Story:
The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is not based on the Movie entirely it has some story elements from the film and includes a lot of villains such as the Shocker, Kraven, Kingpin and many more but most of them have very little interaction with the story and just seem to be there for fanservice which i'm not complaining it was nice to see some of spidey's villains after a while, it felt kind of nostalgic but they don't add anything interesting to the story what so ever. By far the most interesting character is Stan Lee himself as he owns a comic book store in the game and it's just fun to interact with him instead of fighting the villains as they don't provide much of a challenge, other than Stan Spider-Man is done perfectly he has a great sense of humour and often mocks his enemies and will even comment on your web swinging if you fail to attatch to a building, though his jokes fall rather flat after hearing them multiple times.
Gameplay:
This is a open world web slinging adventure with Arkham City esque combat, along with a stealth mechanic from the first game which I found really enjoyable but this one I didn't enjoy as much, the combat itself is very simple it has one attack button, a counter button and a web button that's it, it doesn't have the large variety of options like in the Arkham games which this game is really trying to be it had the nerve to take the detective vision via spider sense, even though it works well and you may as well keep it on just to see the enemies easier it makes the game look really ugly.
The stealth sections are fun you have at least more variety on how to take the enemies out particulary in the Russion Hideouts missions they are just the right length and at the end of it you can unlock a suit, which there are a lot of so I appreciate the suit variety as I recognize most of them from the comics, and they look really good too which is very faithful to the source material, the suits actually impact the combat as they have different bonuses like a faster healing rate, more damage, it's just a shame that the upgrade system doens't have as much variety which gives very little reason for replayablity, the only thing this game seems to do right is the web swinging which has improved from the first game and feels a bit closer to Spider-Man 2 most of the time webs stick to buildings, but in missions physics go out of the window and spidey is able to swing on nothing again come on Beenox this is 2014, games with physics like this shouldn't be allowed.
Another gripe I have with this game is that the frame rate is horrendous it's locked at 60 fps but most of the time you won't even hit that high, which means a lot of configuration in the settings to try and figure out what the hell the problem is. It's a pain to enter the settings too because Beenox decided to have the settings in a launcher now I don't mind that but when the game is constantly dropping frames, it means you have to exit the game and reboot it in order to change some settings it's frustrating, all this doesn't help that the game is fairly buggy often you will find enemies walking into walls when they don't see you, texture pop in during cutscenes which leads me to believe that this game was incredibly rushed as you could finish it in 4 hours, possibly more if you try to complete the side missions but even they're not always enjoyable to the extent you want to finish them all.
The reason why the side missions aren't always enjoyable is because of the new Hero/Menace feature it works like a reputation system where if you ignore crime you will get the blame and will be hunted down, if your a hero you will be praised and the Task Force which is Oscorp's police force will ignore you, this is understandable but when your a menace the Task Force which consist of flying enemies who constantly try and shoot you down is very annoying and this happens during main missions too which the game keeps reminding you to do, as it means ignoring the crime rate for a while dropping your morale to menace level meaning you have to repeat the same old side missions over again in order to regain your reputation, in which the side missions become a chore I've lost count on how many citizens i've saved from fire buildings, disposed bombs or beat up petty thugs as I just did it to raise my hero meter then ignored them most of the time, and the city has the most boring presentation of New York I have ever scene most of it is just window dressing as the villains don't interact with it neither can Spider-Man apart from web swinging which i'll admit is done very well here.
Graphics:
Now this is the fun part this game looks nothing like a current gen game even on PC with 16x AA can't save this game from looking blurry and low res especially the buildings, the texture on them is just awful as well as the character models which don't look that bad unless you take a closer look and you can see how out of date they are, there are a lot of texture pop-in as I mentioned earlier and you can see a lot of graphical glitches while swinging around the dull looking city, and it doesn't even perform that well either this is what happens when developers try to rush a game in order to be released with the movie you get a lot of problems that can be fixed with a patch, which I highly doubt Beenox will even to try to fix this game might perform better on consoles but other than that it's a very average looking game which is dissapointing because the first Amazing Spider-Man looked much better and performed better too.
Sound:
As for sound the voice acting in this is very cheesy some of the voices are good I liked such as Alli Hills who voiced Felicia Hardy/Black Cat who did a good a great job at portraying her character for little screen time we got, I liked Spider-Man's voice his dialogue is funny and I found myself chuckling from time to time at his quips sometimes I purposely missed the buildings just to hear one of his many jokes in the game, at least they got his personality right my favourite though has to be Stan Lee he intereacts with Peter Parker as sort of a father figure and it's great to hear some monolouges from the man himself.
The music is fairly standard nothing really stands out too much there's no electrifying soundtrack when fighting villains which is a shame because the movie had a good score and I was looking forward to the Electro fight but yeah nothing amazing about the soundtrack here.
Conclusion:
This is a passable open world marvel game and I can only see the most die hard Spider-Man fans like myself buying this game at full price which it's not worth it even for the costumes the pre-order bonus comes with, you can find some enjoyment from web swinging but the city is lifeless and i'm pretty sure New York isn't that boring so i'd give this a miss even unless it came at a really deep discount, which doesn't seem likely considering the game is published by Activision, save your money and you're better of playing the 1st Amazing Spider-Man at least until a better Spider-Man game comes out and does the web slinger justice however I believe they are on track with the web swinging, they just need to polish the graphics and gameplay elements then we might just have the spidey game we've all been waiting for since Spider-Man 2.