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Spider-Man 3

Score: 6.5 / 10

Among my chief complaints of games based on licensed properties is their “artificial” release dates.  Artificial in this case refers to hitting the release date of the movie, Spider-Man 3.  In most cases it’s simply a lost cause – just because the movie is ready, it doesn’t mean the game is ready.

And that pretty much sums up the problems with Spider-Man 3, a game rife with possibilities but seemingly cut short due to a push to hit the release date – which is amazing because the game has so little to do with the movie.

As Spider-Man – Classic and Black Suit Spidey – you swing through a deftly rendered version of New York battling three different gangs and a discombobulated rabble of Spider-Man’s bigger foes including Kraven, Lizard, Sandman, Kingpin and, of course, Venom, all the while taking part in side “quests” which include schlepping Mary Jane Watson to make appointments (including one to a hospital for unspecified reasons) and sky diving through rings.

If you want, you can spend hours just swinging around the city knocking over trashcans and standing on cars, but for the more adventurous the disparate story

 

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missions are sprinkled throughout the city, denoted by markers which must first be activated.  As in Spider-Man 2, there are still random instances of street crime which can be averted – follow the wailing police cars and you’re likely to find something going on – but mostly it feels somewhat like the city is dead even though it’s packed with cars and 

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pedestrians.  However, it’s still an improvement over Spider-Man 2 (which I'll have to admit now that I probably over rated -- 8.9 / 10 seems too high in hindsight).

On that same theme of improvement, Treyarch has done an excellent job upping the fight mechanics to the point where a good player should be able to take on six or seven thugs simultaneously and escape with only a few scrapes.  It’s fun flipping guys into the air, pummeling them, lassoing them with some web then hanging them on a lamp post for some piñata fun or snapping them around like a big flyswatter, while dodging throwing stars thanks to your Spider-Sense.  Predictably, as you proceed through the various missions more moves become available and when the black suit is acquired even more powerful combos can be unleashed.  Of course, this fun is based on the premise that you’re fighting normal thugs because the boss fights are incredibly difficult, requiring patience, exact timing, and thumbs with more stamina than the average gamer.  Even worse is that the boss encounters are often broken up by quick time events where you match the on-screen cues to button presses or flicks of the sticks.  It’s been done before in Dragon’s Lair, Marvel Ultimate Alliance, Shenmue, and God of War (among others) and it’s a neat cinematic touch, but if you goof up (and with one exception) you’ll need to weaken the boss before the quick time event can be attempted again.  There’s no difficulty setting either so it’s not like you can tone it down if you get stuck.  If there’s anything good to say about it, it’s that it is satisfying to finally defeat a boss – especially if it’s in a tight environment indoors when the camera tends to go spastic.

As much as I disliked the boss encounters, I disliked the voice acting even more.  Aside from Bruce Campbell, returning as the smarmy and sarcastic narrator, and possibly JK Simmons, the performances turned in by the principle cast of the film is awful.  That’s the only word to describe it.  The no-name journeymen voice actors do a commendable job though.

Keeping in step with this awfulness is the facial models – they’re as wooden as the voice acting.  The rest of the game looks pretty good, even if it doesn’t look quite as good as it might have thanks to Spider-Man 3’s multiplatform release, and the animation is great, but those faces…

For the next (inevitable) Spider-Man game, I’d suggest Activision tap the talents of some of the writers of the comic book to pen a story – or hell, even adapt one of Spidey’s more classic comic stories – and use that as a basis for a game.  In the comics, New York and surrounding areas is the home of some of the most recognizable superheroes including Dr. Strange, The Avengers, The Fantastic Four, and the X-Men so why not do something with that rich source?  Ultimate Spider-Man acknowledged this, why can’t it be done with a “realistic” world and a richer environment?  The main components of the Spider-Man 3 – the fighting, the webslinging in a wide-open environment, lots of villains – are spot on but most everything else just feels somewhat incomplete or at least unpolished, particularly the story.

- Omni

(May 24, 2007)

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