Spider-Man: Edge of Time (DS)

After Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions brought together many different incarnations of the web-slinging Marvel hero, a sequel was put into production that was would tighten the story and focus only on two versions: the Spider-Man of the present and one from the far off future of 2099. Peter Parker and Miguel O’Hara’s story across time is told in Spider-Man: Edge of Time on many different consoles, but while most of them provided similar experiences even if certain cutbacks were necessary due to hardware limitations, the 3D action was still present for all but one. The Nintendo 3DS released the same year as Spider-Man: Edge of Time and was slow to start, but Activision seemed to want to hedge their bets in the handheld realm and decided to develop a version for both the 3DS and Nintendo DS. The 3DS could keep the core gameplay style, but the DS’s more rudimentary 3D rendering likely kept them from developing a straight port. And so, a unique version of Spider-Man: Edge of Time was developed for the DS, featuring 2D platforming and action as well as many villains not seen in the other games by the same name.

Spider-Man: Edge of Time on DS begins with the Spider-Man of the future investigating the Alchemax company. Miguel overhears a man named Walker Sloan planning to use a portal to travel to the past and get a huge foothold for the company with the advanced tech of his time, and while the Spider-Man of 2099 tries to stop him, the plan goes off without a hitch. However, Miguel is able to contact the Spider-Man of the past and starts to try and work to setting history back to normal, only for a fight involving Spider-Man and some of his villains to damage the time machine and start to cause temporal ruptures. A now more fluid form of time connects the present and future, the Spider-Men able to assist each other by making changes in their times as they work on fixing the temporal anomaly and undoing all of Sloan’s past-altering shenanigans.

While Spider-Man and Spider-Man 2099 will never be able to be in the same area as each other at the same time, they do explore similar worlds as they use their link across time to communicate and work towards their end goal. The side-scrolling areas of the present and future are noticeably different even when a room might look similar on the map, the actual space to explore and kinds of dangers in it different for each Spider-Man. You can swap whichever Spider-Man you control at any time and the game tries to mix up who’s the main focus for the next objective, and depending on the time period certain areas are completely different to match. Spider-Man 2099 will find himself in robot factories and even a virtual gaming arena, although the Spider-Man of our time gets tamer places to explore like the offices of the Daily Bugle newspaper. As you explore though you may find devices to deactivate or barriers to break that will in turn clear away obstacles in the way of the other Spider-Man, this sometimes taking on a more interesting form like learning the sequence for a series of switches in one time and executing it in the other but usually boiling down to a blockage you just need to clear away by getting the other Spider-Man to the right spot.

Navigating the present and future in Spider-Man: Edge of Time is unfortunately a rather dry affair most of the time and it can even experience frequent glitches. Both Spider-Man can crawl on walls and ceilings and can swing from lines of web without limitation, but the wall-crawling, while necessary quite often, has plenty of problems. Sometimes you’ll be scaling a wall only to reach the corner where it shifts into a platform and touching it will send you teleporting down to the bottom of the wall. Other times it feels like Spider-Man will refuse to jump off the wall, or an attempt to crawl over a corner will just detach him entirely. You’re rarely under pressure when these moments arise so you can finagle a way through the annoying issues, but a different issue arises with the web-swinging. Web-swinging works just fine for the most part and even follows the rule that it needs something to latch onto, and even with mostly interior areas the high ceilings means you can’t always latch onto something. However, most of the time you can find some way to get swinging or even just jump over a lot of the danger and enemies in an area. A lot of your opposition is ground bound and even the ones with guns can only fire if you’re on screen long enough for them to aim, and while the game does put a few robots in the air or on walls to try and impede your navigation, most of the time if you want to get somewhere you can just web swing right past almost every enemy. There’s very little reason to stop and fight unless they’re guarding some upgrade or maybe you want to extract a health refill from them on defeat, but mostly the enemies feel like they lack the bite needed to oppose area traversal.

In some ways though, the fact you can get to places so quickly in Spider-Man: Edge of Time and without little fuss or obstruction does ease some of the impact of other issues. Over the course of the game Spider-Man and Spider-Man 2099 both get new abilities that are meant to assist in opening up new areas, but this leaning towards exploration-focused platforming is unfortunately rather shallow. Spider-Man of the present will get something that lets him break yellow barriers for example rather than a new move that could let him explore new areas, and Spider-Man 2099 even gets two different forms of protection against energy fields rather than interesting new powers. Rather annoyingly too, you need to cycle between all of these barrier-focused abilities when it’s time to use them rather than them just becoming part of your default kit, even Miguel’s two barrier resistances requiring separate activation. There is a bit of differentiation between how the two play initially, Spider-Man 2099 having a glide maneuver that is usually worse than web-slinging, but their combat options are fairly similar and some of the extra optional moves you can find aren’t that necessary in the easy fights so only giving one the ability to make a hammer out of web doesn’t help with setting them apart much.

