As with Spider-Man 2, the web swinging is right on the
money making it one of the strongest aspects of the game.
It’s easy to get the hang of it, especially if you played
a lot of Spider-Man 2, and it’s the most “fun” when it’s
combined with the free exploration of New York City. It
also helps that the city looks incredible!
The portions of the game featuring Times Square after dark
provide us with the most beautiful graphics in the entire
series. These wonderfully magic visuals certainly convey
the look, feel and spirit of “the city”, but with all of
the beauty the NYC graphics have to offer, there are a ton
of technical flaws found elsewhere.
First of all, Spider-Man looks incredibly detailed in
every way while other character models look blocky,
blotchy, and downright horrible. The graphics also suffer
from the “fade in, fade out” syndrome making the textures
inconsistent. Furthermore, attackers often get marooned by
invisible objects, or lost in scenery.
But perhaps the most annoying aspect of this game is the
herky-jerky camera work and inexplicable views that occur
during what are supposed to be the most engaging portions:
fighting and action. The angles given are perplexing at
best, leaving the battles a lost cause. The biggest battle
is trying to get a consistent vantage point.
Along the way, you’ll fight your fair share of thugs, gang
members, and bosses like Sandman, Venom, and the Goblin,
but there are also some villains that aren’t in the movie
such as the Lizard, Scorpion, and Kingpin. This adds to
the overall challenge and length of the game (hey, the
more bosses the merrier right), but it also detracts from
the story line that attempts to follow the movie. The
resulting plot is an inconsistent jumble.
In between the boss encounters and multiple missions,
you’ll discover miniature crime-stopping tasks to take on.
These are one of the cooler intricacies, but they really
have no bearing on your completion of the game. The
missions, consisting of standard crime-fighting capers and
rescue missions, vary in difficultly but for the most part
are relatively simple. Activision also includes some
mini-games to spice it up, but these are nothing more than
analog movements and varying sequences of button pushing…
Cute, but nothing special.
Overall, Spider-Man 3 is nothing
special. It’s a lot of
hack and slash fighting, button mashing, and web slinging
(which is one of the few things that is well done), but
the storyline is too jumpy to feel any type of
consistency/momentum. The younger Spider-Man fans will
find this game fun and challenging, while more
sophisticated gamers will be annoyed and irritated by all
of the flaws.
C -- This super hero movie-based video game misses for most
of us…
-Clint has been a
writer for Shakefire.com since 2007.
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