Congratulations on being the most disappointing game I've ever bought

[Super-Fly Spider-Guy]

...and I bought, AND ENJOYED, Vroom in the Night Sky for fuck's sake.

 

Move over Duke Nukem Forever, there's a new disappointing pile of shit, and unlike Duke, this one isn't at least a decent game hiding behind all the bullshit. 

 

Energy Hook is a game by the lead designer of the web swing mechanics from good old Spider-Man 2 for PS2, Xbox, and Game Cube, you know, the one everyone everywhere loved to death. Well, at one point in time, the guy behind the swing mechanics decided that no one else had done it as good as he did, and figured he'd make his own game. He launched a Kickstarter for it probably 4 or 5 years ago, and it looked promising. There was small little levels with buildings and they showed off the physics of the swinging and it looked pretty fucking cool. I was keen.

 

Then I forgot about it for a while, then I checked up on it here and there, then I forgot about it again. 

 

For whatever reason, I was looking into it today to see what the hell happened, and it turns out it actually released about a year ago. Type it in on the store and there it is for 24 bones. Didn't hesitate, grabbed my PayPal and ran. Fuck dude, some more Spidey 2 style goodness? That thing I've been yelling for for years, from the guy who made it so good the first time round? Fuck, you could charge a hundred and twenty four and I wouldn't hesitate.

 

Damn do I wish I did. 

 

I should have looked up some reviews or gameplay or something, because it's just that Kickstarter shit from years ago. It's an assortment (like 6 or 7) of shit little mini level things in which you swing around and do some of the most mindnumbingly boring or FUCKING. GOD. AWFULLY. DESIGNED races I've ever played in a game. Ever. The physics are fun when they work but when they don't this shit is broke as all fuck. I'll often go into ragdoll mode for no reason. At first I thought I might have been shit at the races, but then I looked at the timer and saw it said 29 seconds when I had been in it for like 10. I watched the timer and what a shock, it ACTUALLY skips time. It casually jumped 5 seconds more times than I could remember, no wonder I wasn't beating the target times. The whole thing is just a broken mess.

 

It's one thing to release a broken mess of a game to the masses.

It's another thing to release it on the PlayStation Store.

It's yet another thing to fucking charge for it.

It's a whole other league of bullshit though, to charge 24 bucks for a BROKEN tech demo.

 

This is like the pitch trailer for the game from years ago when it was first announced, but playable, and with literally nothing else in there. It's beyond disappointing.

 

Despite my efforts, words genuinely can't describe my disappointment with this game.

 

I still play the shit out of Spidey 2 to this day. It's legit my (equal) favorite game of all time. So when I heard all those years back that this guy would be doing this game, my dick got harder than fighting your way out of being jumped by all the bosses from every Dark Souls game at once. I'm playing it now, and it's just so fucking woeful. I can't even begin to describe how bad it is. And I just don't get it. All these years I've been saying, about the newer Spidey games that they already had the perfect formula in Spider-Man 2, all they have to do is just do that again... yet somehow, the guy who credits himself as being solely responsible for that Spidey 2 magic, he can't even fucking recreate it. 

 

Had this game have had either an open world or at least bigger levels, or some form of crime fighting and combat, I'd probably at least enjoy it enough to keep playing, because the web swinging, when it works, can be really fun. It just sucks because there's no where to really get into it, there's one level, I think level two, that is fun to swing around in, and that's it. The rest of them are just disjointed bullshit. Why would Spidey swing around some baron desert? It doesn't make sense. There's no criminals, no crime, no fighting, no pizza delivery, no anything. It is just lacking. It's like a tech demo for a fan Spidey game, but all they gave out was the swinging bit and nothing else. It's a shame and a disappointment. That's it. 

 

Too bad Spider-Man UE4 didn't pan out, it looked to be what this should have been. 

 

At least on the plus side, I can say for you hunters out there, it's a fuck easy platinum. Whether or not I'll even bother to keep playing to plat though is another question.

 

[Bullstomp]

Thanks for the warning and I'm truly sorry for that waste of time and money. Easy platinum be damned, it doesn't sound like a fun time at all.  It sounds like this game really took disappointment to a whole new level?

[Super-Fly Spider-Guy]

On 9/16/2017 at 8:10 PM, Bullstomp said:

Thanks for the warning and I'm truly sorry for that waste of time and money. Easy platinum be damned, it doesn't sound like a fun time at all.  It sounds like this game really took disappointment to a whole new level

It really does.

 

And that's really the thing, if it was just a pile of shit it would be annoying and a fuck off. But it's a pile of shit, with good swinging in it. When you really get the hang of it...well there's still a bunch of glitches and bullshit, but when you get the hang of it AND it wants to work properly, the swinging is really fun. For those few seconds. 

 

And it's disappointing, because it belongs in a good game. The swinging, when everything aligns, shits all over the Amazing Spidey games, but everything else is just fucked. Why would you put him in a drowning city? Like, water everywhere, you've got like the top of a couple blocks of buildings to swing on and that's it, swing too long and you drown anyway. 

 

There's a broken and tiny construction site.

There's a weird ass Tron looking city that at least gives you a BIT of swinging room.

There's some weird baron ass desert that just shouldn't be near Spider-Man.

There's a place called Misty City that is tiny but also fogged up the ass like in the Spider-Man 1 PS1 game and you can't go too low or you die.

There's the aforementioned water one, where you swing too low and you die. (This was only acceptable on the PS1 because it was the fucking PS1)

There's some weird crazy rock garden thing floating in the sky that is just weird.

And I think there's another level I'm forgetting.

 

And they are all tiny. Put them all in one big world and you'd be lucky to cover a third of the Spidey 2 map, which itself was pretty damn tiny anyway. 

 

Just put the swinging mechanic in an open world city. I can take everything else and throw it if you give me a city to swing in and nothing else. But you couldn't even do that. You couldn't even give me a blank bland dead shithole of a city, you gave me disjointed levels that barely even constitute being called a level.

 

Clearly the guy wasn't lying, he must have been the single handed inventor of the Spidey swing mechanics, know why? Because level design, game design, control design, design in general, music production, visual designs and production, game making, ass scratching, all of it, he can't do a fucking thing right in those fronts. Not a single thing. Outside of swinging there's nothing but pain here, even the fucking menus are shit, and for some reason only let you use the joy stick and not d-pad.

 

This game in one word? Disappointment.