Spider-Man and Venom: Maximum Carnage (SNES)
Many games based on comic book superheroes tell original stories with familiar faces, it often easier to make something self-contained or relatively simple rather than following every story beat from a pre-existing plot, especially when it might depend on decades of context. Spider-Man and Venom: Maximum Carnage though stands out for adapting the Maximum Carnage crossover event fairly accurately, right down to featuring actual comic panels to help tell its version of the tale. Not even deviating when it can lead to little loose ends within the game’s retelling or shying away from cameos that can feel a bit like they come out of nowhere like Captain America suddenly showing up, Spider-Man and Venom: Maximum Carnage is commendable for truncating the story arc and yet still producing a version that is comprehensive enough that players can walk away with a good understanding of the Maximum Carnage comics’ events.
This is, partially, because Maximum Carnage has a heavy action focus that suits this tilted plane beat ’em up game well enough. Serial killer Cletus Kasady once bonded with a goopy alien symbiote that encases his body called Carnage, and after some time in prison, Carnage reappears and breaks him free. Cletus quickly puts together a group of similarly unhinged villains by just kind of looking around the nearby area, because while Shriek was a fellow inmate, he mostly stumbles across his other allies like the monstrous Spider-Man imitator Doppelganger, the almost ghostly Carrion, and the flying fiend Demogoblin. While their crime spree is aimed at taking out the superhero Spider-Man and the similarly empowered but far more dangerous symbiote-wearing Venom, they’ve also managed to make the city go mad, random punks on the street as much an obstacle to the two heroes trying to stop Carnage as the superpowered villains. Many other superheroes will drop in to assist or concoct ways to turn the tables on the villains, be it regular collaborators like the cat burglar Black Cat, the powerful teens Cloak and Dagger, or ones who don’t even get comic panels to introduce them like Morbius and Iron Fist before they’re there to actually assist in a battle. It’s not a complicated conflict since it’s mostly both sides clashing and adjusting their plans based on how well things went last time, but with the game coming out just a year after the actual story concluded, it is fairly faithful and you get both impressive and whimsical comic panels to make the plot a bit more worthwhile to pay attention to.
When you’re thrown into the action, you start first as Spider-Man, and while you’ll get to choose whether to play as him or Venom at later points in the story, it is more than a matter of playing as the faster Peter Parker or the stronger Eddie Brock. Different missions will be available depending on which character you pick and it’s not always clear who might have the more robust action stages, and while some of them will face the same dangers, many of their levels are unique and would require at least two full playthroughs to see. You are ultimately not missing too much despite the changes in setting, but that is mostly because Spider-Man and Venom: Maximum Carnage is not exactly teeming with unique combat situations.
Spider-Man and Venom mostly fight the same. Both of them have basic attack combos as well as a throw you can pull off if you move in close enough. For tricks more worthy of superheros, they also both have their takes on webbing attacks, Venom just using suit goo instead of the artificial webbing Peter Parker created. They can both put up a shield even though it’s not usually very useful since enemies can go around it or sometimes still hit you anyway, and sacrificing positioning in Spider-Man and Venom: Maximum Carnage is a particularly poor choice. A lot of the fighting with regular goons, be they men in trenchcoats or skater punks, is more about moving around right so you can hit them all at once, the heroes left rather vulnerable to back attacks if they try to get in multiple blows or throws. You can use webbing to briefly bind an enemy but it’s often for such a short time it’s not really worth it, but a bit more useful is firing a web line to pull a foe towards you for a beatdown. You can break from the crowd, pull someone in, and hit them before the others have time to surround you, but in some situations you’ll likely lean on hit and run strikes or jump attacks, both heroes even having web swings or wall-crawling options for moving across the battlefield easily. A few special moves can add excitement, like webbing enemies on either side of you and smashing them together or calling in back-up from other heroes if you manage to find their icons in a level. While some like Morbius are underwhelming since one of the way he helps only does damage if a foe is on the ground which is a small window before you even factor in the time it takes for him to slowly swoop in, but Black Cat, Cloak and Dagger, or Firestar do more broadly useful attacks if you are getting overwhelmed or just want to clear some foes out quickly. The game can even be a bit generous with superhero icons when you start nearing the end, meaning the assists aren’t so precious you feel you can never use them.
Where Spider-Man and Venom: Maximum Carnage really comes up short though is in the enemy variety. A great deal of its levels will just throw the same corrupted citizens at you to fill time, many of the common foes mostly only dangerous when they arrive in numbers. Even when a foe like the trenchoat man later gets a variant with a concealed shotgun he might whip out, it’s the kind of trick that might hit you once but then you know well enough to not let it hit you again, even when there are six of him all trying it on screen. Regular foes are simply too plain and mostly just ask you not to leave your back exposed as you attack them, but eventually some of the plainer levels introduce new regular baddies by way of a boss fight. Some athletic ladies are a good addition to the main forces, their quick movements and better ability to break away from your combos meaning they can make an encounter a bit tougher and less straightforward, and rather amusingly, a pair of bald umbrella-wielding men that look unassuming and nebbish can prove quite fiendish simply because their umbrellas give them considerable range in the small fighting spaces.
