Ultimate Spider-Man’s alien suit has a rage mode that can easily tear through groups of enemies, meaning his levels often have moments heavily focused on the combat. While Amazing Spider-Man is essentially the default and will spend most his time beating up groups of baddies and swinging through levels, the other three each have a gimmick with varying degrees of success. They all can climb up walls, swing from webs, and have many of the same moves in combat, but there is at least some effort to ensure that not every Spider-Man is just a costume change.

Spider-Man Noir is lifted from a gritty 1950s take on Spider-Man and Spider-Man 2099’s Miguel O’Hara comes instead from the far-off future of 2099, but while the characters usually are quite different from each other, the game makes sure each one has a fairly similar power-set they don’t break away from.

Then we have Ultimate Spider-Man, who is mostly the same character so they contrive a reason for him to regain the black symbiote suit that the character even acknowledges is no longer relevant to his personal story. We have the regular recognizable version of Marvel’s biggest hero, referred to here as the Amazing Spider-Man, and he has all the web-slinging, wall-crawling, and spider powers people familiar with the hero would expect to see. The four Spider-Men featured in Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions technically should be very different characters. Conceptually, it is definitely intriguing to see how a character might be different in a different time or a world with different rules, so it’s no surprise the idea found purchase in places besides video games, and it certainly seems like those other mediums could better tap into what should be appealing about such a crossover.

Plucking four different versions of the characters from different comic book universes Marvel had made, Beenox’s 2010 action game had such a strong concept that even the comic books would borrow it for the 2014 Spider-Verse story arc that in turn inspired the animated film. Back before Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse introduced most of the world to the idea of multiple Spider-Men from alternate dimensions, there was Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions.

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