There's even a multiplayer option that lets you play through individual levels or the entire story with any of your friends who happen to own the game. Once you wake the bosses out of their stupors, though, you'll be trading blows alongside the likes of Doc Ock, Green Goblin, Blade, Sandman, and Venom. When you play solo, there's a computer-controlled sidekick helping you out. One way the game distinguishes itself from all of the other comic-based beat-'em-ups we've seen on the DS is with its cooperative nature. In many stages, rooftops are shown on the upper screen while street level is displayed on the lower screen. A handy collection of power-up items, such as damage doublers and health kits, also help you out along the way. But you'll mainly find yourself mashing the punch and kick buttons to unleash the combinations that will get those pesky robots out of your face. Spidey can swing through the air, climb up walls, and use his webbing to snare or swat enemies. A few security minigames involving the touch screen serve to break up the monotony, as do boss battles featuring such familiar adversaries as Doctor Octopus and Sandman.
In those levels, you have to free hostages, deactivate bombs, and beat the living daylights out of the groups of robots that appear at regular intervals. Good old Nick Fury, the bossy commander of S.H.I.E.L.D., sends Spidey from one level to the next. The game itself is your typical beat-'em-up. So, in this 3D beat-'em-up for the Nintendo DS, your job is to knock some sense into the zombified bad guys, locate this new villain, and thrash hundreds of robots along the way. To make matters worse, he's also slipped some of Spidey's most dangerous adversaries a mickey, transforming them into his loyal henchmen. In Spider-Man: Friend or Foe, a mysterious villain is terrorizing the world with robots infused with symbiote goo taken from the meteor that brought Venom to Earth.