Spider-Man (1995)

Beat on Amazing difficulty, which I assume to be the hardest. I guess amazing is a better word than spectacular; stupid non standard difficulty mode names. This was not a good game. I found it frustrating and dull, needed a walkthrough, and almost gave up multiple times. The biggest problem was the lack of screen scrolling to keep up with your movements, so you could only see in front of you using 20% of the screen, which made it almost impossible to avoid getting hit by enemies first. Jesus man, take off your mask if you have that much trouble seeing. The worst part of that was trying to jump over oncoming roller coaster cars. Needless to say, I got hit by almost every one and just had to suck up all that hp loss. Good thing dying did not reset progress. The most frustrating aspect was the almost 2.5D backgrounds that you could enter, like stairs and going behind walls. Not only was it extremely difficult to figure out where to go, but the controls for switching were finicky; this was largely why I had to check a walkthrough so many times. Terrible level design. The rest of the controls were not good either. Spider Man felt sluggish to control, with input delays and sometimes moves just not working. Web swinging was particularly bad for sometimes just not shooting when I pressed the button, or shooting but not sticking. The combat was not bad and the mini bosses and bosses did not have too much health. Duck kick was a great move, jump kick was good but there were way too many flying enemies. Web projectiles could be thrown with limited diagonal aiming, but were hard to use. I never seen any use for the vertical web climb. There were no base defensive moves and I think the web shot should have paralyzed enemies instead of dealt damage. Spider Man's style is using webbing to incapacitate. There were grenades that could stun but, if Spider Man is going to throw grenades why not give him a gun too? I found the blue grenades very good for Rhino, but the green ones good for nothing. I tried the fantastic 4 powers but did not need them due to having so many lives. While I appreciated the inventory and item system, I felt it could have been far more interesting. The first boss Dr Ock was ridiculously tough, but I figured out the gimmick fairly quickly. Then I was sent to the sewer where I was stuck for quite some time. I thought it was a bonus stage or hub to transition between stages, but no I had to beat Dr Ock again. I would say this was the hardest fight in the game. Green Goblin was frustrating because the little shit kept flying around out of reach, until I figured out how to hit him. Avoiding his attacks was not hard. The rest of the enemies were not bad, though the game really needed better design.

5.0/10