Spider-man 3 Gamer Review
Activision's Spider-man 3 swings itself right into the rental bin.
A game should be released when it's ready, not when its movie opens.
Overall Score: 75 out of 100
Activision’s recent release, Spider-Man 3, is a good example of why releasing a game to coincide with its theatrical opening isn’t always a good move. Spider-man 3 delivers the fast-paced swinging, fighting, and jumping we’ve come to expect, but a few seemingly cut corners keep it from being truly amazing.
At first glance, Spider-man 3 is pretty impressive, with detailed buildings, streets, and a constant flow of traffic and people that helps make the city come to life. This initial impression, however, fades quickly once Spidey starts moving through the city. If this game were an accurate representation of New Yorkers, then New Yorkers would be the most jaded and brave people on Earth. The normal citizens throughout the game rarely react to anything unless it is specifically affecting them. During a boss fight with the Scorpion, he sends shockwaves through the ground that literally bounce cars up into the air at our hero. This is all fine and good as far as a boss fight goes, but the people in the environment don’t even react. They continue to walk down the street as if two super-powered human arachnids aren’t using two ton trucks as projectile weapons, not fifty feet from them. This kind of non-reactive NPC behavior wasn’t even acceptable during the reign of the Playstation 2, let alone its technological successor.
The story of the game is loosely linked to the movie plotline, but it does differ dramatically from the story in the theaters. Thrown into the mix are some missions that are not related to the movie in any way. Many of these missions are against a few of the numerous supervillians in Spider-man’s army of enemies. The story elements don’t mix very well, especially the parts were movie elements were altered to fit in better with the added scenes. It does not work very well.
The game feature that was the most advertised was the ability to play as the black-suited Spider-man that would play differently from the normal version. It sounds good on paper, but in the actual game translation it fails miserably. The differences between black-suited and red-blue Spider-man are mostly cosmetic, a few slightly different combos, and a different way to charge special attacks. That’s about it.
One has to wonder if the push to release the game along with the movie might have caused the developers to cut a few corners to get it ready for production in time. Swinging through the city is as fun as it ever was, and it is one of the few parts of the game that never really gets boring. The other important feature in any comic-based action game is the combat, and Spider-man 3 was a little less than spectacular in its delivery. The combat system seems decent at first, but the lack of enemy lock-on hurts it. The combo system is delivered through basic button pressing in specific sequences, but the combos themselves, while certainly cool to watch, make keeping track of enemies and Spider-man very difficult. Some of Spidey’s combos send him to the other side of the screen in a split second, and it can be difficult to complete multiple combos while haphazardly flying around the room.
In the end, Spider-man 3 is a fun game for a week or so, but after that it quickly wears thin. There is really very little replay value, and some of the features bragged about by the developers look unpolished, almost as if they stopped before they intended to. Coupled with a frustrating combat system, uninteresting environments, and camera problems, Spider-man 3 gets bitten by the radioactive-average bug and gets transformed into a rental.
