When I’ve asked people if they like the character Spawn, 3 out of ten say they love
it, 4 out of ten say they hate it, and the other 3 out of ten simply look at me and say,
“What’s a Spawn?”
This is Spawn: Armageddon for the Playstation 2.
Spawn has been a love/hate concept since Todd McFarlane created it about twenty years ago,
and since Armageddon’s release in November of 2003, Spawn’s true popularity is still
somewhat of a mystery in my opinion.
I’ll even admit a first, that I didn’t really care for the idea of Spawn either,
it honestly wasn’t until a friend of mine referred me to this game when I really gave
the character and the game a chance.
Which led me to the comics, and the old HBO cartoons from long ago which I love!
But the game itself, I had to seriously struggle through.
Not that it was difficult, but that I just wanted to get the game over with since most
of the time, I was far from enjoying myself.
Now I will say one thing, a feature that I’ve always appreciated in games like this, is
the health meter that pops up for each individual person or thing you have to fight.
Kind of like in the Streets of Rage games.
Because nothing pisses me off more than, beating the hell out of some kind of monster or human,
and not knowing if you’ve killed them or just stunned the little bastards.
You’ll always know if you’ve pulled away from an enemy too early when they’ve snuck
up behind you and the next think you know, you’re hitting the re-try button to start
the mission over again.
Speaking of the enemies I have to say that, Spawn, has a certain imagination that is unlike
other games.
From the angelic beings of good, to the demonic creatures that you’ll find yourself fighting
throughout the game, the artwork in this game is very well done.
If you are familiar with Spawn, you can relate to pretty much everything that you’ll encounter.
One of the things I hated about the agony weapon, or “Axe” for those of you that
have never played the game, is that you have no other combo than simply hitting the circle
button over and over again.
Some other reviews of this game claim it was repetitive, and I’d have to fully agree.
If they would some how cook up a new spawn video game, I think that his Axe, has a lot
of potential.
But in this game, the axe to me is a complete waste.
Upon finding or entering cheat codes to unlock Spawn’s other weapons, you’ll find they
range from awesome, to very ****. And the automatic aiming with R1 made it almost cheating
when you fire at an enemy.
Finally you have spawn’s necroplasm and hell chains…
The Necroplasm is cool, you can blast enemies pretty easy.
And the strength of his hell powers are appropriate from level to level.
Now, I love how you can grapple your way from point to point with your hell chains, however,
I hate that you can’t do it anytime you want.
It’s Spawn for God sakes.
He can move swiftly from rooftop to rooftop via hell chains or teleportation.
Yet they don’t let you do that.
That’s like…that’s like denying Spider-man the ability to swing with his web?
Seriously!
It’s just too bad that the execution of this game was below average.
Spawn Armageddon was a game that was not loved by a lot of people.
Now even though this game caught a lot of flack and received very poor ratings from
most of its critics, I believe that Spawn the video game was a great idea.
My official question and complaint about this game is…why didn’t they make MORE spawn
games, let alone more movies.
I honestly didn’t think that game was bad enough to the point where they didn’t try
to make another game with possible a different approach to try to improve things as a whole.
As I played the game, I thought overall, it wasn’t that bad.
Spawn Armageddon, was good idea!
But I guess some video games that are comic book adaptations were just never meant to
be…and never should have been in the first place.
The Spawn concept in general is awesome!
As far as Spawn video games are concerned…they need to go back to the drawing board.