Beenox and Activision, the developers of last year's game Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions, announced today the development of their next Spider-Man game, Edge of Time, scheduled for a Fall 2011 release. This game, instead of focusing on the four different Spider-Men from the previous game (Noir, Amazing, symbiote, and 2099), will just focus on the untimely death of the original Spider-Man and the attempt to change the events that transpired both in the past and in the catastrophically affected future as Spider-Man 2099.
Having played Shattered Dimensions recently, I am markedly concerned by the news that Beenox is developing a new game. I did not like the first game at all - the story was very paint-by-numbers Spider-Man, and the gameplay was not nearly good enough to justify the poor story. Beenox made the very strange developer decision to nix an open world for Spider-Man and instead have very linear levels with very diminshed amounts of web-swinging, and what they did have was too sloppy and glitchy to truly be used effectively. To put it in perspective, having a Spider-Man game where you cannot swing from your webs at any given time (and there were parts where you simply were not allowed to use them, without any contextual explanation) is like a Batman game without a grappling hook.
Maybe I am just hoping for another Spider-Man 2 (seriously, how good was that game?), but from what I am hearing about the story and who is developing it, I am worried about a similar game to Shattered Dimensions, which felt a little like shovelware to me. This is one of the issues of the game industry that worries me, and holds back video games. Activision will likely stick with Beenox for the next several years with the Spider-Man license, much like Atari with Dimps regarding the Dragonball franchise, which never makes any progression (creatively or financially) due to the refusal to attempt to create something interesting with the license.Companies need to branch out and work with studios that are going to do something different, my case and point being Rocksteady Studios with Arkham Asylum, a relatively unknown studio who completely broke the mold on what to expect from a superhero game by releasing an absolutely brilliant title. When Activision released Web of Shadows a few years ago, it was flawed, but definitely a step in the right direction, allowing the player greater freedom in how they would fight their enemies and incorporating a web-zip function that was actually useful (if a tad overused). It gave me hope that the franchise would continue to evolve into a game that would be much better, but I view their partnership with Beenox and Shattered Dimensions as a step back from the promise offered by Web of Shadows.
So, if you read this, Activision (not likely), please go back to the drawing board and what truly makes a Spider-Man game fun: freely swinging around New York City and pummeling super villains with an acrobatic flair while making terrible, terrible jokes. Spider-Man is too good of a superhero to be squandered on uninspired games like Shattered Dimensions and Edge of Time.
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