As long as you are a hero Fisk’s special anti-crime task force ignores you, but once you dip into the red you will be hunted down by a variety of increasing deadly soldiers, drones, building-mounted turrets, and electric nets stretched between nearly every building in town.

If you fail during any of these events your status will slide toward Menace, but even worse, if you simply ignore the events, you will still become a Menace because you are always fighting a constant drain on your Hero meter. Sadly, that is the limit of your heroic options and while these opportunities are plentifully scattered about the city map, despite a few very slight tweaks to the sequence of events, they all play out identical. These include saving injured citizens and swinging them to the nearest med center, stopping a random crime like a mugging or a B&E, rescuing people from a burning building, disposing of bombs, or saving a hostage from a car during a high-speed police chase. Spider-Man can generate goodwill and boost his Heroic meter into the green by performing a limited set of heroic acts.

Good versus evil alignment or karma meters are nothing new but this game approaches it with a new twist that saps the usual joy of city exploration from the game entirely. If anything, the game is more annoying than challenging thanks to the new Menace/Hero meter that you are constantly at odds with. In fact, there is nothing really challenging about The Amazing Spider-Man 2 regardless of the difficulty setting. There are a few other minor boss encounters like Kraven and Black Cat, but they are of little challenge as well. Your main villains for the game are Kingpin and Carnage who both share nearly identical circular arena boss fights – ironically Kingpin’s mid-game fight is harder than the final battle with Carnage. While those two characters do appear in the game, they are simply thrust into the 14-chapter story as one-off encounters that have nothing to do with the already paper-thin plot.

The new movie villains are Electro, and to a lesser extent, Green Goblin. First, the best Spider-Man games in the franchise have always been the ones that have had nothing to do with the movies, and second there is very little in this game to tie it to the film currently in theaters. Developer Beenox seems to have lost their way with this obviously rushed-to-market-to-coincide-with-movie-release-date video game tie-in, which is ironic for two reasons. Some have been good…some have been great, and some have been…well, some have been The Amazing Spider-Man 2. I’ve played and reviewed every Spider-Man game Activision has ever released.

Amazing spiderman 2 pc game