Review: Spider-Man Friend or Foe

Spider-Man: Friend or Foe (Xbox 360) Review 8-18-2009

In these times of economic struggle, my friends and I sometimes find ourselves looking for things to do on the cheap. A buddy of mine wanted to do a co-op game together, but without spending too much money. Looking through the local Best Buy we saw Spider-Man Friend or Foe at the $15 price point and it had 2 player local co-op. We decided to pick up despite the bad reviews and figured we could have some fun with it and in the end we were right.

Now don't get me wrong, this is far from a great game and it has lots of issues I will go over in a minute, but in the end we had a fun 2 player co-op brawler that didn't go on for too long and earned us some achievements along the way. The story is rather simple, there is some mind control aliens out there and if you beat the villains, they get angry that they were tricked so they help you. Makes no sense, and obviously made for kids, but what brawler has a good story anyway? This game is very similar to the Lego Star Wars games in the sense that you can go at it single player with an AI teammate, or 2 player co op and as you kill enemies you collect chips similar to how you collect Lego pieces. These chips are used to buy upgrades for your player. Spider-Man is obviously the main character so he has the most upgrades available and extra moves, but as you unlock the other teammates you can upgrade them as well. While fun to unlock more moves (and they do break up some of the monotony of the combat) a lot of times you stick with the basic moves. Unfortunately, a lot of the extra moves cannot be used on the larger enemies and bosses, which makes them somewhat pointless, which is a shame.

Some other negatives and that since this game is definitely made with kids in mind as the audience, it is definitely on the easy side. It seems they really took that Lego Star Wars copying even further with that, whereas you can't really “die” you just lose a few chips in which you can always earn more. There is also a lack of variety in the enemies (similar to how the 80s and 90s brawlers were made). They are mostly just color swaps to reflect the new location you are in, but their attacks and movements are all the same, even for the bigger guys. The only change in characters are the super-villains that you fight and later join you. The lack of variety there is made evident when you play as them though, as you will see how they have a lot of the same moves, even when it comes to the co-op double team moves. Some may say that the short completion time is a downside, but I can argue that it's longer than other brawlers and if it were much longer it could get even more monotonous. I find that the game is best played in short bursts anyway.

I played the Xbox 360 version, so I was able to get an easy 1000 points playing though this game. Most are just going through the game, with a few that you get for unlocking everyone and all their moves. They have other versions for other systems that are all the same game. I have not played them, but PS2 version is basically the same with graphics not as good (although the Xbox version isn't all that great to begin with) and obviously no achievements. The PS3 version is identical graphically but has no trophies since it was released before Sony implemented them and made them required for all games.

Bottom line: game is fun for kids, maybe to play with your kids or younger cousins, people looking for a fun semi-old school brawler, or achievement whores. If you fall into one or more of these categories, it's worth checking out for the bargain prices you can find it for. Amazon has it available for $20 for most systems, with the PC version being less than $13. You can go third party merchants to get it even cheaper. It is a poor-man's Lego Star Wars, but some fun can be had with it on the cheap.