Spider-Man: Mysterio’s Menace (GBA)

While Spider-Man certainly seems to have one of the best sets of villains of any superhero, most of the web-slinging wall-crawler’s foes are ones who are able to hold their own in a fight by enhancing their strength with technology or powers of their own. However, there is one big name among Spider-Man’s best known baddies who can barely take a punch, let alone throw one, and he manages to be one of the most creative ones when he does show up. Mysterio’s illusions and technological know-how make for a villain Spider-Man must defeat not by overpowering him, but by outsmarting him, and having a whole game with such a villain would have plenty of potential for creative fights. The odd thing about Spider-Man: Mysterio’s Menace though is the titular villain isn’t even acknowledged until you reach the game’s final stage.

 

While out performing an errand for his wife Mary-Jane, Peter Parker happens to overhear that a group of villains are attacking different locations all across New York City and quickly switches into his superhero alter ego. As he heads off to deal with the sudden crime wave, Spider-Man is baffled by the villains who seem to be working together. The mobster Hammerhead, the electrically-powered Electro, and even the most unusual of pulls with the incredibly obscure Big Wheel whose whole concept is he drive a big battle vehicle shaped like a wheel all seem to be working together while at the same time completely unaware of what their specific crimes are contributing to the plan. The title makes it fairly clearly that the mastermind behind this mystery is none other than Mysterio even if it takes a while to get there in the story itself. Once Spider-Man has fought his way through the other supervillains as they gather the necessary equipment for Mysterio’s master plan, he heads off to face Mysterio at the carnival, this being the only portion of the game that really utilizes the idea of illusions with enemies who appear to be skeletons that can reassemble themselves and Mysterio himself seeming to duplicate himself and grow in size during the climactic battle.

Despite the headlining villain being a rather small part of determining the game’s action design, Spider-Man: Mysterio’s Menace is still a fairly enjoyable action platformer. The side-scrolling stages are designed in an intelligent way where you can often easily identify the path forward and progress if all you care about is making your way to the boss but there is plenty to be found if you choose to explore these areas with your spider powers. Crawling up walls, swinging across gaps, and generally embracing the vertical nature of these stages not only helps you find traditionally useful items like extra lives, a brief invincibility power-up, and refills for your health and web shooters, but each stage features special upgrades hidden somewhere in the level. Some of these are helpful if simplistic like being able to store more silk for your web shooters, but others can provide incredibly useful gameplay bonuses like being able to ignore the electric shock of exposed wires or the damage of open flames. The game makes sure to put some goodies on the other side of these hazards to reward you for going out of your way to get these upgrades as well, but you do essentially have to play all the levels in a certain order if you want to make grabbing every upgrade possible. Still, the levels incentivizing you to explore helps them to have an appreciated layer of depth even if certain ones like the chemical plant feel too big and others like the Nightclub feel oddly small even if you go off the beaten path.

 

Another way the levels pull their weight though is with the specific approach to enemy design used. There are plenty of simple brutes walking around these stages, but depending on the location they might be placed in a way that makes them still dangerous to deal with. The docks in particular places plenty of men on small platforms that they’ll happily shove you off of to your watery doom if you aren’t careful, and they can be surprisingly quick as well so you need to react swiftly to prevent being knocked around. Gunmen will fire almost as soon as they’re on screen so you first need to dodge their bullets before you deal with them, and ninjas tend to be agile so you can’t just crowd them and whale away. Some foes even pack different close and long range weapons, meaning if you try to keep your distance and deal with them by way of web shooters you might be surprised when a molotov cocktail is thrown at you. The enemies are the main danger as you explore the stages so their simple but effective tactics means the levels derive much of their challenge by how those foes are placed. There are, unfortunately, only 7 levels total, and while some stages like Mysterio’s carnival will feature devious skeleton placement where messing up can throw you into spikes or saws, it also features a portion where you can easily outsmart the plentiful clown enemies who aren’t placed with the same degree of attention. You might find one level where the foes seem intelligently placed and another where you can bypass most of them with ease, but it does average out well enough that the better instances of enemy placement still keep the action fresh. It is somewhat likely this rise and fall of difficulty ties a bit to the fact you can sort of pick the order you tackle the levels, with each of the original three stages opening up one new level when beaten, so the balance might have favored making sure none seem remarkably more difficult than the others save the final stage.

