The Amazing Spider-Man is a 2012 open World Action-Adventure game serving as a tie-in for The Amazing Spider-Man, and taking place after the events of the film.
Oscorp's new head of research, a robotics expert named Alistaire Smythe, vows to erase the stain on the company's reputation that resulted from the events of the film. Gwen Stacy, however, is concerned that Oscorp's more dangerous experiments might still be going on under his watch, and brings in Peter Parker to help her investigate.
In the course of the investigation, things go horribly wrong when said experiments, fusions of human and animal DNA called the Cross-Species, break out of confinement and escape into Manhattan. This would be bad enough by itself, but they can also infect regular humans, turning them into beastial creatures with reduced intelligence and a whole lot of extra aggression. Now, Spider-Man must recapture all of them and figure out a cure before the infection spreads beyond the city, even if it means bringing back an old enemy...
Followed by The Amazing Spider-Man 2.
This Video Game provides examples of:
- Actor Allusion: This isn't the first time Claudia Black has played a strong, snarky woman in the thick of danger.
- Air-Vent Passageway: Spidey uses quite a few. And even lampshades it.
- Alternate Continuity: The game was established as this by the movie's sequel.
- And Now for Someone Completely Different: Subverted in the case of the Stan Lee mission. While he does have Stan Lee's look and voice, as well as a mission like he would have, he's still using Spider-Man's combat style and moves, down to the web-shooters.
- And Your Reward Is Clothes: True to form of Bennox's Spider-Man games.
- Cross-Species (Peter partially mutated into a Man-Spider)
- Scarlet Spider III/Kaine
- Negative Zone suit
- Black/Inverted Future Foundation suit
- The Black Suit from Spider-Man 3
- Black & Green "Big Time" Stealth Suit.
- Black Suit based on the default/Amazing suit, unlocked through 100% Completion.
- Animal Motifs: Including the three major Spider-Slayer robots constructed by Smythe, every single boss uses an animal motif.
- Animals Hate Him: The cross-species instinctively go berserk around Spider-Man. This is what causes the disaster at the beginning.
- Anti-Frustration Features:
- Web Rush allows you to slow down time and then just choose your next destination, and Spider-Man will rush there without much player input.
- Once you collect five hundred comic pages the minimap marks the two hundred that are left, to help avert the Last Lousy Point.
- The Atoner: Doctor Connors is trying to do everything he can to make up for his previous mistakes as the Lizard, and believes that he deserves all of the criticism and mistrust given to him.
- Attempted Rape: Implied at least. Should you find thugs cornering a female civilian, among their taunts are they ask for a kiss from the "nurse", and that they "play doctor".
- Barbie Doll Anatomy: All of the Cross-Species. Justified for some, as their respective species don't have visible genitalia unless aroused.
- Benevolent Architecture: For some reason, a great deal of New York has a lot of open space that's perfect for web-swinging and looking cool but would be rather impractical for their ostensible use.
- Big Bad: Alistaire Smythe, creator of the Spider-Slayers and the new head of scientific research at Oscorp after Curtis Connors was imprisoned.
- Brought Down to Normal: During one of the final missions of the game, Smythe manages to depower Peter using a nanobot serum. He reverses this by exposing himself to a large enough electric shock, effectively destroying the nanobots.
- Bull Fight Boss: Both of the boss fights with the Rhino play out like this.
- Canon Foreigner: Nattie, a human/Piranha hybrid created exclusively for the game, as well as Whitney Chang.
- Clothing Damage: An aesthetic feature mostly, but if Spidey is hit in a fight, it'll actually cause damage to his costume - and himself actually - that won't go away until you replace/fix it at the apartment. If left to build, the thing can get absolutely shredded.
- Continue Your Mission, Dammit!: If you take your time getting the signal jammers down, Spider-Man will constantly complain about how his phone is not working.
- Creator Cameo: Peter's house sitting for his Aunt May's friend Stan. He turns up at the end of the game played by Stan Lee. He's also playable in a DLC mission.
