"Spider-Man games haven’t been very good over the past six years. But "Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions" is actually a pretty solid title with decent combat and a couple interesting concepts. The game is far from perfect, but it could mean that future Spider-Man games may be even better.
"The story picks up after a mysterious item, "The Tablet of Order and Chaos," is shattered and the pieces are spread across the four dimensions. Each dimension’s Spider-Man is summoned to then gather the pieces of the tablet. The story arc of the game is told through narration by Stan Lee which is not as awesome as it would seem.
"Each of the Spider-Men; Amazing Spider-Man, Ultimate Spider-Man (which is the Venom suit), Noir Spider-Man and Spider-Man 2099, are entirely unique. The level and artistic designs for each of their levels is very distinct, which makes it feel like you’re actually playing in four different dimentions.
"The voice actors for the four Spider-Men (Neil Patrick Harris, Christopher Daniel Barnes, Dan Gilvezan and Josh Keaton)each have previous experience voicing Spider-Man in a cartoon or video game. Unfortunately, in combat, they tend to say the same lines of dialogue over and over again, which gets annoying very quickly.
"The combat is decent, but it plays like most generic action games. However, there are weird moments in boss battles where the player goes into a first-person point-of-view and has to use the analog sticks to hit the opponent, which slows down the game.
"The levels are very linear, but Spider-Man can still web-sling to avoid obstacles, fight enemies, or just move faster. He can also crawl on walls, but the poor camera angles make it difficult to see anything but his back. In combat, the camera won’t show all the enemies at once, so the character is often blind-sided. Also, there’s no multi-player mode, which isn’t a big deal, but it might lose some appeal to potential players.
""Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions is one of the best Spider-Man games in a long time, especially for Spider-Man fans. Maybe that alone means this game is worth checking out.
