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The Amazing Spider-Man 2 has become a bit of a mystery. Review copies have been thin on the ground (although that isn't unusual for Activision's licensed games) while the puzzling announcement that the Xbox One version of the game was "indefinitely postponed" provoked a raft of crazy conspiracy theories. The sudden digital release of the game on Xbox Live this week only heightened the interest around what turns out to be a rather average release. What caused the postponement in the first place and how had the situation been resolved? Right now, nobody's talking.What we can confirm is that Activision initially pulling the game from the release schedule had nothing to do with the quality of the Xbox One conversion work (as if that's ever been a reason for a publisher not to release a substandard port anyway). The Xbox One game has clear disadvantages against the PlayStation 4 release that we'll explore in a moment, but they're best described as annoyances as opposed to anything genuinely game-breaking.
In truth, based on first impressions derived from an hour with both versions, The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is an enormous missed opportunity on a broader level. What we're looking at is a distinctly last-gen effort, spruced up with 1080p imagery and some higher-precision post-processing effects, but little else. Detail in the cityscape is passable but lacking at close range, while - Spider-Man's model apart - overall geometry levels are often bafflingly low. Loading times between missions are very intrusive on both platforms, more so on Xbox One.
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