Spider-Man: Friend or Foe
One of my favorite comic book series when I was growing up was "Marvel Team-Up." Unlike the last 20 or so years, when comics have featured more guest appearances and crossovers than a rap album, when I was a wee lad, your superheroes kept mostly to their own four-color pages. But that wasn't the case in "Team-Up." In this wonderful corner of the Marvel Universe, men in tights would mingle and trade quips and blows each month, to my utter delight.
I can't imagine that my little heart or impressionable mind could have handled it if you had shown me Spider-Man: Friend or Foe back in the day (and not just because I knew only Atari 2600-quality visuals, spaceman.) The concept of my friendly neighborhood Spidey teaming up not only with his fellow heroes but the bad guys as well would have shocked me in a way that only a giant pixie stick could have before. Now, these may be more jaded times we live in, and I a more world-weary adult, but the concept is still kinda cool, at least when it comes to joining forces with the baddies.
To put such a concept into play, the game introduces a threat bigger than the Green Goblin or Sandman: alien mind-control devices powered by the symbiote that gave Venom his powers. As Spidey battles his old foes, under the direction of Nick Fury and the international defense group S.H.I.E.L.D., who are under the influence of these devices, he frees them to join him on his quest, along with some pals, like Silver Sable, Black Cat and Iron Fist. You get to pick one to join Spidey on his mission, swap off in the middle of combat or perform a team-up super attack (if you have the necessary power-up available.)
Gameplay
The game is a simple brawler that lets you and an accompanying partner (computer-controlled or human co-op) tackle a few waves ofhomogeneous robots before you either finish the level or battle a boss villain. Along the way, you collect power-ups, tokens that can be used to improve your characters' abilities and various items that pay off in rewards later. That's about all there is, especially since the robots are simply cannon fodder. It's just too easy, too repetitive and awfully boring thanks to a severe lack of variety in the enemies. Improve your attacks by shopping for new weapons and abilities, and the game gets even easier.
What makes the game fun? The variety of playable characters and attacks let you blow away over your cookie-cutter foes, whether you're in button-mashing mode or trying to use the special moves, connecting a variety of attacks with in-air assaults which can create a pretty fluid and entertaining battle. Appropriately, Spider-Man's attacks, which integrate his web-slinging abilities, are the most fun, but they are so much better than the other characters', that there's no real motivation to switch off, other than curiosity as to what a pairing's team-up attack looks like (one of the coolest elements of the game.)
There's also no real motivation to try too hard, as getting killed has little meaning, since you get regenerated, at the cost of a handful of the tokens you've collected. So when you run out of tokens, the game's over, right? Not at all, as you get a nice "welfare" rebirth. Again and again. Jump off a ledge (which is easy, as the layout of the stages can have issues with alignment and depth perception) and you return. Blow yourself up with an explosive? Welcome back. There's no limit to how many ways you can end poor Spidey's life only to see him return to his Sisyphean struggle. Considering what a good challenge means to a game, the utter lack of one is a real deficit.
When the battle of the main game gets to be too much like deja vu to you, there are another options. In the game, there are hidden areas you can unlock (by defeating more of those robots) to use as arenas for one-on-one battles with a playing partner. There's no online portion to this, but if someone's sitting next to you, you can do battle in a 3-D fighting-game style, using the abilities in the game and the characters you've unlocked. The attacks don't lend themselves all that well to a fighting game, but they are a little diversion from any boredom the game may bring on. You can also collect items that will unlock some minor rewards.
Controls
The two-handed controls for this game were kept rather simple, limiting the Wii-ness of it all by saving motion-sensing controls for changing characters (a flick of the nunchuk) or enhancing throws (moving the Wiimote when attempting those moves.) Outside of those small enhancements, it's all about guiding your character with the analog stick, and using the three main buttons to jump, attack and use special powers. The only frustrating parts are the power-up activations, which are done by reaching up to the D-pad, and the throw enhancements, which seem to work once in every three tries. The rest of the time, you're just lost in mash-land, pounding away on the controls. It's games like this, where the controls are so similar to previous-generation games, that show how natural it is to play with your hands separated in the way only the Wii controls allow.
Moving around the game can get a bit annoying when you attempt to jump from platform to platform, or worse yet, web swing, as frequently platforms don't quite line-up, and the swing doesn't take you where you would expect it to. These problems can be overcome with practice, but it still can bug you.
Graphics
This is one of those games that, though not on the cutting edge graphics-wise, looks quite nice, thanks to an art style that's simplistic and well-done. For the Wii, it looks as good as anything I've played that's not developed by Nintendo, especially in the area of cut-scenes and cinematics. When you pop the disc in, you can get seriously excited by how good the animation looks, but that's the peak of how good the game's graphics are. The in-game video is boring, thanks to repetitive design, but it is solid, with a 3/4 camera perspective that shows a wide section of the gamefield, though on a smaller screen, it can get hard to see what's happening, thanks to the size of the characters in comparison to the background. The movement of the characters is clean, with some exaggerated movement, especially when you knock a foe into the sky, sending him the height of a small office building. This game certainly gives hope for the future of graphics on the Wii, as the presentation is slick and impressive, but the character models aren't quite as impressive, with some, like Silver Sable, looking a bit odd. That might be more of an art issue than a programming issue though.
Audio
The Dolby Pro Logic II stands out mainly because of the effort put into the voices in the game. This game features some of the best acting I've heard in a video game, which says a lot, considering the variety of characters included. Normally, I'm looking to get through a cinematic as quickly as possible, but the acting makes these parts as good or better than the game action. The in-game sound is pretty good as well, with well-designed effects, but just as the game repeats itself in the battles, the sound does as well. Any time you battle a robot with a weak spot, the game makes sure you know where and when to attack, by repeating it again and again. It gets to the point where you start answering back, hoping to shut it up.
And in the End...
I could see this game being the holy grail for younger players, as it's an easy game to pick up and play, with characters and situations you'd love to play with and in, and enough challenge to maintain interest. For older players though, the appeal is severely limited, thanks almost entirely to the weaknesses of the enemies. All they needed to do to make this a solid game would be to pull back on the playable characters and make the foes more interesting to battle. As it is, it's a fun couple of hours, but hardly enough to engage most gamers. A rental will answer any questions you have about the game, and will help you kill an afternoon.