The Amazing Spider-Man 2 Game Looks Surprisingly Fun

A new video walkthrough for The Amazing Spider-Man 2 has been released into the wild and I have to say, it looks kind of fun. Of course, it's a bit of a toss-up in the gaming community as to what they think about the game and how well the gameplay ties into the web-slinging and combat, but the latest developer walkthrough just gives the impression of an extremely fluid and smooth gameplay experience.

Now this isn't to say that The Amazing Spider-Man 2 will be an awesome, well-designed, very fun game. I have no idea. What I am saying is that after you watch the five minute video below, you might be convinced (a little like I was) that this game could be surprisingly fun.

I guess we should all keep in mind this is still a movie-based video game. So... yeah. Doubt caps should be kept on your head at all times.

There's also been some debates about Spider-Man's animation transitions between his acrobatic leaping and his web-slinging antics. Some gamers felt it was jarring seeing him flip and spin and rotate in the air while going into a dive, before whipping out the sticky web. I'm a bit torn on this: while the flipping and mid-air twisting is kind of out of the blue, I do have to admit that at least the animation blending and transitioning is seamless.

One of my biggest gripes with Uncharted 2 was the janky animation blending when Drake would go from cover to rolling or from ducking to vaulting, or from coming out of cover to shoot – the transitioning suffered from animation judder, where you would literally see the stop of one animation and the start of another. I absolutely hated that.

Here, with Spider-Man 2, you don't see the start or stop frames and that makes a world of difference.

Not only is the web-slinging exceptionally smooth but it marries well to the combat mechanics, allowing players to smoothly flow from moving around the city to throwing punches against baddies, without a break in the momentum or being able to easily spot out the key-frame hopping.

Much of the gameplay also reminds me of Rocksteady's Batman: Arkham games, as we see how Spider-Man can hop and bop around to multiple baddies without nary a stumble or break in the action.

And dare I say it: I think The Amazing Spider-Man 2 might do the mixture of vertical scaling and stealth combat tactics better than the Batman: Arkham games. However, that's just what I'm seeing from this video here, and I should also note that the Arkham games were on the geriatric twins, which automatically limited a lot of its properties to maintain steady performance rates on the PS3 and 360.

I get the feeling that Arkham Knight will probably bring the smooth frame rates and equally smooth animation transitions that we're seeing in The Amazing Spider-Man 2 video to the XB1 and PS4, given that the developers have moved over to the eighth-gen consoles instead of downgrading, down-scaling and “optimizing” for near decade-old technology.

Anyway, The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is due out at the end of April for old-gen consoles, new-gen consoles, PC and those expensive lint collectors known as mobile devices. You can learn more about the game by paying a visit to the official website.