Ultimate Spider-Man

"Ultimate Frustration more like it. >.<"

Intro
Okay, here's the deal. I love Spidey. I do not hate him in any way, but this game has frustrated the living crap outta me on so many levels that I nearly threw my controller at the TV screen. There are several plus points to the game, so here we go.

Story 7/10
Since the storyline was written by Brian Michael Bendis, it's what you would expect out of a Spider-Man comic book. A consipiracy here, a face off there, there isn't any much more depth in character or plot than you would find in the comics, but hey, I didn't get this game for the story. Very much. The nice thing is, the bantering and punchlines that Spidey throws now and then while fighting is very very nice, and very very welcome. Definitely beats Tobey Maguire's Spidey personality.

The story alternates between Spidey and Venom, where Spidey has free roam of the entire city, busting perps while occasionally fighting the odd super villain boss. Venom doesn't have free range of the city at first (you play him in missions chasing or fighting villains or Trask's goons), but at the end of the game he gets free roam, minus the busting perps. Which is kinda a letdown.

Graphics/Sound 8/10
The graphics for this game is absolutely stunning. Imagine a city, as detailed as San Andreas (well, about 1/3 smaller in land area, but 3 times taller ^^), with all the little alleyways, hotdog stands, towering skyscrapers, underground tunnels, and screaming bystanders. Everything meshes together very nicely, and the colouring is as if it was lifted from the comic book itself. Very nice, very pretty. Sound... meh. It's not the *boom boom kablam boom* of Doom or HL2, but it suits this game.

Gameplay 3/10
Okay, this is the really crappy part of the game. The gameplay is so crappy, sooooo frustrating, that it boggles the mind that the producers actually thought this would be a good idea to please the Spider Fans. The redeeming part is that they retained the whole 'swinging around NY' part of SM2, which is what most superhero fans really want to do, swinging around the locations, busting heads, collecting tokens, it's okay I guess.

But other than that, it sucks. It sucks so hard, that it's painful. Most of the game is broken down into either chase scenes or fight scenes. Now, the chase scenes involve you pursuing the villain of the hour across the state of Manhattan, often through the forest of buildings. The object of the chase is basically not to lose your target, whose distance from you is represented by a meter above your screen. Now, when you're racing at like 60m an hour, and the villain suddenly decides to just climb up a building really really fast, you find yourself suddenly losing the race because you couldn't react with such lightening-quick capacity and scale a 100 foot building in less than a second.

Even worse, is the race against Johnny Storm aka Human Torch. He is sorta a guest star and will challenge you in races to unlock your swing speed upgrades. The thing is... he freaking flies And you have your little webshooters. When you race with him, you have to touch checkpoints obscenely placed in mid-air that he can reach without trouble, but you have to jump, leap, and perform some very thumb-twisting maneuvers to reach. And with the camera angles, it is still very very hard to determine where the hell your target is when you're somersaulting in mid-air.

The race is not the only terrible part of the game. You also get to do 'Combat Tours' where you run around areas in the city busting gangs. The problem is, when you get to the Medium difficulty, it all becomes quite ridiculous. You're outnumbered 6-7 to 1, the gangsters have semi-autos and grenade launchers. You have no one-shot knockout blows, no multiple-target attacks, and... the gangsters can block your punches. About 80-90% of the time. I mean, you are a man who has been genetically altered to have the strength, agility, and resistance proportionate to a spider, and these piddling little gangsters KEEP BLOCKING YOUR SHOTS!!! JUST HIT HARDER GODDAMNIT, YOU'RE A GODDAMN SPIDER-MAN.

It makes me wonder what in god's name Treyarch was thinking when they decided to make Spider-Man such a nerf. It's such an insult to the fans. And I mean that >.<

Venom however, doesn't have that kind of handicap. He's big, strong, he can chuck cars with ease, and he can feed on people to regain health. Now why can't Spidey chuck cars?!

Playtime/Replayability6/10
Well, the game plays out pretty much like GTA. There's no stopping you from playing as much as you want, but swinging around busting heads and collecting tokens gets boring pretty fast, especially since that's what we did in SM2 and there's no catchy music or talk shows like in GTA: SA ^^. Maybe they should include an Ipod for Spidey in the next game ^^. The story mode is disappointingly short, but then again, they ruined so much of the game its hardly the worst that they did.

Final Recommendation
Buy this if you're a Spidey fan FIRST, not a gaming fan. Enjoy the game for the novelty of playing as Spider-Man, not for a deep, addictive gaming experience. Don't get your hopes up too high, and maybe, just maybe, you might enjoy the game. They took out some of the parts that were right in SM2, and put in a lot of new things that just made it worse. I hope Treyarch will improve the next game to such a beloved character. Maybe we can have Spider-Man, Venom, and Daredevil as playable characters then!

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 09/28/05