This was my favorite superhero fighting game, back in the day it had some amazing graphics and gameplay. It's a decent game single-player, but it really shines when you convince someone else to hop in. That might have been a result of the difficulty though. It's been maybe ten years since I’ve played and besides how much I loved the game, I have to remember how hard it was.
The levels were really long and filled with interesting bad guys, but it wasn't easy to find enough health.
That's probably the greatest sore point, difficulty. On the plus side the two playable characters, Spiderman and Venom, each provide a distinct feel and tactical approach. Spiderman is fast and coordinated, Venom is slightly slower and more powerful. The graphics at the time were really amazing. The art is varied and colorful and the resolution is relatively high.
Today, those graphics hold up much better than other games released at the time. The sound effects are pretty crisp and memorable and the gameplay is definitely solid.
Spiderman and Venom team up to take down Carnage and all of his symbiote brethren. That's the storyline. Along the way you'll fight mostly high-tech super-soldiers and thugs while the Carnage wannabes act as boss characters. There's a few power-ups
that let you call in other Marvel Characters (like Captain America) to provide some brief aid. The Scarlet Witch and the Green Arrow are the only other two I can think of. The levels themselves are usually pretty straightforward, just battle through the swarms of bad guys and take down the boss. The boss isn't always a symbiote character, which helps to add variety. There is a level that takes place on an elevator, but that's still rather cliché.
I loved this game to death when I was a kid and I spent years thinking of it after it suddenly stopped working on me. I was obsessed. The comic-style graphics haunted my dreams. I wanted the grunts and groans to roar from my speakers again, but they never did. Even though most of the characters in this game are new to the Marvel Universe, they still made room in my memory. I had a thing for the boss chick symbiote and I was always afraid to take on the Boba Fett style boss man. Few games can leave an impact on me, but this was one of them. The gameplay deserves a 9, the graphics a 9, the sound an 8, the characters a 10.
