Spider-Man 3

"Spider-Man, Spider-Man, Cash-Cow-Milking Spider-Man"

Spider-Man games always seem to carry a negative stigma with them wherever they go. It wasn't always like this; the GBA's Mysterio's Menace and the PSOne's Spider-Man are top-of-the-line 2D and 3D platformers respectively. Once the feature films started going in 2002 though, game developers promptly brushed up on their milking skills and for the next 5 years up until present day 2007, we've seen an abundance of mediocre cash-ins abusing the star-power of our friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man. Well Spider-Man 3 the movie has just been released and considering how much I enjoyed the first 2 installments, me saying that Sam Raimi's latest effort is just a super-rushed, irregularly paced, barely adequate finish, with possibly too much fan service for a spider to handle.. well that just says a lot about how deep traditional values have sunk to the might of marketing.

The DS console has already got 3 Spider-Man focused games in its massive 1000+ library, and they range from near-abysmal to just passable. Instead of the usual button-mash-fest that everyone should be sick and tired of by now, Vicarious Visions decided to finally do something different for a change, integrating stylus-based attack and webbing controls into the usual 2.5D platform niche. I'll tell you right now that the gameplay isn't any better because of this, so can you guess where Spider-Man 3 lies with respect to the past 3 efforts on the DS? Ooh, you're in for a big surprise!

Visuals - 7
Sound & Music - 7
Gameplay - 3
Controls - C-
Longevity - C (2-3 hours for the main missions)
Replayability - C (Some fun with the MP minigames, but you won't want to save NY again)
Difficulty - Medium (An easy game overall, but cheap restarts can annoy)

Dosage of Castleroids - 2
VERDICT - 3.5/10

A bigger mess than the movie
Spider-Man 3 follows the events that occur in the movie extremely loosely. You've got your 3 big baddies: Goblin, Sandman and Venom, all making an appearance of course, but you only encounter each of them once throughout the game's entire 22 levels! To fill in the rest of the game space (as if 3 baddies wasn't enough for it..) we also have the Lizard playing a major role; in fact the Lizard could be considered to be the main Spidey villain in this "official game of the movie" given the amount of screen time he has - more than the movie's antagonists combined!

This doesn't bode well already..

The storyline presentation ditches the impressive comic book panels seen previously, opting to go for some washed out storyboards instead. After just having watched the film, I honestly don't really know what the heck is going on here. There's some gang warfare going on and the Lizard seems to be going berserk (something that should have been in the movie!), and then Goblin, Sandman and Venom randomly pop up without any build-up to these encounters. It's all very dicey, and more disjointed than the already muddled film.

Free-roam? Not quite. But what a tease!
Now that we have established that this game FAILS in trying to stay true to the source material, let's look at how much fun it is to play. A free-roam element has now been added to the 2.5D formula that seems to stick to Spider-Man DS games as well as Tobey Maguire does to his Peter Parker's nerdiness. If you are expecting sandbox-style gaming like the console Spider-Man 2 tie-ins, you read me wrong; it's more like the exploration-style associated with 2D Metroid and Castlevania games, only without much exploration actually required. New York City is divided into several districts and you can move between them via warp points scattered about the place, or you can simply bring up a menu and teleport to any destination instantly. Since there isn't any incentive to travel manually apart from locating some far-out, semi-useless collectibles, why wouldn't you just skip all the 'exploration' phases? You just wouldn't.

So there's the free-roam feature thrown out the window already. So what else is new? Well you can now use the touch-screen to direct you fists and webbing. Moving Spidey around with the d-pad (or alpha-buttons for lefties) is easy enough, but it will take a while to get used to the automatic swinging that occurs when you move left/right while airborne. I'll let that go for the time being, even though I abhor how difficult it is to web-zip now. But what I can't forgive is the horror that is the touching. It sounds like a good idea.. for all of 5 seconds, but it looks like the developers wrote this into the game before that short period was up. Attacking enemies by slashing at the screen isn't as far from button-mashing as you'd think; different action, same feeling. Complex techniques such as the web rodeo require some half and full-circle motions, and for the first couple of times are good fun to play around with, but you'll soon see that with the amount the amount of thugs that you're forced to beat up, it isn't all that practical. As soon as you gain the ability to change into the black suit (of which you have no direct turn on/shut off control over), everything is over faster if you just keep swiping diagonally downwards. You need more coordination than with a button-masher, but this stylus-slasher doesn't give you any more meaning.

