Review by: Brandon "Shockin’" Cackowski-Schnell

Spider-Man: Edge of Time took everything that was good about Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions, namely the open aired web slinging, varied, fluid combat and collection of well realized super-villains and threw it all away in favor of an uninteresting slog through a giant office building with random stops to fight reskinned version of the same enemies. If this is what a year’s worth of development gets you, I’d say next time don’t bother.

Time travel shenanigans are afoot and it’s up to not one, but two Spider-Men to fix the problems. Dr. Walker Sloan, a scientist at Alchemax, the mega-conglomerate of Spider-Man 2099’s timeline, decides that he’s just not happy with his lot in life and decides to travel back in time to the 1970’s and found Alchemax there. Unfortunately this results in Anti-Venom killing Spider-Man, which is somewhat of a downer, so Miguel O’Hara (Spider-Man 2099) teams up with Peter Parker (Amazing Spider-Man) to stop Sloan from mucking up the time stream, saving Spider-Man’s life in the process.

Along the way an alternate timeline gets written, replacing the Daily Bugle with Alchemax and turns Peter Parker from a down-on-his-luck photojournalist into an Alchemax scientist yet conveniently not changing the fact that he’s Spider-Man. If the plot sounds silly, it’s because it is and the whole “Alchemax in the past” plot point seems to be there only to justify why the entire game takes place in a giant office building.

Yes, that’s right, an office building. I know, I know, when you think of Spider-Man and his ability to zip through urban jungles unfettered by the laws of gravity, you think of office building. I mean, who wouldn’t? Sure the hallways are big and you come to some multi-story atriums but at the end of the day it’s an office building and web zipping through it is as interesting and thrilling as it sounds.

Luckily you have interesting and varied combat to help spice things up. Oh wait, no you don’t! You have a light attack and a heavy attack and some combos that you can pull off when your stamina meter goes into overdrive, however that happens, but basically you just hit the buttons and watch the Spider-Man punch dudes. Amazing Spider-Man has a hypersense thing that makes him move quickly so that he can get around guys and punch them and Spidey 2099 has a decoy that he can deploy so that he can get around guys and punch them, which adds some strategic wrinkles to the combat provided you want to get around guys and punch them. Seriously, the combat is the same across both Spider-Men, with some small reskinning differences. Spider-Man uses webs, Spidey 2099 uses claws, and they both bicker incessantly. Yawn.

The reskinning also carries over to the game’s enemies. Basically, enemies in the past are people with guns. Enemies in the future are robots with guns. They attack the same way, move the same way and are dispatched the same way. Eventually some mutated lizard things show up in the past and not wanting to waste such an opportunity for such an awesome enemy type in the future, Alchemax made a robot version because nothing says “practical” like a robotic mutated lizard thing. Also, at some point in the past cyborg prison escapees with fire axes show up. I have no idea why but by then, I was just looking to finish the game. To give you an idea of just how bad the reskinning is, at one point Amazing Spidey and 2099 Spidey switch timelines and then switch back. At this point, I no longer knew which Spidey was in which timeline because the environments and enemies all looked the same, as if a neon light store threw up all over my television.