In the comics, the years of Spider-Man’s life can be marked off with tragedies. Perhaps it’s fitting then that the hero’s video game career has been a roller coaster of critical successes and insulting failures. With last year’s Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions, developer Beenox delivered a title that was consistently entertaining. Now the studio looks to change the hero’s hit or miss streak by delivering a follow up title, Spider-Man: Edge of Time.
Where Shattered Dimensions told a reality warping story that featured four versions of the wall crawler, Edge of Time is a more focused titled that will revolve solely on the Amazing Spider-Man and Spider-Man 2099. Comic book legend Peter David is helping Beenox craft a story that has Spider-Man 2099 sending a message back through time to prevent the assassination of Peter Parker the Amazing Spider-Man.
Spider-Man 2099 isn’t able to travel back in time himself, but the Amazing Spider-Man will be able to make changes to the time stream that directly effect Spider-Man 2099’s world. In one example, we watched the Amazing Spider-Man destroy a prototype of a robot that was attacking Spider-Man 2099. Once Amazing destroyed the prototype, the machine attacking Spider-Man 2099 disappeared. Unfortunately, six smaller security drones instantly replaced that single robot. “If you mess with time, you won’t always get what you expect,” says Beenox’s creative director Gerard Lehiany. Sometimes Amazing’s tinkering in the past will invent additional problems for his future counterpart.
Players will be able to follow the events in both time periods thanks to a picture-in-picture system that shows players what their time-spanning partner is up to. In the above example, while Amazing Spider-Man was destroying the giant robot, we could see a future model of the machine fading out of existence within the picture-in-picture frame.
The difference between these two heroes will also play out in combat. In Shattered Dimensions, Beenox developed a combat system where each character had his own set of attacks and combos. In Edge of Time, this system has expanded. Amazing Spider-Man’s combat still centers on long-range, web-based attacks, while Spider-Man 2099 exhibits faster, more up-close and personal combos. However, each hero will now have a few new powers at his disposal.
Amazing Spider-Man has a new evade move that showcases his superhuman agility. While evade is active, Spider-Man will automatically dodge enemy attacks and environmental dangers. Spider-Man 2099, on the other hand, will be able to activate a holographic decoy, allowing him to distract enemies so he can easily perform sneak attacks or duck out of dangerous situations.
These skills are just a taste of the kinds of things these heroes will be doing throughout the game. Beenox is still fleshing out the game’s progression system, but the fighting styles of these two heroes will continue to diverge as they each learn different but complementary moves and level up existing powers. Activision refused to comment on any multiplayer plans at this time, but it doesn’t seem out of the realm of possibility.
You can check out issue 217 of Game Informer for the full scoop on Spider-Man: Edge of Time, but in the meantime, feast your eyes on a few screens as well as the game’s announce trailer below.