Spider-Man Shattered Dimensions – Preview

I was recently invited into the bowels of Megarom’s office for a hands off demonstration of the upcoming Spider-Man Shattered Dimensions.

Shattered Dimensions is set over 4 different universes which have been taken directly from the different universes from the comic books. These are The Amazing Spider-Man, Noir, 2099 and a yet to be named universe.

After a brief demo video we jumped right into it and the first universe we entered was Noir.

This universe is set in 1930’s depression era America and is far grittier and darker than your average Spider-Man experience and the stage I saw was set in a carnival on Coney Island which had rides going around and fireworks lighting up the night sky.

While you are Spider-Man you are still new at this and are no where near as powerful as we are used to as the Amazing Spider-Man and obviously since we are in the 1930’s you don’t have any fantastic gadgets others than your awesome looking World War 1 bomber helmet.

All this means that the Noir universe is far more stealth oriented than your usual Spider-Man experience and while I generally don’t go for stealth games the Noir style along with the web slinging ability made for some interesting viewing. We crawled along the shadows taking out the enemy with increasingly complex take down manoeuvres and a healthy dose of solid violence.

After every takedown yellow and red lights that I can only explain as orbs appear to come out of the downed body and are then absorbed by yourself. They won’t say what these orbs are for yet but it seems quite obvious that they will form part of a ranking system. This idea is given an extra boost by the multipliers that start to appear once you take down multiple enemies at once or string together combo’s against boss units.

We continued to clear out the stage by stalking along roof tops, power lines and swooping in for the kill from all angles. Then while we were tracing a power line across the carnival the fireworks went off again and lit up the sky, suddenly we were wide out in the open and all the enemies started coming at us. We took off across the stage swinging from point to point in an awesomely fluid motion, once we managed to disappear into the darkness I saw a red glowing circle left in the last place the enemy saw us, much like the last known location from Splinter Cell Conviction.

After that we were magically transferred to the next universe, The Amazing Spider-Man. This one is very much the standard Spider-Man that we know and love and the graphics style and fighting style changes to reflect that. The graphics are now very comic book like and the fighting style is now high flying advanced web attacks.

You get to change the web into a sledge hammer, spear, anvil and all other manner of things. It’s much faster and more visual than Noir and reminds me quite a bit of the last Wolverine title. The environment is quite destructible in this universe and you can then pickup the destruction and use that as a weapon.

We don’t hang around this universe for long and then head on over to the 2099 universe which can be explained entirely in one word, Neon.

Everything is gleaming and clean and we have cars flying around and a ton of Neon lights all over the place.

We take on the Hobgoblin 2099 who has been created exclusively for this title, we are chasing after him down a vertical alley with random obstacles as we go. Once we land the goblin starts lobbing bombs our way and we then grab them out of the air with our webbing and return the favour back towards the Hobgoblin.

The stage itself is huge with a lot going on and the Spider-Man suit and Hobgoblin suits look really impressive. The battle continues as expected and then we head of swinging through the stage while avoiding flying cars in the beautifully rendered Blade Runner styled city.

The overriding feeling I got from the game is that it’s basically going to be 4 distinct Spider-Man titles rolled into one and yet all the universes felt more violent than your standard Spider-Man cartoons that I used to watch growing up.

I’ll tell you a secret as well, when I was at E3 waiting for my hands off Black Ops demo I managed to sneak onto a Spider-Man Shattered Dimensions console and give it a bit of a go. The controls feel smooth and once again that reference back to Wolverine is there with a very similar close combat fighting style. Which is a good thing in my book as I really enjoyed the Wolverine title and the Noir styled universe was easily my favourite.

Spider-Man Shattered Dimensions is planned to be released on the 10th of September and is well worth keeping an eye on. It will be landing on all 3 consoles and according to the developers, Beenox, all three consoles are using the same engine and are being developed simultaneously.

Last Updated: July 8, 2010