I’ve never been a big fan of Activision’s Spiderman franchise. I always thought they were beautiful looking games but found the open world nature of them to be quite boring and hard to get into. I didn’t have that problem with Spiderman Web of Shadows. The game grabs you from the beginning and manages to keep you interested. The missions are all well defined, clear and I never once thought, “Ok, what am I supposed to be doing.” The trailers for the game are a little misleading, you are lead to believe that the game is about Spiderman trying to save a post Apocalyptic New York city and while this is true, these elements don’t come into the game until the 3rd act. The game starts with you battling an outbreak of humans that have been infected with the Venom virus. You are then transported back to 4 days prior where the story unveils how you got to that point. Mary Jane somehow gets injured as you follow her to the hospital you get sidetracked into stopping a gang war from breaking out in New York City. With the help of Luke Cage you learn new skills as you help him solve the gang problem. Spiderman isn’t a particularly hard game, which was refreshing. I get tired of playing games that are overly long and complicated. I love Spiderman’s pick up and ease of play. But after playing the game for about 10 hours, I really got tired of beating up on useless gang members. One of the early side quests include taking out 200 gang members. At first this was a lot of fun because Spiderman has got the moves. Zipping around on your webs, using your Spidey sense to spot gang members through buildings and then coming in fast and hard to lay the smack down is exhilarating.
You can do Air Juggles and string together attacks by firing your web line at a bad guy, attack from the air and then bounce off him right onto the next one. It’s awesome. It really felt natural and fun. But by the 130th lame gang member, I was asking “Why am I doing this? When do I get some super powered bad guys?” By that time I was committed to getting the 200, but I was no longer having a blast.
You can play as either the classic or black suited Spiderman. The game has an alternate path you can take as either with a different ending. I played the game as the goody two shoes Spiderman. You can change at any time by clicking the left stick, which annoyed me to no end. In the heat of battle or just moving Spiderman around I kept accidentally hitting the button, so instead of Red Spidey getting the experience points Black one did; which brings me to the sometimes janky controls and design decisions in the game, most of the time the controls work really well, at the end of the day it’s a simple button mashing fighting game.
There are some real, almost game breaking annoyances, namely the fact that when web swinging you don’t automatically stick to buildings. So when I was just happily swinging along picking up my web icons to increase my experience points I kept finding myself swinging from building to building and falling down until I pressed the RB bumper to actually stick. During a Black Cat chase sequence I kept failing to catch her because I couldn’t swing from building to building in a relatively easy fashion. This is Spiderman! Why can’t I automatically stick to buildings when I swing to them? And half the time when you swing to a building you don’t land on the top it’s a half of foot away causing you to fall to the ground. The camera also goes completely wonky when you are wall crawling switching perspectives and it’s hard to tell which direction you are on in the wall.
I love how the Achievements are implemented on the 360 version of the game. You get for actually doing normal things like, um, completing missions and story acts. You don’t have to go off and do weird stuff to get them. I’m not an Achievement whore because most games have made them too difficult or non-intuitive to get.
Graphically the game is beautiful, the city really does look like New York, you can see the Brooklyn Bridge in the background, there doesn’t seem to be any invisible walls, so the city feels completely open and with bystanders who get hurt during battles, after a few hours it starts to look a bit repetitive. The Voice acting is amazingly bad.
Despite my annoyances with the game, Spiderman is addictive fun that will keep you busy for a good weekend, its lack of online play, and moderate difficulty limits the replay value. This is a good rental, wouldn’t buy it.
Final Grade B-
EM Review by
Michelle Alexandria
Originally Posted 11.08.08