Foe

I haven’t written a game review in eleven months and six days. Surely a new groundbreaking game like GTA4 or Metal Gear 4 is going to be the one to finally cure Cobadee’s writers block, right? Wrong! I hear there are games out there that simulate eighty percent of everything you can do on Earth, but for some reason I’m writing about the most blahtacular game I’ve ever played. I come to you with a review for Spiderman: Friend or Foe. Let me just say that if we could test the IQ of video games, this game would probably be about that of a West Highland Terrier’s; that’s assuming we had an IQ test for dogs as well.

If you’ve played Marvel Ultimate Alliance for any amount of time, you’ve seen everything that this game has to offer, and more. This game is a dumbed down crappier version of that game. The game borrows the same premise and feel of games like Baldur’s Gate, Untold Legends, Marvel Ultimate Alliance, and X-men Legends, but it forgets to borrow the story driven gameplay, substance, and fun that those games could boast. And yes, I am a fan of these types of games. I love sitting down and mindlessly wacking bad guys over and over, but not in this game.

Let me begin to tell you why this game fails so miserably. I shall start with the story. The story makes almost no sense. Meteors have fallen from space and are sending ghosts to five areas in Europe. At the same time, brainwashing devices have been planted into the minds of many of Spiderman’s villains and causing them to do evil things. Wooo! Scary! As if they’re not used to doing evil things. You’re supposed to find them and destroy the brainwashing thingies on them and partner up with them to find who is behind all of this.
Here’s how you will feel after playing this game:

After 5 minutes: “Hmm this seems pretty cool.”
After 15 minutes: “Hmm, seems solid.”
After 30 minutes: “Okay this is getting a little old.”
After an hour: “Kill me.”

There really isn’t a ton to say about Friend or Foe, because after thirty seconds, you’ve seen everything this game has to offer.

Here’s what you do in the game:
Pick a partner for Spiderman
Go into the level you want
Run through the levels killing every guy you can see

One of the big things that spoil this game is the extremely easy difficulty. Excluding bosses, there are four types of enemies in the game: small guys, medium size guys, big guys, and really big guys. These same guys are repeated throughout the whole game with different looks for each of the levels. Each of them only gets a tad more challenging as you progress through the game. Now take into consideration that these enemies never get hard and then add the fact that you have unlimited respawns and you get one of the easiest games out there. There is no challenge. You could beat every part of every level, except for bosses, without even attacking anyone because the partner you picked will fight all the guys for you. The guys are always ridiculously easy to beat. Right from the beginning you won’t be asking yourself ‘Gee, can I beat this guy?’ but ‘What’s the fastest way I can get rid of this dude?’ What you’ll probably do is just throw all the bad guys off the cliff. The fact that you can throw guys off of cliffs takes away every bit of skill that this game could have left.

Yeah you can play co-op, but that just makes the game less fun. Whenever I tried to play this with a friend, I found my friend complaining the whole time. There should’ve been some cool co-op puzzles, like having one guy go ahead and hit a switch, but no! With the unlimited lives you’ll probably have no morale to make it through the game. I think the reason they gave unlimited lives was was because the AI of your partner in single player is so terrible that he is constantly jumping off the level and dying. Or maybe he’s just suicidal because he’s stuck in such a terrible game. The enemies don’t have really any minds either and are extremely easy to take down. I can’t believe I made it to the end. Guess what! The game leaves room for a sequel! How exciting!

One other thing that my friends would always complain about was the fact that Spiderman was the only good character. Be prepared to fight over him. Spiderman has a full upgrade screen where you can buy and upgrade attacks. You can upgrade the health, strength, and toughness of the other characters that you unlock through the game, but they’ll never be nearly as good as Spidey so you’ll rarely ever intentionally play as them. There isn’t much diversity between the other guys you can play. It’s very very very common to see two, three, four, five, six characters with the same “special” attacks. You’ll never want to buy upgrades for the other characters because you are constantly unlocking new bad guys to play, so buying upgrades is a terrible waste of your money.

Friend or Foe is definitely a button masher. The combat in the game is so ridiculously simple. The B button is grab. The X button is normal attack. The Y button is power attack. Press these buttons in any order you’d like and your guy will zip all around the place and beat the tar out of the bad guys. My friend who isn’t much of a gamer joined in and was about as good as me in 10 minutes or so. The 4 types of enemies you fight are so blaaaah. They don’t do anything exciting… they pretty much just punch you… and uhhhh… punch you some more. Occasionally you’ll find one who can do a stomp attack or something. The boss battles are hardly epic and most of them feel very similar. You generally have to dodge attacks and wait for them to give you an easy shot at either punching them or throwing something at them. The final battle was so freaking disappointing. You throw boxes at a guy on a balcony and wait for him to teleport to the floor so you can punch him. You’d think that you’d be able to web sling across the level. This is a Spidey game… isn’t it a law that he can web sling? Well they found a loop hole around this law. Spiderman will do one lengthy web sling and won’t catch it again to do another one. Come on! Even Ultimate Alliance had continuous web slinging!

There’s a multiplayer mode where you can beat the crap out of a friend in one of the areas seen in the single player campaign. This mode is one of the least fun things I’ve done in my life. I waited at the DMV for a couple hours this morning and it was probably more fun. I played as Spiderman against my friend and I’m not sure if he hit me one time. We’re equally good at the game too. Not only is the combat just terribly bland, but the characters are completely unmatched. Double whammy.
The graphics are very cartoony, but they’re surprisingly not bad at all. They have a Nintendo-esque look to them. Ultimate Spiderman boasted sweet cell shading and looked just like the Ultimate Spiderman comics. Most of the other ones go for the realistic look to capture the feel of the movies. This one has almost perfectly captured the look of the Amazing Spiderman comics. There are quite a few characters and they all look like they put work into each and every one of them. Some of the attacks look really neat too. The five environments featured in the game are Tokyo, Tangaroa Island, Cairo, Transylvania and Nepal. All of the environments look pretty good for the most part, but they do get repetitive after a while. Be prepared to see the same textures for the hour or so you will spend in each environment. Luckily the five environments all look very different. For example, Cairo has pyramids and sand everywhere. In Transylvania you’ll maneuver through creepy mansions and graveyards. Usually the game switches the environment right before you’d go insane.
The guy in charge definitely needed to hire a new sound team. The voiceovers are ridunkulously awful. They tried to make it so the characters interact with each other, but they rarely say anything that makes sense. It’s like they just throw random voice clips they recorded all over the place. In one part of the game I had come from a big battle where I fought with so many bad guys and then like four or five ghosts appear and Spiderman screams “There are so many of them!” The music gets annoying after about five minutes of playing. The tracks are very cheesish and repeat after about a minute. The music does fit the environments you’ll play in though. Cairo has Egyptian music. Transylvania has creepy music.

The achievements in the game are so ridiculously challenging. Most of the gamerpoints consist of you finding all the secret little floating objects that are in the levels. It would be torture to try finding them. The achievements would probably drag this five to six hour long game into a ten hour one.

All in all this game is just terrible. Do not buy it. Do not rent it. If you have Ultimate Alliance or any game like it, play it instead. Ultimate Alliance 2 is coming out. Wait for that instead! DO NOT BUY THIS GAME. AND THAT IS FINAL!

Graphics: 7/10
Sound: 3/10
Gameplay: 1/10
Difficulty: Extremely frickin easy
Bang for thy buck: 1/10
Overall: 2/10