At a few points in the adventure though you will encounter both recognizable and new Marvel characters and villains. If you find a heroic character like Black Cat you’ll need to protect her from an onslaught of regular enemies, which is fairly easy since basic foes can be easily kept at bay with simple combos. However, the villain fights range from hilariously bad to almost decent challenges. Relatively minor Spider-Man villain Menace as well as the newly created for this DS game alone Overdrive 2099 are both pathetically easy, flying back and forth and barely attacking while you can easily just smack them as they pass. In a rather funny pick for a villain, the game invents a future version of the obscure Spider-Man villain Big Wheel, but Big Wheel 2099’s efforts to damage you are unfortunately weak and you can likely just weather them and punch him into oblivion. Arcade 2099, another future twist on an old villain made specifically for the game, is probably the game at its most creative, the virtual arena part of the map already a highlight conceptually and Arcade uses video game concepts and cheats to be a harder foe to take down than most. The game’s main villain, an amalgam of Spider-Man villains known as the Atrocity, is a rather bland fight every time you face him though, partly because it never evolves beyond the same one-note attack approach. While seeing new and familiar characters that do require you to stand and fight definitely adds some breaks in the exploration monotony, their quality varies too wildly for them to really redeem this adventure in two time periods.

THE VERDICT: If it wasn’t so easy to speedily web-swing your way past boring battles as you explore less than thrilling locations, Spider-Man: Edge of Time would certainly be a worse game. Battling regular enemies is an often straightforward affair so it’s nice you can usually skip the mindless fights, but a majority of the boss fights end up shallow or ridiculously easy save for the rare highlight like Arcade 2099. The connection across time between both Spider-Men mostly manifests as eliminating barriers with an unexciting sequence of upgrades that are only used for overcoming barriers, but because you can move through the game so quickly you won’t linger long on the bad stuff and occasional glitches. You can squeeze a rare moment of decent play out of the segments where more creativity is on show, but it’s a very limited amount overall. At least the ease of the experience means Spider-Man: Edge of Time’s DS version is forgettable instead of memorable for the wrong reasons.

And so, I give Spider-Man: Edge of Time for Nintendo DS…

A BAD rating. If you had to pay attention to those enemies who try to impede your progress unsuccessfully so often, Spider-Man: Edge of Time would definitely have been knocked down a rating. The regular baddies are unexceptional normally and unexciting when you do need to face them either to get to a goodie or because of a special segment like protecting another character. Some of them take a fair bit to finally put down but your attack combo knocks them flat so often they can’t even really counterattack, but the web-swinging lets you get past most of the combat with ease and so you can carry on ahead with the possible hope the game can do a little better with its next idea. For the most part though it is just taking Spider-Men to barriers to help each other explore more of the map. Flirting with Metroidvania ideas is all Spider-Man: Edge of Time does, but the exploration-focused platforming did have potential and sometimes the assistance across time is more meaningful. Leaning more into unique movement abilities or powers for both Spider-Men could have differentiated them more and given more substance to exploration, and instead of peppering ineffective ground bound enemies everywhere they could have started to challenge those powers as part of the game progression. However, with the glitchy wall-crawling and the bosses that almost seem passive in how little they seem to be doing to fight back, there are definitely more problems at play than how it executed the regular exploration and the low difficulty saves the experience from lingering on its obvious issues for long.

Creating new boss characters and focusing on less obscure villains could have been a neat angle to take for a less technologically advanced version of a bigger title, almost like a side adventure to the console versions of Spider-Man: Edge of Time. However, the hardware limitations that lead to this game being different weren’t what held it back. Limited ideas on how to oppose the player’s navigation, on how the Spider-Men can interact, and even on how progress can be blocked or fights can unfold all lead to a messy little experience. Being the handheld version of a game that wasn’t even the current handheld of the time meant Spider-Man: Edge of Time was probably going to be overlooked anyway, some sites not even acknowledging the differences between it and the versions released on PS3, Xbox 360, Wii, and 3DS. It’s the kind of technically different game by the same name as a console title that often is forgotten by time, but time also benefits this game in one way, as the ability to speed through it at least means it won’t leave behind a truly sour legacy.