- DLC:
- Stan Lee Adventure pack (Playable Stan Lee side-mission)
- Rhino Challenge (Playable Rhino side-mission)
- Oscorp Search and Destroy pack (Extra games for Spider-Man's in-game cell phone)
- Lizard Rampage (Like the Rhino pack, only with more Lizard)
- Classic Movie suit (with all three above packs, provided they were pre-order bonuses)
- Vigilante Spider-Man suit (Free; Exclusive to PlayStation 3)
- Human Spider suit (Peter's wrestling suit in the first movie; unlockable by way of a code packaged with DVD/Blu-ray releases of The Amazing Spider-Man)
- Dual Boss: The first set of Hunter robots that the player fights in Chapter 5.
- Dying as Yourself: See Hoist by His Own Petard and The Stinger below.
- Enemy Chatter: Many of Oscorp guards throughout the indoor levels have idle conversations, discussing things such as their rate of pay, how bored they are, how much they want to beat up Spider-Man, and even whether or not Smythe is dating all of the interns.
- The Faceless: Peter Parker's face is never seen unmasked; all cutscenes that show him in his street clothes take place in first-person.
- Fantastic Racism: Dr. Smythe is Oscorp's head of the fantastical racism department. He hates Spider-Man and Connors for being cross-species and the man who created them respectively. Slightly justified when Connors' first antidote ends up paralyzing him. Hypocrisy aside, though, he would have a point about infectious cross-species if he could state it without calling them horrible creatures, regarding them with as much care as dirt or evolutionary dead ends.
- Fluffy the Terrible:
- Iguana's name, as bestowed by Dr Connors when it was still a normal iguana, is Iggy.
- Nattie, the human/piranha mutant. It is even lampshaded in his profile as the scientist thought it was amusing to name him something so cute despite being one of the most vicious fish in the world.
- Godzilla Threshold: Connors hits it during the climax; with Manhattan being thrown into chaos by the virus outbreak and Smythe's robots, and Spider-Man himself Brought Down to Normal and near-death from Smythe's nanobots, he is forced to turn himself into the Lizard once more in order to stop Smythe, insisting that with Spidey down for the count, it's the only way, hoping that he'll be able to hold onto his sanity long enough to finish the job and then return to take the cure and return to his human form.
- Gone Horribly Wrong: Spider-Man and Connors' first attempt at an antidote ends up paralyzing Smythe from the waist down and causing him major Sanity Slippage.
- Guide Dang It!:
- Subverted for the Manhattan overmap. It feels like you will have to endlessly look all over the city for all 700 comics and the escaped patients. However once you reach 500 comics they start to appear on your minimap once you are close to them, and can later get a tech upgrade to find the patients through the normal map.
- Played straight on missions that take place indoors, there aren't any markers for the various collectibles.
- Hard Work Hardly Works: A Trophy version, where collecting all 700 comics gives you a Bronze Trophy despite all the work it takes to get it. It applies to all of the collectables.
- Half-Human Hybrid: Humans mixed with animal DNA, or more commonly the other way around, are referred to as Cross-Species.
- Hoist by His Own Petard: Happens to Smythe at the end of the credits, where a bonus scene shows him heading back to his lab and willingly allowing a Spider-Slayer to kill him before he fully succumbs to the cross-species virus.
- Hopeless Boss Fight: The first one-on-one battle with Smythe plays out this way, with the player inevitably being defeated within mere seconds. This is because at this point in the game, Peter doesn't have his powers.
- "I Know You're in There Somewhere" Fight: The final battle against the Lizard involves this, with Peter repeatedly asking his foe to try and remember who he is.
- Insistent Terminology: On Spider-Man freeing Dr. Connors.Gwen: "You broke him out of prison?!"Connors: "It's a mental facility..."
- Intrepid Reporter: Whitney Chang, Spider-Man even comments "She needs her own costume".
- Ironic Echo: Throughout the game, the numerous Spider-Slayers and other robots used by Smythe use the phrase "Cross-species detected" whenever they come in contact with Spider-Man. However, the final use of the phrase occurs in the post-credits scene, when a Spider-Slayer says the phrase to Smythe before it kills him.
- I Want Them Alive!: Norman Osborn orders the guards to bring Connors and Spider-Man in alive. However, subverted as they are also informed that "if you accidentally load your guns with bullets instead of tranqs, well... oops".
- Killed Off for Real:
- Potentially Rhino when you battle him in the sewers, as he falls into a electric pit at the end.
