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Review: Spider-Man 3 – Hit and miss web-slinging in the USA

by Mike Bantick

Tuesday, 29 May 2007

Spider-Man 3
	Developer	Treyarch (Xbxo360/PS3) Beenox Studios (PC) Vicarious Visions (others)
	Publisher	Activision
	Rating	M

PC, PS3, Wii, PS2, NDS, PSP, Reviewed on Xbox 360

Spider-Man 3 initially impresses both in terms of game-play and visuals. With a pedigree built on recent offerings Spider-Man 2 and Ultimate Spider-Man, this is to be expected. But play the game for any length and there are frustrations that crawl in.

Early on in a session of Spider-Man 3, I was ready to retract a lot of the statements I made around big license titles (see here and here for a recap). The opening portions of the game required swishing effortlessly around New York City, beautifully rendered and presented as a bustling metropolis during day, evening and night.

The controls for getting around were intuitive and forgiving, even the fighting buttons presented a combination of button mashing and tactics that, against minions and street thugs, felt satisfying enough and got the job done.

I have not seen the movie yet (yes I know, time to rip up my geek club member card), but I gather the game follows a similar plot with more super villains thrown in for good measure. Not that it matters too much, as your onscreen Spidy can pretty much pick and choose between story missions, activities such as swinging through the city with Mary Jane or clearing the New York Burroughs of petty criminals.

As the game progresses, Spidy can don the black Spider-Man suit to enhance combat abilities and even take limited control of the ‘young goblin’ for a bit of hover board action.

Though Spider-Man 3 presents itself as a sand-box environment of opportunity, there is a lot of vacuous content here with the myriad of skydiving tasks and time-trials as well as Dead Rising photography tasks which are not too bad.

Players will spend the majority of their time playing the plot missions with varying degrees of success. Plot missions are multi-layered with the action broken up by cut scenes, mini games including bomb defusal and button sequence challenges and baddy battles.

The vast majority of ‘brain teasers’ included in these missions are easily solved speed bumps that prove little challenging, the battles, including boss style marathons however are another story, with a nasty checkpointing system, steep difficulty curve and awkward camera angle conspiring to ensure most battles – if not entire missions - will need to be repeated, sometimes ad nauseously before either success or ‘try something else’ is achieved.

The Wii version of Spider-Man 3 promises to allow the Wii-mote and Nunchuck control system to be used as directional web slingings. Considering, this is the part of the game providing the most fun, Wii owners may be most interested in taking on the challenge. For the rest of us, only Spider-Man fans need apply, as the choice of sand-box games is on the increase every week.
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