Spider-Man 3

"'Superman Returns- Redux'. Damn."

“Damn”. That was the only word that came from my mouth the moment I started playing 'Spider-Man 3: The Game' for the Playstation 2. I didn't have high expectations and I wasn't looking forward to this game, but it was one of those moments when someone you trust screws up and you can't help but just say that: “Damn”.

Leaving the melodrama aside, I have a soft spot for Activision. They don't really rank among my favorite companies in the industry, but I generally think of them as one of the 'more caring' ones when it comes to their titles. Especially when handling comic-book hero titles and -more specifically- Spider-Man titles, they know what they're doing and they're usually doing it right. This time, however, their project is nothing but one huge disappointment.

“Spider-Man 3: The Game”, follows after the movie of the same title. It tells the new adventure of Peter Parker (Spider-Man), as he gets slowly taken over by the strange, black substance that came from Space (the symbiote- what makes his suit black), while having to deal with Harry's hatred toward him, his new rival over at the Bugle, the photographer Eddie Brock and several villains popping up to keep him busy. Not everything is from the movie, of course; there are villains taken from the comic books and original content.

So, the premise of the game is pretty much the same as in Spider-Man 2. You have a HUGE Manhattan (nnnnnot the drink), you have the super-hero, so stop muggings, deliver fruit pies (I'm not kidding) and hunt down the occasional super-villain. The problem is that where 'Spider-Man 2' demonstrated the potential of the genre, this new installment only takes some of the successful elements of its predecessor and does a rush-job with them and the rest of the game.

Graphically, the game is sub par at best. From far, your 'playground' looks pretty enough, but close-up, the building are just empty boxes, the textures are very average and the models are as generic as they come. The fact that you spend a lot of time swinging around (which is the biggest high-point of this game) sort of 'masks' all the problems, but you'll eventually run into the civilians that literally have no faces or you will notice how Spider-Man's feet sink awkwardly in the grass. The only truly pretty thing is the player's-model, which is detailed enough and really animates beautifully when 'dancing' in the skies.

Sound-wise, things are just as average. The soundtrack is decent, picking up the pace when you're in battle, going softer during swinging or wandering through the city. The voice-acting, on the other hand, is pretty much painful. Even Maguire sounds dull, failing to deliver his lines properly. The fact that his lines simply suck, doesn't help. I was amazed at how not-funny, Spider-Man's smartass jokes were and how worse Tobey made them sound. Easily one of the reasons someone falls for good ole' Spidey are these jokes and here they were anything but a reason to fall for him. The supporting cast (of which I'm not sure how many are from the film) is pretty average too, leaving the player with a very bitter taste in his mouth after the game's over. It's not that the actors are not talented, but none of them either cares enough to deliver or gets the chance to do so. As usual, bright exception is Bruce Campbell as the narrator, who I'd loved to have heard even more.

Now that those little things are out of the way, let's go to the meat of any game: the gameplay. Like I mentioned earlier, the core of the game is being able to swing around the city, stop crimes, help civilians and hunt down the bad guys. It's no GTA, there is no Peter Parker in the game, don't expect to ride cars (why would you, anyway?) or take MJ to dinner, unless the story calls for it. You only swing over the city and either respond to help cries from civilians and the cops, or you drop off at the designated markers that signify a story-related mission or event. The game starts with Spidey telling you about how things are going in his life and his city and Bruce Campbell gives you a short tour around the controls. In the story mode (and, mind you, there are spoilers ahead), you start with a short encounter with Harry, then get taken over by the symbiote and in the process, fight Dr. Connors, Kraven, Morbius, realize what the symbiote's doing to you, get dumped by MJ, get rid of the Symbiote, fight the Sandman, fight the Venom, witness Harry's change of heart and your reconciliation with him and then make up and make out with Mary Jane. This mode is more or less linear; occasionally you can pick one mission before the other, but it doesn't really make a difference. You can, of course, put it on hold and do other short missions in the meantime, but don't expect to find yourself fond of that option.

So, no, as you might have guessed from my tone, the open-ended world part of the gameplay isn't fun at all. For something 'open-ended', it's restricted to punching bad guys, delivering fruit pies and other packages, rescuing kidnapped victims, getting rid of bombs and punching some more bad guys. The missions might sound varied, but they're not; they're all the same. Whether you deliver a pie or a meteor rock, you essentially do the same thing: swing to the target within the time limit. Whether you stop a mugging or you save cops who refused bribe from angry gang members, you do the same thing: you punch the same five enemy NPCs over and over and over again. There are two ways to engage in these missions: one is to respond (with the Triangle Button) to a cry for help that suddenly shows up while swinging over the city. The other way is to walk to an informant (the same informant, only with different accent each time) and follow his tip to suppress one of the five rivaling gangs that want a bite out of the Big Apple. In both cases, the missions are the same; the only difference is that during a 'patrol' (that's what fighting gangs is called) a mission is comprised of a number of objectives, which really aren't anything other than the same short missions you've been doing all around the city when you heard a random call for help.

