Review of Spider-Man & Venom: Maximum Carnage (SNES)

Spider-Man is one of Marvel's most popular characters. So when it comes time to make a game for this character you'd think they'd put some actual effort into it. This is not the case with Spider-Man & Venom: Maximum Carnage. Let's go over the individual elements of the game.

Story : Unimportant. You play as Spider-Man and Venom and do generic superhero stuff. The meat of this game is supposed to be the game play, which happens to be where it fails horribly. There are cameos from other several heroes and some interesting villain appearances but it's all wasted on such a horrible game.

Graphics : Everybody is animated decently, the stages look decent. There's nothing special here, but nothing too bad either. The animations for Spider-Man and Venom could use some word however. They stand around in awkward fighting poses and their combo attacks are just generic punch and kick sequences. Spider-Man should be kneeling, jumping, throwing hay makers just like his comic counterpart but fails to do so here. The only interesting thing to mention are the comic book panel graphics, which are very fun to look at.

Sound : The music for this game is actually very cool. The sound also is very nice and the punching sounds are satisfying. Some of the music is very catchy and will stick in your head long after you've played it.

Game play : This game, like many other comic games on the Super Nintendo, is far too difficult. You have no continues and only three lives. There are far too many henchmen, endless in number but high in frustration. If you lose your all your lives, you start over from the very beginning. The differences between the two title characters are minimal. No matter who you choose, you're going down. The enemies are all very bland and not memorable. On top of that, they don't vary much stage to stage. It's the same generic thugs with longer life bars.

The bosses are equally disappointing. You torture yourself going through an entire level and usually just fight a palette swap of the same thugs you've fought before. When you do finally fight a super villain, it's not thrilling at all. Sure, you're happy to not beat up on the same thugs, but even these super villain pop up more than once. You fight all of the multiple times, each more dull than the last.

The most glaring flaw of the game is the fact that it's so easy to grab enemies. You'd think this isn't a flaw, however you grab and throw or attack so slowly that in the time it takes to do all that another enemy has snuck behind you and attacked you. Your best bet is to stay away from every enemy but it's impossible since the grab range is so huge. This alone makes the game unplayable, on top of everything we've gone over already.

Re playability: Not worth playing once, not worth playing twice.

Overall: 3/10. Everything in this game is garbage but the soundtrack.