RSS
Spider-Man is back. Does his latest video game adventure disappoint? Find out inside.
May 5, 2007 | 12:18 PM PSTLooking back, it’s amazing how closely the Spider-Man video games have echoed their source material in terms of quality and feel. The first Spider-Man movie was a fairly straight-forward origin tale that took relatively few chances but got more than enough of the important stuff right to please fans of the comic and the casual movie-going public. Activision’s gaming tie-in to the movie was a similar affair - a linear, by-the-numbers action title with solid if uninspired gameplay and decent presentation. Marvel and Sony Pictures followed up their comic-book blockbuster with a critically acclaimed sequel that offered deeper character development, more impressive action set pieces, and perfect pacing. Developer Treyarch followed suit by one-upping their previous effort and implementing a far more ambitious sandbox game design and absolutely brilliant web-slinging mechanics to provide a greater sense of sheer physical freedom than any game before it. For part three, gamers and movie-goers alike can expect a frustratingly schizophrenic experience sprinkled with just enough glimpses of brilliance to pull the audience through the litany of problems surrounding them.
The storyline in the game is only slightly less coherent than the movie, an impressive feat considering the fact that Treyarch has interwoven nine new storylines into the core movie-based narrative. Besides the New Goblin, Sandman and Venom, players will also confront other prominent members of Spidey’s rogues gallery including the Kingpin, Scorpion, and the Lizard. None of these storylines are developed particularly well, but the sheer fanboyish thrills of seeing major Spider-Man villains rendered and well-animated in the pseudo-realistic movie styling should be enough get most Spidey-fans to care. The developers have also introduced three warring gangs into the mix, each of which gets their own mission trees.
Those extra storylines, along with the abundance of optional side-quests certainly help amend the most frequent gripe with the previous Spider-Man titles – lack of content. In Spider-Man 2, players effectively had the choice of scurrying to the next hero mission as soon as they unlocked it, completing races across the city, or spending their time disrupting the same five crimes hundreds of times. Lost balloons, falling construction workers, armored car robberies, car chases, and roving bands of thugs – these were the sole pursuits of your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man between scuffles with super-villains. Not anymore.
Treyarch has more than doubled the size of Manhattan for Spider-Man 3, and they’ve filled the island with tons of activities for the webslinger to partake in, including bomb-disposal, combat tours through all the gang territories, timed webslinging races, skydiving, photography assignments from the Daily Bugle, and even an homage to the classic OutRun series that forces players to oblige Mary-Jane’s desires while web-slinging through the city. Stats are recorded for all of these activities – how many have been completed, best times, and what trophies have been earned. Finding these missions is easy thanks to an intuitive 3D map that highlights each of the missions across the city and a waypoint system that slaps a huge directional indicator on screen to help players find their way to the next objective.
Some missions can’t be found with the radar. Pesky random crimes will still occur as players swing through the city (highlighted by colored dots on their handy-dandy 3D radar), but now there’s a far greater variety of them so the numbing repetition that plagued the last game is less of a problem. Random crimes are also tied to the three-way gang-war plaguing NYC, and preventing crimes in different districts will weaken each of the gang’s hold over that section of Manhattan. As if the satisfaction that comes from cleaning up a city and winning over the public wasn’t enough, the game also rewards players with health and reflex upgrades completing these events. Completists will also want to scour the city for over 150 different tokens scattered everywhere from the subway to the tops of skyscrapers. No, quantity is certainly not a problem with Spider-Man 3.
Unfortunately, like its cinematic counterpart, the quality of Spider-Man 3 is frustratingly uneven. Some of the missions and spontaneous crimes are well-done and fun to complete, but the vast majority of them simply entail battling waves of enemies before taking out a more powerful boss character or solving a simple puzzle. That wouldn’t be a huge problem if the puzzles were actually challenging or fun and the combat wasn’t completely uninspired. Disarming bombs is the most common mini-game, and handling the explosive devices ranges anywhere from moving very carefully out to the bomb squad (move to fast or erratically and they blow), to wading through several layers of button-prompt mini-games. Such tasks are amusing the first couple times, but they grow old fast. The best mission objectives are those that make liberal use of Spider-Man’s spider-sense, which is rendered as a clever mix of infrared and X-ray vision that really imparts the sense of hyper-awareness. Sensing enemies through buildings to track them to their hide-outs, finding hidden bombs strewn throughout a building, and isolating weak points in structures to break through and surprise enemies are all handled well and feel distinctly ‘Spider-Man’.
