Ultimate Spider-Man: Total Mayhem

Games sporting a film licence rightly bring a sense of dread to most serious gamers. For every GoldenEye 007 triumph, there's a dozen Charlie's Angels ready to destroy your faith all over again.

Fortunately, Ultimate Spider-Man: Total Mayhem is more of a GoldenEye 007, scoring Pocket Gamer Gold Awards on both iPhone and Android.

Can it complete the hat-trick on Xperia Play?

Ultimate Spider-Man: Total Mayhem is essentially a hybrid action / platforming / beat-'em-up game, in which you spend the majority of your time performing combo attacks on your standard range of cartoon thugs and big bosses.

With the buttons moved off the display and onto the Xperia Play pad, you can see everything more clearly. The screen is, therefore, a lot less crowded, allowing you to enjoy with greater freedom pummelling and webbing your opponents, and racking up the combo score.

One of the neatest features is the Spidey Sense button, which is mapped to the left trigger. Pressing it will make you dive out of the way of attacks when the icon flashes on the screen, and the button placement is just about awkward enough to avoid handing you a free pass. Odd praise, but absolutely genuine.

It runs smoothly and looks fantastic, with strong animation and bright colours really bringing the cartoon world to life. The full voice acting goes some way to explaining the large file size, too, which is just south of 200MB.

The transition to Xperia Play hasn't been completely without incident, though, for Peter Parker.

Whilst manipulating Spidey around the environments with the D-pad means there's less chance of slipping, pulling off jumps in the platforming segments still feels slightly inaccurate. This, perhaps, exposes an issue with the way the game's built, rather than with the original controls.

More serious is the hangover from the original game: the Quick Time Events, where you have to suddenly swipe the screen to make Spidey dive out of the way of something. Inexplicably, these have been left in, meaning you have to let go of the gamepad briefly to quickly act, or risk losing some of Spidey's health.

You can usually tell when one's coming, so it's far from a deal breaker, but considering every other function is mapped to the gamepad, it's a shame the developer couldn't find a better alternative.

This shouldn't put you off, though: Ultimate Spider-Man's journey to Xperia Play has made what we labelled “the finest action game on Android” a even more fluid experience. If you have an Xperia Play, and a hankering for some old skool beat-'em-up action, you can't go far wrong with Ultimate Spider-Man: Total Mayhem.