I would still place the enemy design and placement as something done pretty well in general, but Spider-Man’s own powers could definitely use some improvements. The one issue that keeps arising is the fact that Spider-Man’s most reliable attack method is going up close and punching a foe a few times, but the enemies will sometimes get too close to Spider-Man where his punches will somehow pass right through them while you can still be hit by their moves. You need to stop at the right spot so the spacing is close enough for your attacks to hit but not so close you lose your ability to land a punch, but some enemy types like to charge forward when you approach. If all you had was punches this would be a problem, but you have a pretty decent set of options for how you can tackle your foes. Some are simple like pulling off an uppercut to deal heavy damage if you can justify the time needed to wind it up, and jump attacks come both in simple aerial kicks as well as diving strikes that mean you can sometimes open the fight with a quick hit that can lead into a safer punch combo. Crouching kicks let you duck under certain attacks and are a nice option for foes who just stood up after you knocked them down since they will whiff their retaliatory strike, but your web shooters can help you out too. The web shield is a bit of a strange option since you root yourself in place when using it, but it can protect you from gunshots in a pinch. More important is that firing some silk at a foe will briefly wrap them up, even some boss characters best handled by waiting for the right moment and wrapping them up so they’re a sitting duck while you strike. While it’s not a perfect set of powers and combat options, Spider-Man: Mysterio’s Menace again manages to average out between what works and what doesn’t, and more importantly this small set of skills feels like a fine fit for how enemies are placed and behave save for that hit detection issue.

 

Bosses, perhaps unsurprisingly, have their highs and lows as well. Mysterio unfortunately is mostly a waiting game and a long one at that since his final boss role meant they padded his health so it’s not over quickly, the supervillain’s fight not as creative as it could have been either as it leans on repeating simple patterns. Some villains like Scorpion are highly mobile attackers that you need to pin down with your web shooters, Hammerhead likes to call in goons during his second fight so you need to balance fighting the back-up as well as him, and Electro is a pretty solid case of trying to find out how to dodge the electric blasts and strike as much as you can when you have an opening. On the other hand, Big Wheel is so big that you can easily just brute force the battle without having to worry too much about his attacks and Rhino and the first fight with Hammerhead both feature the boss charging you over and over while you easily jump over the shockwaves and gunshots they futilely use to briefly break up that pattern.  Here’s where the game’s short length kicks in as you essentially have a coin flip on whether a boss is going to be a decent fight or not, but at least the weaker ones are mostly over quickly so it’s not like any fight save Mysterio’s really stands out as poorly constructed.

THE VERDICT: Perhaps appropriately for a game with an illusionist as its main antagonist, Spider-Man: Mysterio’s Menace can look like a good or bad game based on where you decide to look. Sometimes level design rewards exploration and places it enemies well to serve as hazards, your combat options meaning even regular fights can still require a smart approach and certain bosses like Scorpion ask for the player to be quick and responsive. However, other bosses are mindless or drag on, fighting regular enemies sometimes goes awry due to detection issues, and the small set of stages mean certain portions feel unexceptional when they don’t balance their enemy placement well. This superhero game still provides more moments that are decent or outright good thankfully, but its slip ups do still impact the general enjoyability of this short title.

 

And so, I give Spider-Man: Mysterio’s Menace for Game Boy Advance…

An OKAY rating. While it’s easy to forgive the plain boss battles like Rhino’s and even wave away how underutilized Mysterio is as the main antagonist, if Spider-Man: Mysterio’s Menace is going to be seven stages long, it needed to make sure that experience was more finely tuned throughout. Since the upgrade path is only possible if you play levels in a certain order it might not have been too bad to just make the game progress in a linear fashion with a difficulty curve that ensures its simpler stages don’t have a chance of being played fifth, but mostly tidying up things like Spider-Man’s hit detection for his basic punches would do a fair bit to smooth over the game’s small issues. The enemy placement, especially when the game is willing to get difficult, does a lot to carry the experience as it asks the player to consider the area and their options before they attack. Just maintaining that intelligent level design would couple well with the moments you can explore for bonuses, but the attention to this important and effective element varies just a little too much to keep this a smooth adventure overall.

 

While all around a decent Spider-Man sidescroller, this small package feels like it needed a bit more planning to ensure an even distribution of its best features. If you’re a fan of Marvel’s biggest superhero it can easily entertain despite its little blemishes, but despite having a notoriously flashy villain as its headliner, Spider-Man: Mysterio’s Menace mostly provides a simple action experience with just enough attention given to the right places to keep it interesting.