Spider-Man: Friend or Foe [X360]

Each time you leave the helicarrier and head down to play a level, you choose a fighting partner to go along with you. You start with the Prowler and unlock more characters as you play through the game. They each have special attacks and can team up with you to perform co-op Hero Attacks which are actually a lot of fun to watch, but can usually only be used once per stage.

Although it's unclear why, the in-game currency consists of tech tokens, little glowing thingamabobs that burst out of nearly anything you can punch (rocks, vases, crates, barrels) and some things you can't (your fighting partner). As you play through the game's battle sequences (of which there are painfully many), you'll collect tech tokens to spend on upgrades back at the helicarrier.

Tokens not only serve as upgrade cash, they also disappear in small increments every time you automatically respawn after dying in battle, which, by the way, is ridiculously hard to do. But do you die for good when you run out of tokens? Nope. You simply continue to respawn infinitely, in the exact same spot, until, we assume, the sun crashes into the Earth and destroys this game.

The problem becomes that it takes tokens to buy upgrades, but the upgrades don't matter because you can't die anyway, so why upgrade? Sure, you can die in a boss battle, but guess what? You can't use any of your special abilities on a boss anyway, so, again, why upgrade?

And that's what's ultimately so frustrating about Spider-Man: Friend or Foe. Some of the web upgrades are actually fun and rewarding to use, but they feel completely unnecessary because the gameplay demands nothing of the player. As a test, we replayed an entire stage in the first level of the game using nothing but a single attack button. We sailed through with a yawn.

As another test, while trying out the game's two-player co-op mode, we took Spidey and our chosen foe/partner, Silver Sable, to a cliff-top stage in the game's island-themed level. The predictable number of predictable-looking Phantom enemies spawned around us, and we set our controllers down, let the game continue running, and walked away for 30 minutes.

When we came back, our characters were still standing, and somehow the enemies had all thrown themselves off the cliff, probably out of boredom. Reluctantly, we picked up the controllers again and played through the rest of the game, with nothing to lose but time, small bits of our souls, and all manner of faith in all that is good and holy.

We played the Xbox 360, PlayStation 2, Wii PC and PlayStation Portable versions of the game. With the exception of the PSP version, all the above played the same way and seemed to contain the same storylines, battle system and upgrade mechanic (although in our tests, the PS2 version ran noticeably slower than the 360 version and had significantly longer load times). The Wii version is identical to the PlayStation 2 version with very few Wii-centric enhancements: shake the nunchuk to change characters, and waggle the remote during a throw to modify the move. That's it.

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