Spawn: Armageddon

This game is worth a look. It is debatable whether it's an underrated gem but certainly is deserving of a remake on a higher powered next generation gaming system since that seems to be today's thing. Let's start with player scores: A couple players are reviewing more than once and bringing down the average score. Looking further they are making comments which are not true which may explain their low scores. (You can switch locked on targets)- I'd recommend reading the manual or going thru the game tutorial again. Much of what's said for the player scores is somewhat echoed in the professional review scores. I kinda laugh when a professional reviewer says the game is too simple and hard back to back in the same sentence. So which is it? No matter how I break that down it seems more a compliment than anything and to me translates as easy to learn and hard to master. Regardless most of the reviews I read seem to be loyalty service not getting exactly the game they dreamed of. Does that really mean this is a bad game? Absolutely not. Let's start off with the main branches of gameplay. Upon startup you can go to options and configure your controller. Many of yesterday's games were very hard to play because each one used different button mapping to get used to. Here we have options for mapping your buttons to mock whatever game preferences you enjoy and mapping your own immersive style to your controller. This is huge. That said it's not the game it's just options. About the game, what makes a game great? Variety and the ability to play as you wish with lots of toys, a good story and graphics are important too. Graphically this is in the high end of ps2 games some comments in forums even suggest this game looks like early ps3. Load times are quite respectful. Story wise may be weak but it's a comic and relies on the tie in. I think most people get that so I don't punish this game too hard for that. I'm not a Spawn fan though, I'm interested in the gameplay so I can recognize to fans there may be some disappointment there. On the flip of that though, Spawn, in this game has tons of variety in attacks. We see guns, chain, melee and necroplasm attacks not to mention there are many scrollable choices within this category. There are plenty of options to play as your own reincarnation of Spawn. Action wise this game was pretty decent. On top of that you have mission based gameplay containing areas to explore and incentives to find collectibles to unlock bonus content, and they are replayable. Despite Spawn fans not getting their story I kinda feel the developers reasonable knew they had to provide something for the fans and it seems fair and reasonable to me that this is what they offered up. Whether gamer or fan, this seems a good compromise. All in all I really don't see the dislike in this game. Most button mashers get these low scores but by no means is this a button masher. My complaints around the game are really only about two things. The first is there are some bad camera angles which are not gamebreaking but are annoying and break up gameplay immersion really bad. Annoying. The largest issue with this game for me is an oversight which really brings the score down for me and that is you are forced to play without the option of x axis and y axis inversion, and the default setting is the "left handed/brained" option and this control setting is futile to work with for some people such as myself. Now, as you can see in my review profile, I've played a lot of games and that said I have x axis and y axis "muscle memory" since most games offer options for this setting to be changed to the most common control scheme. It was super difficult to try to play this game with default settings that move me in the opposite direction my natural instincts are pushing the controllers anolog sticks. As great a game as the fatal frame series were they had the same issue and rendered them unplayable to people like me. Thankfully this game was more friendly in that respect the combat was more straight in your characters viewpoint and although needlessly frustrating, was workable. Providing these options, I would have enjoyed the game even more and goes back to the statement I made that if remastered with new developers and a higher powered system this game remake could be very successful. As it stands I feel this game was a niche title overlooked at the time the ps3 was luring gamers away from ps2 and the relatively few gamers who reviewed it didnt help.

Most points here are for the cool factor and personal nostalgia - Character and creature designs are excellent, dual wielding mini-guns is never not cool and the red cape is iconic. This game falls short in it's repetitiveness of the level design and reuse of enemy types. The monotony really sets in before you reach the last few levels and I was glad to be done with it by the time I finished. Worth a play especially if you are interested in the Spawn comics.