By breaking that aspect of the game, arguably the best part of the previous installment, the developers managed to practically kill a big portion of the game's appeal. And unfortunately the story mode isn't all that much better either. The action in both the free-roaming and the story mode is focused around battle. The battle system, however, is just too simplistic for its own good. It's basically button-mashing. The combos that exist are “hit one button five times and then hit another one once”. From some point on and until the end of the story mode you can put on the Symbiote costume, which makes you faster and a lot stronger (you can't keep it on all the time, though, as Pete's 'dark side' will take over him), which is cool, but it's not enough to salvage the battle system. In addition, you can collect experience points through the missions and use them to upgrade your skills, but the upgrades are really not needed at all throughout the entire game. It matters little if you mash the button to generate a combo three times or five times, since the enemies don't ever really change. I can almost see how there was not more attention paid to it, keeping in mind how the game was supposed to play, but since the whole game's basically all about fighting the baddies, they should've put more effort into it. It's a general problem with super-hero games, that must be bypassed eventually: you have a guy who has the proportional strength of the spider, the speed, the agility and all you give him is a generic combo of five fists and a kick? Your source material is cool by default; why make it 'uncool'?

Other than the basic 'hit them in the head', there is the swinging and the interaction with the environment. Whether you chase someone or you're just trying to get to your target, you'll throw the controller in anger at least once, when you realize what a pain in the ass navigating through NYC can be. It's pretty cool at first, but once the original excitement is gone, the problems are apparent. The game's made so that to swing, your web has to grab onto a nearby building first. That actually makes sense, but proves to be an obstacle to the gameplay, because when your web grabs onto a building, your direction changes toward that building. So, if you want to swing through to a checkpoint fast, because of a time-based mission, you are likely to take a wrong turn you didn't mean to take or crash on a building and thus waste time trying to swing from scratch again. Ironically this problem might not have even been noticeable at all, if not for the damn camera. Yes, I can safely say that the worst thing in this entire game is the camera. It's controllable by the right analog stick, but not only is it stuck in reverse (and apparently can't change), manual control of it is SLOOOOOW. The automatic control's even worse. It gives the MOST awkward angles at the worst times possible, both during battle in confined spaces and when navigating through the city. The battle with Venom was a witch with a giant 'B', just because of the camera and don't even get me started on how many times I didn't make it to the target within the time limit, because the camera took a sudden 180o and made me lose coordination.

Most of the gameplay is revolved around these two options: battle takes the big piece and swinging takes most of the rest. During story mode there are also few moments of 'interactive intermissions'; like in many games recently, it's the usual 'we show you an in-game sequence, you push the button that shows up in your screen'. These moments are few and inbetween, more than usually being a nuisance rather than an interesting twist.

While the controls are passable, the design is incredibly flawed. It's not just the lacking gameplay, or the bad graphics and sound, it's also the details and the mechanics that fail. Did you know that to crawl on a wall, you have to push the circle button next to it? Which is very impractical when your swinging and you want to drop from your web-line and just stick on a building, since the corresponding mechanism is buggy. Sometimes it won't work and you'll be on a free fall no matter how many times you punch that button. Other times you'll 'zip' upwards, since crawling is slow as hell, but for some reason you'll slip and start falling again. You don't die if you hit ground, of course, but try getting to a far target in a short time when you keep slipping down the same wall over and over and over again.

The fights themselves aren't fun or particularly functional either. You always fight the same bad guys, in the exact same way. It's not just the button mashing or the failing RPG system in place, it's also how very formulaic the whole thing's set up. I can already tell you how to get through the entire game in a couple of lines: locate the baddies, disarm them if they're armed, hit the square button three times, jump behind them, hit it four times again and hit triangle once for the combo. That's it. That sums up the game's battle. Every single enemy, except for the bosses, are beat like that. And the bosses? Boy, they are DULL. Their battles last too long and offer too little. Some exceed five or ten minutes in which you do the same boring things, like throw a punch and then run around and push a button or something and then go back to landing a punch.

Interaction with the city below is also non-existent. Aside from the scripted moments of the missions, the pedestrians are just mindless NPCs walking their path non-stop, the gangs are nowhere to be seen unless you take on a mission involving them, you can't talk to or even scare the civilians. Hell, even when a battle takes place right next to them, or you bust a truck open to get something from inside, they won't even stop to look. It's like you're not there. Your impressive playground is nothing but plastic dolls and big boxes; no other kids to play with. It's one of the game's biggest failures.

Last, but not least, the game's full of bugs. Not only does it have a million graphic glitches, but there are also other small things that affect gameplay. I had to quit the game and restart three patrols, because my arrival to the next mission marker never triggered the new objective.

This is not a long game. The story mode shouldn't take more than a few hours (I finished it in 6 hours in the 'normal' difficulty setting) and while the rest of the game that deals with the random crime stopping and the gang suppressing could last for long, it's just so boring that it's not worth your time.

So, what the hell happened? Activision made a small breakthrough in the genre with 'Spider-Man 2' and by combining successful elements from various other games (like an open-ended world), it marked a new standard for games of this kind, a standard that at least one super-hero game before attempted to reach- Superman Returns. 'Superman Returns' was a game that had the right idea and failed in execution; it failed in big part, because it was an unfinished. 'Spider-Man 3' fails in the same way, but not for the same reason. This is not an unfinished game; it's a rush-job. Somebody wanted a title to follow the blockbuster and somebody made it, by essentially recycling 'Spider-Man 2' and not really paying attention to anything else. There is a possibility that Spidey fans will enjoy it. I can't say I hated it as I've hated other games and maybe if its predecessor hadn't raised the bar so high, I wouldn't be as hard on it, but fact is that this is a step back for the entire genre of super-hero games. It's not innovative, it's not solid and it's most certainly not fun. I can't tell to hardcore fans if they should buy or rent; but from the gamer' s POV, this game doesn't deserve anything more than a half-a-day rent. Sorry.

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 05/21/07