Spider-Man 2 was a great game. It looked good, it played well, and swinging around the city was a blast. The absolute minimum that Activision needed to do here was take the existing Spider-Man 2 game and add some assets to it. Maybe they lost the original game's code because Spider-Man 3 somehow looks, sounds, and plays worse than its predecessor. It also looks, plays, and sounds worse than the 360, PS3, and Wii versions of the game, but that's to be expected from the previous generation's hardware. Development effort was very obviously concentrated on the 360/PS3 versions of the game, and the poor, decrepit PS2 was left out to dry.

Missions are boring and repetitive, and they often drag for far too long. Tracking lizard-men was entertaining for the first few minutes, but by the end of the mission I was rooting for them. If you're not beating up generic lizard-men, then you're beating up generic gang-bangers. This wouldn't be so bad if the combat was challenging in any way, shape, or form, but you'll find yourself bypassing as much combat as possible to get to the boss fights. Not that the boss fights are terribly difficult either, but at least they offer a change of pace. Add Spidey's black suit to the mix and combat is an absolute cinch.

With little in-game opposition, one of your biggest foes is the camera. How is it that we've been making three-dimensional games for three console generations and we still can't consistently deliver a half-decent camera? Honestly, what is so hard about "stay over the character's right shoulder"? If you need to clip through a building to show me where I am then that's fine. It's certainly preferable to the camera swinging wildly while I flail about like an idiot because the controls respond in relation to the camera's orientation instead of the avatar's.

Spider-Man 2 looked great on the PS2. Spider-Man 3 looks terrible. Buildings pop up out of nowhere, what few citizens there are around the city lack detail, and occasionally the citizens lack key features of the human species - like a face. You know what's creepy? Seeing a faceless lady walking around a polygonal New York and realizing that somebody meant for this to be fun. Sound isn't any better. Voices seem to be arbitrarily assigned to people. This wouldn't be too bad if there were any attention paid to the match made, but it's no uncommon to run into a petite woman that sounds like a hulking body-builder or a tall man that sounds like a tiny Asian woman.

If all you've got is a PS2 and you really need some Spider-Man action, all I can recommend is another replay of Spider-Man 2 or Ultimate Spider-Man, and it's a shame because Spider-Man 3's failure stings that much more when it can be compared to the franchise's prior installment on the same console.

May 30, 2007 | 0 comments
Justin Last