- Alistaire Smythe, infected by the Cross-species Virus for the whole game, throws himself in front of an armed Hunter Bot rather than living as an Infected. Though this is based of a comic property and if he became the THE spider-slayer
◊, then all bets are off on if they truly died.
- Lab Pet: Inverted. When Dr. Connors was sent away to Beloit Mental Hospital, his pet iguana, which was unknowingly exposed to some cross-species experimentation, mutated to human-size and then breaks out with the other cross-species very early in the video game.
- Last Lousy Point: Though the Anti-Frustration Feature of adding the remainder comics to your mini-map after finding 500 of them, it only helps if you are close to them. If they are too high in the air they will not show up until you climb to the tallest building.
- Late-Arrival Spoiler: This game spoils a few details about the movie, with the most prominent one being the death of Gwen's father, Captain Stacy. This is somewhat amusing due to the game having being released a full week before the movie was.
- Made of Iron: The only justification that could be made for Peter surviving and escaping from an exploding facility after having his powers taken away.
- My God, What Have I Done?: Smythe says this verbatim right after Spider-Man defeats him and makes him see all the damage he has caused.
- Mythology Gag:
- Bruce Campbell voices an obnoxious sport announcer in a blimp, making Spider-Man jump through hoops for his own amusement.
- Both suits (Classic and Black) from the previous film trilogy are usable as a costume.
- A promotional code packaged with DVD/Blu-ray combo packs of the film unlocked Peter's Human Spider wrestling outfit from the first film for use as a costume.
- When Whitney Chang tells Spidey to take photos for her, he protests that he doesn't work at the Daily Bugle.
- Some of the photo hunts that Spidey is tasked with allude to several other Spider-Man villains that aren't actually in the game such as Man-Wolf, Sandman, Hydro-Man, Vulture, and Mr. Negative.
- In Stan Lee's cameo, he mentions that Spidey lives in some "Amazing Fantasy", the name of the comic in which he first appeared.
- While fighting S-Bots, Spidey mentions hoping they don't have web-proof coating, a common feature of many Spider-Slayers from the comics.
- New Game Plus: You can replay any level to gather all the collectibles with all the upgrades you have acquired. And if you start a new game you still keep all of the extras you have already unlocked despite all of the collectibles returning.
- No OSHA Compliance: Oscorp's robot factory has a lot of missing floors suspended over bottomless pits, as well as missing rails.
- Optional Stealth: The game allows the player to have plenty of opportunities to stealth-KO any opponents who don't see them, and is the easiest way to dispose of enemies as opposed to a normal battle.
- Subverted on the stealth missions, where you have to rescue a hostage without letting anyone see you.
- Police Are Useless: You have to pretty much do their job throughout the game:
- You have to save them from unarmed thugs.
- They are always seen kneeling by infected citizens, but they don't help them get to the quarantine zones.
- You capture Felicia, only for her to break out shortly after and rob a jewelry store.
- They arrest Smythe, only for him to break out of jail. Making it worse is the fact that he was a paraplegic at this time. Peter even lampshades this by wondering how a guy who can't walk could break out of prison.
- Subverted with the second fight against Scorpion, who is captured in a squad car and brought away after being thrown in there by Spider-Man, and not seen again afterwards.
- Punch-Clock Villain: One of the bits of Enemy Chatter suggests that at least some of Oscorp's goons only work there and do jobs like guard warehouses against Spidey because of the pay.
- Really Gets Around: Another one of the bits of Enemy Chatter suggests Smythe is dating all of the female interns. Considering how he acts towards Gwen, it might not be entirely untrue.
- Recycled In Space: Not the first time Spider-Man has had to deal with a quarantined Manhattan in a video game — see Spider-Man: Web of Shadows.
- Romantic False Lead: Whitney Chang and Spider-Man flirt quite a lot throughout this game, however it is quite clear Spider-Man is only really with Gwen. It is even All There in the Manual, where it clearly states she has no interest in a relationship.
- Sanity Slippage: Smythe does this quite well. He starts off the game as a confident scientist, whereby after being infected slowly starts to grow more and more paranoid until the end where he believes he is helping cure the infection by completely wrecking it with his robots. After Spider-Man defeats him, he does have a moment where he realizes this and says My God, What Have I Done?. Then he commits suicide in the ending...
