Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions Game Review
Review by IGN 8/10 (Impressive)
Your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man is back. In fact, four Spider-Men are back for Shattered Dimensions, a game that celebrates the wallcrawler’s various incarnations. These four Spider-Men inhabit different worlds with different gameplay styles and unexpected variations on well-known villains. If you think you’ve seen it all with Spider-Man games, think again. (Go ahead, think. I’ll be here waiting.) Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions has some incredible Spider-Man moments, but plenty of familiar issues that prevent it from being the Arkham Asylum of the Spider-Man universe.
Mysterio is after a powerful tablet that will make him more than just a lame illusionist. But the pieces of the tablet have been spread out across four dimensions. Fortunately, each dimension has its own version of Spider-Man. There’s the Amazing Spider-Man, Ultimate Spider-Man, Noir Spidey and Spider-Man 2099. Each has unique abilities, a different visual style, and even different voice actors pulled from Spidey’s long television history (including Dan Gilvezan of Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends fame).
Review by Eurogamer 7/10
Despite its multiverse-spanning conceit, Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions lacks the one thing you might be expecting from it: genuine variety. While Beenox has trawled the back-room long boxes of its local comics shop to gather four different takes on Marvel’s chirpy webslinger, the entwined campaigns, with one notable exception, tend to play very similarly.
What balances the package out is that they all play pretty well. This isn’t the Arkham Asylum of Spider-Man capers, then – it isn’t that special game that, out of nowhere, suddenly creates the perfect interactive expression of a classic superhero – but it’s a thoughtful and inventive use of the license all the same. Spidey’s videogame outings have been on a downswing since the days of Spider-Man 2, and while it’s hard to shake the feeling that the character works better in an open world than in a linear, story-based affair, this is still the best of his adventures for some time.
The plot has a pleasant silver-age thinness to it. Spidey has accidentally shattered an ancient tablet that binds various dimensions together. Now, with the help of three other-world versions of himself, he must gather the fragments back together before, you know, something terrible happens.
Review by Gamespot 7.5/10
Swinging through the air and pounding bad guys to a pulp are two of the things Spider-Man does best, and in Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions, you do plenty of both while playing as four different versions of Spider-Man: Amazing, Ultimate, 2099, and Noir. Each Spidey is quick and powerful, allowing you to deftly evade your enemies and string together brutal combos using your substantial spider powers. At its best, Shattered Dimensions captures the energy and excitement of the webslinging superhero, and most of the time, you’ll revel in your enhanced abilities. However, occasional locomotion snags and a creeping sense of repetition put a kink in Spidey’s web, and the Noir levels aren’t as strong as the others. Yet the excellent art design goes a long way toward smoothing out these wrinkles, and in the end, Shattered Dimensions proves itself a very entertaining adventure.
The story begins with a powerful magical artifact being shattered. As the walls of reality begin to crumble, Spider-Men across the four different dimensions must hunt down the shards of the artifact under the guidance of the mysterious Madame Web. Her disembodied voice gives our heroes plenty of opportunities to make wisecracks (not that they need any encouragement), and each Spidey has a distinct personality that helps each dimension feel unique. Bantering with villains opens up more opportunity for humor, and along with some genuinely funny jokes, there are a lot of enjoyable pop culture references and nods to the Spider-Man canon.
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