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One of the biggest issues is the first thing you’ll probably notice: it requires an internet connection to play. There’s a bunch of new combos to unlock, but they make little difference when mashing the punch button ends up being just as effective. Where it fails, though, is that instead of having the sort of rhythm that’s ever-present in the Batman games, you’ll find yourself simply mashing the punch button. Impressive for a mobile game.Gameloft has adapted the Batman: Arkham style of free-flowing combat, giving you buttons for normal attacks, web slinging, and counters. Boss fights are interesting, bringing in new mechanics and quick time events, but tend to be a bit on the punishing side. After completing a certain number of events- both random and story-centric-Spidey gets to take on the boss of that chapter. The first chapter, for example, deals with Electro, and has quite a few enemies guarding electrical generators for him, or even rigging some to blow up. The random events do have a bit of variety, with some of them even changing thematically depending on which chapter you’re on. Gameplay mostly involves swinging around Manhattan, and completing random “help citizens” missions to unlock a story progression event. The same can’t be said for other areas, such as the random bystanders, whose models tend to look like they were pulled straight from a 10-year-old game. This is, however, to be expected, since a lot of care has clearly gone into making Spider-Man’s character model look as good as possible. The open world has a visible impact on performance, with long loading screens as well as random drops in frame rate. Here, exploration feels like boring filler material that does little more than pad out the playing time. Even back on the PS2, webs would stick to buildings and you swung alongside them naturally.
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It doesn't help that Spidey’s webs seem to stick to clouds whenever you try to swing, which makes the whole game feels a bit phony. Sadly, the limitations of smartphones as gaming devices are in full show here, as even something as simple as turning around between web swings takes a considerable amount of effort, and a fair bit of praying that the shoddy on-screen analog stick actually does what you want it to. One of the best things about The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is the open world, and the ability to go more-or-less anywhere you might want to in a miniature Manhattan.
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