Spider-Man has a huge assortment of attacks but there’s no reason to make use of them since button-mashing is often more than enough to get the job done. Furthermore, every time an enemy is primed to attack Spidey, an indicator appears over their head prompting the player to slow-down time with the left bumper and counter. Conceptually, this is a perfect way to implement Spidey’s spider-sense, but the combat leans too heavily on its usage and eventually it just becomes tedious. Whereas games like Ninja Gaiden or Devil May Cry challenge players to pull off the proper move for any given situation for sake of style or survival, Spider-Man 3 simply rewards player’s for hammering the three attack buttons as fast as possible and making liberal use of the slow-mo Spider-sense feature to stay safe.
The storyline in the game is only slightly less coherent than the movie, an impressive feat considering the fact that Treyarch has interwoven nine new storylines into the core movie-based narrative. Besides the New Goblin, Sandman and Venom, players will also confront other prominent members of Spidey’s rogues gallery including the Kingpin, Scorpion, and the Lizard. None of these storylines are developed particularly well, but the sheer fanboyish thrills of seeing major Spider-Man villains rendered and well-animated in the pseudo-realistic movie styling should be enough get most Spidey-fans to care. The developers have also introduced three warring gangs into the mix, each of which gets their own mission trees.
Those extra storylines, along with the abundance of optional side-quests certainly help amend the most frequent gripe with the previous Spider-Man titles – lack of content. In Spider-Man 2, players effectively had the choice of scurrying to the next hero mission as soon as they unlocked it, completing races across the city, or spending their time disrupting the same five crimes hundreds of times. Lost balloons, falling construction workers, armored car robberies, car chases, and roving bands of thugs – these were the sole pursuits of your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man between scuffles with super-villains. Not anymore.
Treyarch has more than doubled the size of Manhattan for Spider-Man 3, and they’ve filled the island with tons of activities for the webslinger to partake in, including bomb-disposal, combat tours through all the gang territories, timed webslinging races, skydiving, photography assignments from the Daily Bugle, and even an homage to the classic OutRun series that forces players to oblige Mary-Jane’s desires while web-slinging through the city. Stats are recorded for all of these activities – how many have been completed, best times, and what trophies have been earned. Finding these missions is easy thanks to an intuitive 3D map that highlights each of the missions across the city and a waypoint system that slaps a huge directional indicator on screen to help players find their way to the next objective.
Some missions can’t be found with the radar. Pesky random crimes will still occur as players swing through the city (highlighted by colored dots on their handy-dandy 3D radar), but now there’s a far greater variety of them so the numbing repetition that plagued the last game is less of a problem. Random crimes are also tied to the three-way gang-war plaguing NYC, and preventing crimes in different districts will weaken each of the gang’s hold over that section of Manhattan. As if the satisfaction that comes from cleaning up a city and winning over the public wasn’t enough, the game also rewards players with health and reflex upgrades completing these events. Completists will also want to scour the city for over 150 different tokens scattered everywhere from the subway to the tops of skyscrapers. No, quantity is certainly not a problem with Spider-Man 3.
Unfortunately, like its cinematic counterpart, the quality of Spider-Man 3 is frustratingly uneven. Some of the missions and spontaneous crimes are well-done and fun to complete, but the vast majority of them simply entail battling waves of enemies before taking out a more powerful boss character or solving a simple puzzle. That wouldn’t be a huge problem if the puzzles were actually challenging or fun and the combat wasn’t completely uninspired. Disarming bombs is the most common mini-game, and handling the explosive devices ranges anywhere from moving very carefully out to the bomb squad (move to fast or erratically and they blow), to wading through several layers of button-prompt mini-games. Such tasks are amusing the first couple times, but they grow old fast. The best mission objectives are those that make liberal use of Spider-Man’s spider-sense, which is rendered as a clever mix of infrared and X-ray vision that really imparts the sense of hyper-awareness. Sensing enemies through buildings to track them to their hide-outs, finding hidden bombs strewn throughout a building, and isolating weak points in structures to break through and surprise enemies are all handled well and feel distinctly ‘Spider-Man’.
Spider-Man has a huge assortment of attacks but there’s no reason to make use of them since button-mashing is often more than enough to get the job done. Furthermore, every time an enemy is primed to attack Spidey, an indicator appears over their head prompting the player to slow-down time with the left bumper and counter. Conceptually, this is a perfect way to implement Spidey’s spider-sense, but the combat leans too heavily on its usage and eventually it just becomes tedious. Whereas games like Ninja Gaiden or Devil May Cry challenge players to pull off the proper move for any given situation for sake of style or survival, Spider-Man 3 simply rewards player’s for hammering the three attack buttons as fast as possible and making liberal use of the slow-mo Spider-sense feature to stay safe.
< previous | page 1 of 2 | next >
February 8, 2010
