.
Or, alternatively, you could crawl in on the wall and target the same foes from a distance with web attacks – "Web Rushing,"
as it's now called – to fly straight at a target, kick him in the head,
then just as quickly retreat back to the safe position you started from to be out of range of retaliation.
Then, beyond those approaches, you can also pick to play most missions in full-on stealth mode –
hanging out on the ceiling, targeting enemies from above, and dropping straight down to encase them in web cocoons that you then lift straight back up and attach to the ceiling.
The other enemies in the area look around, confused, wondering where their friend just disappeared to.
And then you rinse and repeat the process, until the whole room in cleared of goons and decorated with suffocating, web-wrapped bodies up above.
This is when Spider Amazing Battle Fighting is at its man best.
Having so many different options at your disposal for dealing with the same groups of enemies opens back up that sense of freedom that you might have feared would be lost by the game's lack of wide-open spaces to websling across.