Carnage’s gang feels like it could be where the game ups its ante a bit, but even from early on, you’ll have encounters with multiple members of the group with later encounters not often changing up their battle style too much. The third stage already sees you facing Shriek and Doppelganger, but you’ll face them many more times and in many different combinations with the other members of Carnage’s band of villainous allies. Some of them aren’t too bad on their own, Shriek fires off sonic attacks if left alone but fighting her up close is a risk when she blasts herself up and away to get some room. Carrion, on the other hand, exists purely for the group fights, his slow drifting meant to keep you moving since if he grabs you he’ll rapidly leech life from you until you shake him off. However, these foes are thrown together so often that they grow stale, and just mixing up who shows first or whether the group might expand to include one more doesn’t make Doppelganger appearing across almost eight potential fights any more exciting. Some stages do shake up the formula a bit, a climbing section where Doppelganger and Shriek attack to slow you down more interesting than a typical skirmish with them, and a brief diversion to the lab of the Fantastic Four introduces some new security robot enemies that briefly inject new dangers before it reverts back to the same faces over and over again. Sadly, even when you finally face Carnage in his last fight, it’s also a bit underwhelming since not only have you faced him a few times more, but it is a fight built off a lot of waiting for the small windows where he can even take damage. While the heroes having repeat encounters with the villains might be appropriate for a comic story, if these foes weren’t going to be updated or mixed together with more thought, it might have been better to stray from the story’s events some more to avoid how monotonous the action can sometimes end up feeling.
Of some note as well are a few touches that don’t necessarily impact the experience but are mildly interesting. Spider-Man and Venom: Maximum Carnage has a striking red cartridge for both its SNES and Sega Genesis releases and the music was composed by a rock band called Green Jelly. The digitized guitar tracks are memorable and suit the brawler action well enough, but if not for the trivia they might just stand out as decent rock music to accompany a subpar superhero action game.
THE VERDICT: Spider-Man and Venom: Maximum Carnage impressively adapts a good deal of the comic book arc its named after down to utilizing panels taken directly from the comic for its story-telling and throwing in extra superhero cameos that even come with some useful and somewhat frequent mid-battle assists. However, overexposure to almost all of its combat elements does wear down the experience considerably no matter what path you pick when it’s time to choose between Spider-Man or Venom. The regular foes are rehashed almost as often as the bosses, Carnage’s gang losing their luster across numerous battles where they hardly change up their tactics, and while there’s some decent punchiness to the action, the variety isn’t there to make fighting through this simple comic book plot all that appealing.
And so, I give Spider-Man and Venom: Maximum Carnage for Super Nintendo Entertainment System…
A BAD rating. Much of the action in Spider-Man and Venom: Maximum Carnage can work in small doses. Bosses teaming up is used to some interesting effects at times and many of the regular enemies could have been good fodder between skirmishes. However, while it sometimes whips out a unique section like the contested climb or Fantastic Four lab break-in, it mostly just leans back on throwing the same few corrupted citizens at you and then capping things off with another encounter with Carnage’s gang members. It wears down your interest as well as your life, many of its secret areas with bonuses to help you out exceedingly difficult to find naturally and the superhero icons only doing so much to speed things up when you’ve found yourself in yet another all too familiar battle situation. Spider-Man and Venom are at least not too bad in combat. They can easily get surrounded, but that motivates you to fight smarter and do things like use your web grab to separate foes. There are technically some extra moves like a running charge or a power move that rewards you for accurately hitting foes without taking damage yourself and even maneuvers like an attack that send you leaping away as you do it, but fight spacing doesn’t often reward too much flashiness since you can end up throwing yourself into the midst of foes who thrive on catching you from unexpected angles. It would be a bit of a shame to rob Spider-Man and Venom: Maximum Carnage of some of the things that make it unique in trying to make it a more entertaining brawler, but if bosses are going to reappear as often as they are, they’d benefit from new tricks or more clear cases of cooperation instead of just happening to fight you on the same rooftop, in the same park, or in the same nightclub as some of their allies. Difficulty is high because enemy AI has no issue against exploiting small openings, but a wider range of battle situations and foes to fight would do a lot to make Spider-Man and Venom: Maximum Carnage less of a repetitive push through a game that decided to be tough on top of monotonous.
Spider-Man and Venom: Maximum Carnage still can impress because its comic scenes do a lot to convey the original story well despite the shift to a video game medium, and mixing bosses the way it does at least is a unique way to be repetitive. There are beat ’em ups that have fewer unique sections than this one and at least here we do go the surprise breaks to something truly different from time to time or a new regular baddie can spice up the standard fights once they’re introduced. Trivia about the game like the Green Jelly soundtrack or red cartridge might earn it more attention than the substance of its fighting, but if you do decide to tackle its tough split campaign, that are bits of the action to enjoy before they’re run into the ground through frequent reappearances.