The Amazing Spider-Man 2

The Amazing Spider-Man 2 follows on from its predecessor and was again created by studio Beenox as a companion game to the same-named film. As in the first installment, this is not a direct conversion of the film's plot but its own story set in an open New York, drawing on both the film and comic-book mythology of Spider-Man and adding its own gallery of villains that the main film storyline never encounters at all.

The basis of the gameplay remains the same — free web-swinging between skyscrapers as the main way to move around, complemented by acrobatic combat and the use of spider powers against street gangs and upgraded super-villains. The second installment tried to make the swinging system even more precise and faster, added new combat combinations and abilities, and expanded the range of side activities, item collecting, and small side missions from the New York police across the whole city. New game modes also appeared, along with the ability to switch between various Spider-Man outfits drawn from the character's comic-book history, an element the game shared with the then-current trend of monetization through microtransactions, still a relatively new phenomenon for major film-licensed titles at the time.

Critical reception was rather cooler than for the previous installment — reviewers welcomed the further improved feel of moving through the city, but criticized technical shortcomings, a repetitive mission structure, and the noticeable presence of microtransactions in an otherwise full-price game. Neither commercially nor critically did the title become a major milestone for the series, and it essentially closed out the line of open-world action Spider-Man games from studio Beenox, before other studios with a different approach to the genre took over development of further titles featuring the character. For fans of the era of the early Andrew Garfield films, the game remains mainly a nostalgic memory of a time when licensed games were released alongside a film's premiere.