- Scenic-Tour Level: The game's opening, doubling as a Shout-Out to Deus Ex: Human Revolution thanks to very similar art styles and presentation.
- She-Fu: Spider-Man is an example by default, but it's taken further in that some of his attacks are twirls or pirouettes. It gets kind of ridiculous when the hit boxes are big enough that the only possible contact you make with the enemy is by your pinkie and ring fingertips, so it looks like you're hitting the enemy with the air from your spinning.
- Shoot the Shaggy Dog: Connors tries to fight off Smythe by willingly becoming the Lizard when Peter's powers fail him due to poisoned nanobots. While it does help, he loses his mind to the Lizard brain in the process once more, forcing Peter to stop him again.
- Shout-Out:
- Spider-Man: "Webs versus steam, there can be only one."
- While chasing Vermin through the sewers, Spidey asks him if he's running off to share a pizza with his adopted turtle sons. Between the green ooze and killer robots found at certain points, the whole mission feels like a subtle nod to the TMNT franchise; Vermin can even control rats like the TMNT villain Rat King.
- In the break-in to Beloit Mental Hospital to free Connors, one of the enemies present tells Spider-Man, while aiming a laser-sight sniper rifle, that he's too colorful to be a Gargoyle.
- Could also be seen as a reference to Gargoyles, which was about a group of multi-colored Gargoyles in New York City.
- Whitney tries the old "I'm not the droid you're looking for" routine when an Oscorp guard discovers her. He fires back with his own quote of "Move along!".
- Stay Frosty: One of Spider-Man's quips to rescued civilians.
- Stealth-Based Mission: You can take out your enemies utilizing stealth when indoors as well as outdoors.
- Developer's Foresight:
- Knock a Mook off a ledge, and Spider-Man will immediately web them into a cocoon & leave them hanging from another web attached to the ledge.
- Try and attack a civilian, and Spider-Man will just greet them instead.
- The Stinger: The scene mentioned in Hoist by His Own Petard above.
- Suspiciously Similar Substitute: Iguana for Lizard from the movie. Except not so much — the Lizard is in fact the final boss battle.
- Take That!:Spider-Man: No bat-men out there, Doc. That's ridiculous.
- Unfinished, Untested, Used Anyway: Connors' first attempt at a cure to the virus is done on the fly and not properly tested; when Smythe injects himself with it, rather than cure him, it paralyzes him from the waist down. The second attempt, using Spider-Man's blood, works.
- The Unfought: Various members of Spider-Man's Rogues Gallery are teased throughout the game, but are never seen.
- Video Game Caring Potential: If you press the attack button around civilians, Spider-Man will just greet them.
- Villains Act, Heroes React: Zig-zagged. The story starts out with Gwen Stacy taking Peter to investigate Alistaire Smythe, who she suspects of continuing cross-species experiments for nefarious purposes, but it turns out that he's actually going to dispose of them. In fact, at the beginning of the game, Alistaire isn't even a villain, doing nothing illegal and acting under protocol. However, Peter's presence causes the cross-species to break out, starting the city-wide catastrophe. Smythe then spends the first half of the game trying to contain the threat using his robot army, before finally becoming a full villain in the second half once he is crippled with the cure that Peter himself gave him. Most of the game plays out with Peter and Smythe trying to outmaneuver each other, rather than either one being the sole one acting or reacting.
- The Virus: The cross-species virus, of course.
- Well-Intentioned Extremist: Smythe sets his cross-species killing robots out in the city to stop them, which only causes more harm than good, and also creates a nanobot serum designed to destroy those infected with the cross-species virus from the inside out, all with the intention of "saving" the city. In the end, Smythe ends up causing more damage to the city than the Lizard ever did.
- Why Won't You Die?: Said by Smythe to Peter during the final boss fight against him.
- Wrestler in All of Us: Some of Spider-Man's finishing moves would look more at home in the WWE. This does double duty as a Call-Back to the movie, where Spidey got the inspiration for his mask from a luchadore poster, and (along with the poster itself) as a Shout-Out to Spidey's original origin story.
- You Killed My Father: This is the reason why Gwen refuses to trust Connors, despite him wanting to help save the city.
