Great and horrible... what the heck were Activison doing?
User Rating: 6.9 | Spider-Man 2 PS2
Okay. Really. A free roaming spider-man game is bound to be alot of fun, even if it has crappy sound and repetitive missions it must be FUN right? Yeah! Don't get me wrong, swinging from buliding to building and beating bad guys as Spider-Man is probably the most fun i've had in a game since doing it in Spider-Man 1! The game is set in a big New York where you can roam utterly freely with few strings attached (pun intended). Activision really did lookl at the big picture when they produced this game... but sadly they forgot about the little picture. Spider-Man 2's selling point is the free roaming of course. And believe me it works out great. The web swinging is different this time as you are more in control of spidey's web swinging. In the previous games you would just push R2 and you'd swing, it didnt make much sense seeing spidey attach his web to thin air. But now you need to aim towards a bulding or something else solid to be able to swing. You must also cut your web and continue on the next one, as this is not done "automatically" like in the previous spidey games. The game follows the story of the movie, but it's rather loose and many parts are altered for the worse. Luckily the presence of other villans like Mysterio and Shocker sort of balance it out. The appearance of Black Cat makes the game a whole lot better story-wise. The game is split into "chapters", in each chapter you get a "to do" list. Such a list consists of certain tasks or goals you need to achieve to get to the next chapter. The game has a total of 15 chapter's before it's beat. Which is about 7-8 hours of gameplay. When not following the story and doing it's related missions, you can complete various missions you get by the citizens of New York. These missions vary from small things like retrieving a lost balloon or stopping a bank heist. Even though the citizens can be pretty shabby looking and have pretty horrible voice acting, they really contribute to giving New York alot of life as they point and wave while you swing by. Sadly there arent many of these missions and the variation between them can be pretty small. And after a while they can get pretty boring. By completing missions you get hero points, if you get enough you can buy combat or web swing upgrades which may and will come in handy later on. The game's sound is actually not bad. The music is very spider-man-esque and different tracks are played to set different moods depending on the current situation. The voice acting is very varied. The voices of spidey, octavious and mary-jane sound just like in the movie. Listening to spidey monologing after a mission as you swing to your next destination is a great part of the game and helps make spidey more life and more of a person. Voices of the citizens of New York are what vary. Some of it sounds absolutely horrible and you cant help but wonder if they had a "bring your kid to work day" and let a 5 year old direct the voice acting. A citizen who is in great pain and needs to get to the hospital "screams" in a monotonous voice. It's just laughable. Many parts of the game are something that should have been worked on. It is probably one of the most varied games i've ever played quality wise. It's like two different teams worked on it. A good team and an utterly bad team. I guess you can say that the higher up in the city you get the better it looks. The games graphics look good on spidey and other important characters. When you swing fast you get a kind of tunnel vision as seen on games such as NFSU. Spidey can swing and fall pretty fast without any laggy framerate at all. Pedestrians and citizens look pretty bad though and could compare to such as a good N64 game. Luckly they are varied in looks. The game is utmost enjoyable but there are some notable glitches that arent easy to ignore. Some of the boss fights are also very difficult and i've never been so frustrated since Stuntman. If you wanna do whatever a spidey can. Get the game, it's ALOT of fun, throwing ragdolled thugs off buliding just might be my new hobby. If you want a technically good game, you might want to reconsider unless you're a fan.
