The lack of Manhattan for me to freely travel makes me dissapointed with this Spider-Man game.
Before I get to what I did not enjoy, I just want to focus on the pros of the game. First of all, the graphics are quite wonderful to my tastes. Though this game was just copied over from the original DS and given the 3D treatment, it still looks good. The environments are greatly detailed and Spider-Man looks great throughout the whole game. Though some animations are choppy at times and the animations of characters lips moving while they talk is completely inexistent, the game still looks good and the 3D gives the impression that you are right there with Spider-Man himself. As for the story, it was quite interesting. Hordes of cross-species have escaped from Oscorp and have run rampant in the city. It's up to Spider-Man and Doc. Connors to find a cure for the cross-species disease and to rescue everyone in danger, especially Gwen Stacy. That's the main aspect of the story, so expect a lot of thugs to beat, bosses to demolish and cross-species to cure! As for the gameplay, the fighting can be quite entertaining, but of course, gets a little repetitive (as it is with all beat-'em-up games). You can pull off fancy web moves using the new Web-Rush feature as well as Signature Moves from getting up enough combo hits. The controls are quite great most of the time. Spider-Man's web swinging is easy to navigate and the button mashing for fighting is quite responsive. Though the camera can get in the way sometimes when you're crawling on walls or Spider-Man jumps too far even though you slightly hit the button, the game is very far from being unplayable. The cheeky one-liners and dialogue that Spider-Man says throughout the game are quite funny and entertaining...but just be prepared to be hearing some of them quite often.
Now, onto the stuff I was disappointed about with the game. When I played the demo for this game from the Nintendo eShop, it only showed off one level, which is reasonable for a demo. Once I completed it, I imagined me exiting the level into a living Manhattan where I could swing to my hearts content. However, this isn't the case when you play the full game. Instead of getting missions and swinging around New York to your objectives, you are simply brought to the place of interest, do the mission, return to your apartment for another mission, go to the new area, etc. There is no travel time between your apartment and the mission at hand, only a loading screen. Not having the open Manhattan that I imagined, I was completely turned off by the game. Though I did finish it, and I did enjoy it for the most part.
Oh right, and there is also a section of the game called "Vigilante". Let's just say...it's the most unoriginal and lazy excuse for an addition to a game and probably the worst use for StreetPass. I won't even bother explaining what Vigilante is. All I will say is that it can easily be a game on Windows 98. But of course, you can get unlockables from it, which may make people finish Vigilante no matter how boring it is.
Overall, The Amazing Spider-Man for the Nintendo 3DS could have been a really great game with the simple addition of an open world Manhattan to explore as well as either the removal or improvement of the Vigilante side-game. Though it is quite possible that due to the limitations of the 3DS software, they were not able to make the whole city of Manhattan on one game for the 3DS, they were able to in the home console versions. So if you want to play a great Spider-Man game with an open city to explore, then I would suggest getting The Amazing Spider-Man on a home console. The 3DS version is just a small, but enjoyable, part of the console games.