Spider-Man 3

"What the **** happened to Spidey?"

I love Spider-Man to death. I don't seem to recall ever looking forward to something more than this. Really, Wii remote and nunchuk + Spidey swinging = good, right? It should have, anyways. I'll admit maybe I had my expectations set a bit high for this game, but it has problems.

Graphics - 6/10
The draw distance is terrible, stand on the roof of a building and you can see maybe 4 buildings away with detail, then lines of boxes sticking out of the ground. Spidey looks great. Everyone else, however, does not. This lends to a rather frustrating quirk. Spider-Man doesn't feel like he's part of New York. He seems separate from everything, even the buildings he's crawling

Story - 8/10
Simplistic, yes, but still effective. Colorful bad people doing bad things, and it's up to Spidey to make things right. It takes some serious effort to **** up Spider-Man plotwise. I'll admit it feels far too contracted into too short a time, but otherwise it's just what's expected out of a Spidey game.

Gameplay - 3/10
This is where the game really gets hit hard. So many things are missing from SM2 it's not even funny. Combat is simplistic and quickly becomes tedious, with little to no combo variations. Aerial combat is gone. Webbing up multiple bad guys is gone. Hanging from street lamps, carrying and throwing, helicopters, even riding on top of cars on the streets of New York is done with. My personal favorite:two webs at once while swinging has completely disappeared. Swinging with the remote and nunchuk is fun....for a while. Then you realize that you can't do anything unique or entertaining anymore. Acrobatics, building jumps, even the act of swinging itself has become too awkward. I blame the developers. This game had ****ing potential.

Replayability - 4/10
Okay, so it's free-roaming and open-ended...so open-ended, in fact, that there's really nothing interesting to do once you finish the story. Beat up gangs, hunt down elusive tokens, and swing. Not much of terrible interest.

Overall - 7/10
That's with a fairly hefty bias from my love of Spider-Man as well. My advice: Rent it if you want, buy it if you love Spidey as much as I do, but buy Spider-Man 2 if you want to play a good Spider-Man game.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 05/09/07