Spider-Man: Friend or Foe is certainly less of the first option and more of the second to gamers.
Friend or Foe may be a little over half a year old, but it feels and plays like a game designed for last generation's audiences. The simplistic and laughably bad plot centers on Spider-Man's iconic villains and friends being abducted by an unknown force.
In order to find out why, S.H.I.E.L.D Director Nick Fury recruits him as he saves the world. Again.
From this point on, the plot becomes a nonsensical trip down memory lane as Spider-Man rescues countless familiar characters from the Marvel universe in 20 levels of pure boredom.
The rescued characters, including Spidey's vilest villains, are then added to Spider-Man's growing roster and can be played as using their own attacks and abilities.
Players can collect tokens from fights to upgrade their favorite characters, but only Spider-Man can earn new moves with them while everyone else is just reduced to powering up things like health and durability.
But even being able to control 16 different characters doesn't make playing a game as repetitive as this any more fun.
Friend or Foe is divided into five popular locales, such as Tokyo and Egypt, with each possessing four levels and multiple enemies to fight through. But the game once again shows just how cheap it is by recycling the same five or six enemy types for each location's four levels.
When players move on to another location, they'll find the same handful of enemies to fight, but only with a different coat of paint.
The game's cheapness doesn't end there. The voice work in the game is recycled to the point of wanting to mute the television, the 3-D stages scrolling by are bland and the game follows a strict pattern of beating two levels, rescuing and adding a new character, beating two more levels and then fighting and adding the boss.
It's a strictly by-the-book affair that leaves gamers with a bitter taste in their mouths, especially if good money was spent on it.
Luckily the best thing about the game is its mercifully short length, if players even stick around long enough to find out the last boss in Friend or Foe is one of the biggest jobbers in the Spider-Man universe. But even with the predictable two-player mode, the six to eight hours it takes to complete the game is way more than you'll want to spend, trust me.
If for some reason a player actually enjoys this game and finishes it, they'll find absolutely nothing to do afterward with no special features or reasons to continue playing except to play the same bland levels over, collect tokens, and build up all available characters. It's that shallow.
So unless for gamers in their early teens or the hardest of hardcore Spider-Man fans, Spider-Man: Friend or Foe should be avoided at all cost, bargain bin or not. Other fans of Marvel's popular web-slinging hero should pray that Activision gets its act together before the inevitable next game.