The Amazing Spider-Man Bundle

The Amazing Spider-Man Bundle packages Beenox's 2012 open-world action-adventure with its DLC content, including the Lizard Rampage Pack and the Oscorp Search and Destroy Pack. The base game picks up where the 2012 film left off, dropping you into a cross-species outbreak across Manhattan that Alistair Smythe's Oscorp is making considerably worse. It is a movie tie-in that, for once, actually tries to be a game first, setting its story as a standalone epilogue rather than a straightforward retread of the film's plot. The star attraction is web traversal, and Beenox largely nails it. Swinging through Manhattan feels fast and physical, with the camera pulling in close as Spidey accelerates between skyscrapers. The defining new mechanic is Web Rush: hold a button to slow time, pick a point in the environment or an enemy, release, and Spider-Man rockets straight to it. It works in combat, for stealth takedowns, and for pure traversal, and it gives the movement a momentum-chaining quality that fans of old-school Spidey games will appreciate. Side activities sprawl across the open world too - stopping street crimes, photographing landmarks to unlock alternate costumes (including the Big Time suit and Scarlet Spider), collecting comic book covers, and infiltrating hidden Oscorp labs that ask you to clear rooms without being spotted. Combat is where the honeymoon shortens. The freeflow system is lifted directly from the Batman: Arkham games - combo meter climbs with each hit, a Spidey Sense prompt tells you when to counter, suit and tech upgrades unlock gradually. It works, but it never reaches the Arkham games' depth. The limited gadget set means fights repeat the same patterns well before the credits, and enemy variety is thin enough that the combat stops surprising you about halfway through. The story has similar issues: Smythe is a flat villain, the cross-species plot is functional at best, and several critics noted that the thin narrative feels like scaffolding for the traversal sandbox rather than a story worth following on its own terms. PC players should know this version has some technical baggage. Stuttering during asset streaming is a documented issue on all of Beenox's PC Spider-Man releases, and the gamepad support at launch had axis-mapping problems that some players still report. The game also lost its digital storefront listing in 2017 after Activision lost the Marvel licence, so if you have a key in hand through a third-party store, treat it as the only copy you are likely to get. The DLC packs are bite-sized but fun for what they are: the Lizard Rampage Pack lets you stomp through Manhattan destroying Oscorp generators, and the Oscorp Search and Destroy Pack adds two retro arcade mini-games to Spider-Man's in-game smartphone. If your main ask from a Spider-Man game is a city worth swinging around in, this delivers that cleanly. If you want a mechanically rich brawler with a plot that holds together, manage expectations accordingly. It is a solid afternoon of web-slinging with extra villain playgrounds bolted on, and for Spider-Man fans who missed it at launch, the bundle represents the most complete version of an imperfect but earnest game.

Alex · Scout Team

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