The story is penned by Marvel writer Peter David, who had a hand in creating Spider-Man 2099 in the first place. The plot begins in 2099’s era, with a devious scientist named Walter Sloan, who works at Alchemax (where Miguel O’Hara, aka, Spider-Man 2099 also works), decides to use one of his new inventions to wreck havoc on the timeline and become wildly powerful. He goes back in time, before Alchemax exists, and creates Alchemax in his own, dark vision. This instantly alters history, going back as far as Peter Parker’s time, to create a more desolate world in which Sloan has a great deal of power. In short, it’s kind of like Biff getting a hold of the DeLorean in Back To the Future II.
Spider-Man 2099 knows what happened. In fact, he’s trailing Sloan during the opening minutes of the game, and listening in on his plans as he discusses them with a sentient hologram that he created. Miguel almost stops Sloan from jumping through the time portal, but is too late. We witness the death of the Amazing Spider-Man, too, who was battling Anti-Venom in this alternate reality. Aware of the changes to the timeline, Miguel must undo what Sloan has done and prevent the Amazing Spider-Man from dying.
To do this, he first establishes a chronolink with the “new” Amazing Spider-Man, the one that doesn’t realize his reality has been instantly altered. Peter Park and Miguel are very different characters and one of the strong points in their many discussions is in their unique differences. Miguel is far more serious and knowledgeable than Peter, which is painful clear sometimes, but still, the two unique personalities play well off of each other. Anyway, the crux of the gameplay and story is that the two must work together to fix the timeline and save the Amazing Spider-Man from getting killed.
Anytime you involve time travel and history-altering events in games, there’s the potential to do some really cool stuff. While I never thought Beenox took it as far as I had hoped, there are numerous occasions in which, playing as Amazing Spider-Man, you must do something to help out 2099, and vice versa. One example is a massive robot that exists in 2099 and is killing Spider-Man 2099. Meanwhile, many decades earlier, Amazing Spider-Man is able to destroy this robot before it is created. When it’s destroyed, 2099’s reality is immediately changed, and he’s not longer being crushed by the robot.
Beenox used many other moments like this to tie to the two characters, and the story, closer together. It’s a formula that works well, and I liked that Beenox did a ‘picture-in-picture,’ uh, thing, in which players can see the other Spider-Man (at scripted times) in the lower right of the screen. This sub-picture shows you how they’re doing while you, as the other Spider-Man, do what you need to do to help them out. The game decides when you can switch between the characters, but I thought they did a good job of not making these times predictable.
Both Spideys have their own unique upgradeable attacks and health and special attack abilities that can be upgraded, and there are also shared upgrades, too. As in Shattered Dimensions, collecting the golden spiders found in the game world, which are usually well hidden, are key to getting upgrades. You can also take on numerous challenges throughout the game, and revisit them from the main menu. These challenges are presented in a large web pattern, similar to previous Spider-Man games, although the exact name of this mode escape me.
There are a lot of orbs to collect too, those that give health boosts, special power boost, and upgrade points to spend on unlocking new combinations or permanent upgrades to your health and special power meters. These orbs are also used to show the player where to go. While the level design is pretty much all linear, the orbs are helpful because Spider-Man’s ability to climb and swing just about anywhere could make the player inadvertently go down a lot of wrong (although short) paths. Additionally, the Amazing Spider-Man has the ability to see the proper path with his Spider-Sense, as doors and enemies are outlined clearly for the few seconds that Spider-Sense lasts.
Combat, a huge part of the Edge of Time experience, is fun and nearly constant. It can get a little monotonous, as you are almost always just fighting small waves of weak, grunt enemies, but other times there are over a dozen of melee and ranged enemies all trying to beat the crap out of Spider-Man. Some enemies use shields, too, which requires a bit more planning and strategy, and there are also turrets which you can temporarily blind with a web shot. If you have played Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions, the controls and the combat will feel familiar and welcoming, but even if you haven’t, it doesn’t take long to be well versed in all of the combat that Edge of Time offers. And while the variety of enemies is mediocre, the variety of ways to attack with either Spider-Man is pretty good. You can get by with button mashing, but if you craft combos, which give you multiplier rewards and does not take a great deal of effort, you can do some really cool-looking attacks, and do them really quickly, too.
I was satisfied with the combat in Edge of Time, overall. As with the rest of the game, I wouldn’t call it AAA quality, but it’s engaging and fun. Other aspects of Edge of Time aren’t quite as polished or as fleshed out as I would have liked, though. For one, many action sequences occur simply to knock a key, or three keys, out of the enemies. In other words, both Spider-Men run into a lot of locked doors. Simply beating up the enemies in the area and collecting the big key icon was underwhelming and, to me, showed a lack of creativity. I understand that you need to contain the player in an area, drive them in certain directions, and force them to fight some enemies, amongst other gameplay design ideas and themes, but to build a whole sequence around getting some keys to open a door seemed almost like a cope out and something done out of convenience.
The level design is often either built around or certainly bound by these basic locked doors as well. The level design, as a whole, isn’t bad, but it does have some overly basic elements to it too. For example, on several occasions you have to do x number of tasks to unlock a bigger event — such as find three keys, or press three buttons, or access three terminals for so many seconds — and in having to do so, the levels were constrained by that, largely due the close proximity of those smaller events. Bigger, AAA games have similar ideas — needing to gather so many relic pieces to activate some machine, etc., but those events are huge, long journeys. In Edge of Time, these tasks are chopped up into shorter, much-closer-to-one-another sequences that moreso promoted monotony than anything on a grander scale. Still, I did like that Spider-Man’s wall crawling and web slinging abilities were not forgotten, so expect to be doing plenty of that, in addition to normal running that any third person action-adventure has.
Regarding using the web to zip from one location to another, the game shows you points that Spider-Man can zip to with yellow markers. This is helpful, but it’s not perfect as you will, at a semi-regular rate, webzip to the wrong marker or not target it at all. Also at times, you will see a lot of these yellow circular markers at once, even though Spider-Man can’t actually reach, say, marker number two until he gets to number one. I think the typical game screen could have been de-cluttered a considerable amount (along with removing some of the orbs mentioned previously) by removing some of these ‘extra’ yellow markers.
As far as the presentation goes, Edge of Time is a fine looking game, and with a solid sound package to boot. Graphically, I do experience some clipping when wall climbing towards the floor; Spider-Man will literally clip through the floor. The framerate, animations, and texture quality are solid, though. From a technical standpoint, other than the clipping, the graphics are nice. From an art perspective, the levels are a little bland, and as mentioned earlier, there’s a little too much clutter between orbs and webzip markers and your health/special ability meters on screen. Cutscenes look outstanding, however, and the voice cast is great. Val Kilmer plays the evil scientist Walter Sloan, while Laura Vandervoort of Smallville fame is Mary Jane. The coolest choice in the voice cast has to be Christopher Daniel Barnes as Spider-Man 2099; Barnes was the voice of Spidey in the 90s animated series.
To the summary…