Can you save that lady while I finish my donut?
Apart from moving the short story along, you can engage in a few other activities to kill time. Each district has its own race where you'll have to collect a set number of tokens within a time limit. These could have been good, but with the unresponsive swinging controls, they're made harder than they should be. The fact that there is a time limit between each consecutive token rather than one overall means that repetition equals plenty of frustration. Crime-watching is one of your superhero obligations to the city and what this entails is you helping out your fellow citizens in need of help. You do this by beating up the bullies and bringing the odd helpless (dancing?!) civilian to safer places. If you don't help out, your threat meter will fill up, and once it maxes the game is over. When not in a story mission it fills up too slow to be of any concern, which means you don't really have to save the city. Yeah you can be a bad Spider-Man and no-one will really care.

Boss battles are usually the highlight of 2D platformers, but Spider-Man has always been cursed with pathetic fights on the DS. Things still haven't changed in this department. You have to do some web-slinging with a few of them, but lots of downwards slashing will take care of most of them. Their patterns are very easy to figure out, and the real challenge comes from getting Spidey to do what you want given the messy control interface. The final battle is the same as the one in the movie, but it's probably the most unexciting out of all of them; in other words it really does suck. Just like Battle for New York which came before, there are still some glitches loose here, in particular with the very first battle with the Goblin who just gets stuck in the corner. Tsk tsk - they really need to hire better DS game testers..

There is only the one difficulty level available when you start your adventure, but it isn't really too hard to handle, as long as you've spent a good hour or so getting 75% used to the controls (you'll never get anywhere near 100). Another problem carried over from the other DS Spideys is the cheap restart. A typical mission will take about 5-10 minutes to complete and quite a often a bunch of enemies will deal mega damage to you, or you'll just run out of time right before the endpoint. You'll have to then restart the mission from the beginning doing those first easy 3-5 minutes all over again, and it gets boring by the nth time you've had to swing across empty spaces and beat down 10 crooks just to get to that do-or-die moment again. Even still, this game is shorter than the movie itself for experienced gamers.

Behind the scenes it looks great!
The 2.5D graphics have been upped significantly compared to previous DS Spider-Men. Swinging about all over the place gives an exhilarating sensation (despite the dodgy controls) as your soar over various New York locales including the Brooklyn Bridge with its typical traffic congestion. The framerate has been toned down to keep the staggering amount (for a DS) of polygons moving at a consistent speed. The backgrounds are definitely are great sight, but apart from a bunch of uniform cars there isn't much else going on apart from the impressive looking architecture. Where the action is at, it may even look a bit worse in this latest Spidey game. Character models aren't very impressive and the animations can look quite jerky, especially given the erratic control scheme which can see you comboing the enemy into the air and then instead of following them up, Spidey decides to moonwalk back a few steps and throw out some random haphazard punches.

The music provided here is actually pretty rockin' good, but there are times when all you have is some awkward silence. Nevertheless the use of headphones is highly recommended to get the full audio experience here. There are quite a few voice samples as well, but several of Tobey's quips are repeated way too often.

Strike 4 - Just get out of here already!
Vicarious Visions still hasn't got Spider-Man down on the DS. It might have been a better idea to emulate the solid PS1 games (well maybe not so much the 2nd one) or just stick to the tried and true GBA platforming style, rather than go down the same route, unsuccessfully yet again. Attempting to make use of the innovative touch-screen in a place where it clearly does not belong makes this Spidey adventure the worst out of the bunch. You can't force something to work if it doesn't fit, but they did here and they broke it as a result.

3.5/10 - Spider-Man becomes Stylus-Man.. you see it just doesn't work!

My Score System – a score of 7 from me denotes a good, solid game. Excellence earns a higher grade, whilst 4-6 reflects a below average product; glitchy, unplayable games deserve less.

06/05/07

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 05/09/07