Spider-Man 2

"Spidey Senseless"

Spiderman is one of the all time great super heroes. What could possibly be cooler than swinging through the city on shoots of web spun by the palm of you hand? After playing Spiderman 2 for the Nintendo DS, apparently there are plenty of cooler things.

Spider Man 2 puts players in control of the legendary Spider Man himself, complete with webs, sticky fingers, and all. Spiderman can swing through a 3-D environment in a 2D side-scrolling fashion. It's pleasing to see a 2-D platform game for the DS, but for a Spider Man game, 2D feels extremely confined; restricting Spiderman from freely swing through the levels without hitting the side of a building every few feet. Spiderman has three goals to accomplish across the many levels: 1. Rescue all hostages, 2. Defeat all enemies, and 3. Rescue all hostages and Defeat all enemies. All of these basically entail beating up thugs. To increase the difficulty often a time limit and/or stronger enemies are thrown in. Despite being a 2D side-scrolling game, some enemies are hidden so well that they are near impossible find. Most of the enemies are out in the open where they are easy to spot and defeat, but some find very inconspicuous little nooks and crannies at the base of a building to hide. This requires a lot of tiresome back tracking to find everyone, and in levels with a time limit, this can determine victory or defeat. Defeat happens all too often in Spiderman 2, as Spiderman has absolutely no continues, only one life meter that depletes quickly with a few hits. Health is very sparse throughout each level and most of it is dropped from defeated enemies, but since many enemies are flung off of buildings, the health is irretrievable. Once Spider Man dies the entire level starts over, and that can be devastating in the longer levels. Most of the levels have minimal objects in them, and of them only about half of them can be interacted with. Some times Spiderman 'talks' by displaying text on the lower screen, but when in the middle of a fight, it is hard to read what he is saying, and sometimes the text is important. Spiderman can enter into slow motion for a brief moment when next to enemies, but all this feature does is slow everything down. There is no advantage to using this because Spiderman is just as slow as the enemy. Spiderman can also climb on almost anything by simply jumping onto it. Which, sadly, is a good idea gone completely wrong. He grabs onto objects far too easily. By simply pressing down spider man will grasp the floor and start crawling, or if you jump too high he'll stick to the ceiling. Occasionally Spiderman will come across a boss battle, which follows the pattern of: fight, tap stuff on the screen, and then fight again. The inclusion of touch screen based challenges in the middle of the boss battle is awkward and frustrating. In fact, all of the touch-based challenges are annoying and poorly implemented. One of the challenges sees Spiderman attempting to diffuse a bomb by guiding steel balls through a maze via stylus input. It's entertaining once, but the game recycles the exact same game multiple times.

When Spider Man 2 first boots up, players are greeted to a beautiful pre rendered movie clip. A few more of these clips are scattered throughout the game, but the rest of the cut-scenes are simply still images and text. The 3-D models used for the still images look awful. They make all of the characters look old and as though they were recently beat up. The in game graphics are not spectacular either, with polygonal models and bland texturing. Much of the background looks like cheesy chard board cutouts, which would be great if that were the style the game was shooting for.

Most of the dialogue in Spiderman 2 is text based, but occasionally civilians will call out “help Spiderman!” and “thanks Spiderman”. Perhaps the most entertaining part of Spider Man 2 is listening to the canned scream of a thug as he falls from the top of a tall building. The rest of the sound effects are fairly standard, and nothing to get too excited about. Most of the music is annoying and is magnified by repeating levels so much, but other levels have very fitting music, nothing memorable though.

Closing Comments
After the third level there really is no reason to play Spiderman 2 anymore. You have quite literally seen it all as far as level design, challenges, and fun factor. Everything is recycled many times over, and there is almost no variation in the tasks required in each level. With only a total of 14 levels, there isn't much to play through in the first place. Admittedly it was fun to swing through a few levels and beat up enemies, but the fun lasts about ten minutes before the repetitive nature of the game settles in.

Points
+ Swing through the city!
-- And smack into buildings…
-- No continues
-- Easy to die
-- Heavy recycler
-- Touch-based challenges

Score: 3/10

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 01/21/05, Updated 04/02/07