Thwip! Spider-Man 3 on ps2 is definitely a swing and a miss.
Pros:
- Huge city to swing around in
- Bruce Campbell
- The black suit
Cons:
- Lame combat
- Dull, repetitive missions
- Camera is consistently a pain
- Voice actors sound bored
- Pitiful graphics
I consider myself a hardcore Spider-Man fan. I've collected comics, watched every one of the movies, and played just about every Spider-Man game since the 2000 PS1 title. So no one was more excited than me when Spider-Man 3 came out. After all, Spider-Man 2 gave us both the best superhero film and the best superhero game of all-time, so what could be better than a sequel? Many things, as it turns out. The PS2/Wii version of Spider-Man 3 is a disaster, a product of a developer trying to milk every ounce of money it can by bringing it to last-gen systems. The result is a half-hearted effort that fails to uphold the standard of solid games based on our favorite wall-crawler.
The story of Spider-Man 3 isn't really much to talk about. While it does include elements from the film's plot, it doesn't really use them especially well (and even the movie had issues with its plot). Yes, the black suit is still the focus, but key villains Venom and Sandman don't show up until late in the game. For most of it, you're taking on villains like Kraven, the Lizard and, exclusive to the last-gen version, Morbius the Vampire. There's no real cohesion to any of the stories, though, to be fair, the shorter length does give it a bit more focus than the x360/ps3 versions, which had to juggle an even greater number of villains over the course of the game. Furthermore, the game does a decent job of tying the symbiote to the stories, which at least gives them a more unifying theme. Still, I didn't care much for the characters, and it never really amounts to much in the grand scheme of things.
Unlike in Spider-Man 2, which forced players to complete side missions in order to unlock the next story sequence, Spider-Man 3 allows players to complete the next story mission whenever they so choose. Moreover, whereas the side missions in the previous game were essentially just a bunch of random crimes that popped up, Spider-Man 3's side missions actually have a bit more structure. You see, there are now events called crime patrols where Spidey takes on one of the gangs that are running loose in New York. By foiling one of the gangs, the police slowly take back the city. It's actually a fairly well done system that serves its job as an objective beyond the main story.
It's unfortunate, then, that the missions aren't enjoyable enough to hold players' interest for long. It's not that the missions are badly designed but that they're too mind-numbingly formulaic to generate much excitement. They typically involve going to point A, beat up bad guys, then talk to a thug who'll direct you to point B where you must either defuse a bomb or recover a stolen item before talking to a shady informant (who Spider-Man somehow knows is an informant despite having apparently never met him before) who'll direct you to point C where you must beat up slightly stronger bad guys. Open world games usually overcome this repetition through the strengths of their core mechanics, like the combat. Sadly, the combat only serves to make the already bland missions even more bland.
Like the missions themselves, the combat suffers not from being terrible so much as devoid of any nuance or excitement. This is mostly due to the paltry number of moves and pathetic enemies that make just about every encounter a snore. To be fair, Spidey is able to buy upgrades using experience points earned by completing missions, but most of these are just upgrades to already existing combos, with little in the way of new ones. And even the few cool moves you can buy aren't essential for combat, since just about every enemy in the game is a pushover who can be beaten using the same combination of punches and kicks, which gets dull pretty fast. The only real challenge to combat comes from the camera, which will bounce around with just around every move you make, causing you to constantly fight to keep enemies in sight. It's especially bad in the indoor segments, where it will frequently bump against walls and zoom in real close to Spidey. Boss battles sadly don't do much to break up the monotony. Simply memorize their rather basic attack patterns and each one becomes a breeze.
If there's one thing that's interesting about the combat, it's Spidey's relationship with his new black costume. Unlike the next-gen version, in which the suit didn't show up until halfway through and was frankly nothing more than a costume change with one added move, this one actually feels like a unique new mechanic. When you put it on, your attacks become stronger and you can change longer and more brutal combos. The catch is that keeping it on too long will eventually cause it to eat Spidey alive, as evidenced by a black border slowly forming around the edge of the screen. To prevent this, players will enter a button pressing minigame to wrench it off, which becomes longer and more difficult each time you do it. So while the suit certainly does its job of making Spidey feel powerful, it's not really worth using more than a handful of times in the game.
The other clear difference between versions is that, while the next-gen graphics at least look passable, the PS2/Wii versions of the game do not. Sure, it's unreasonable to expect the same level of graphical fidelity as the big boys, but even by the standards of the aged ps2 hardware the game looks horrible. The city is a series of painted blocks meant to represent buildings, the character models are jaggy, expressionless mannequins that wouldn't look out of place on ps1, and even with the scant number of cars and pedestrians populating New York's not-so-busy streets, the framerate chugs. The draw distance is also pathetic; swing high above the ground or climb to the top of a tall building and all the world textures will disappear, making the whole game look like something still in the early stages of testing. Spider-Man and his animations at least look OK, though you'll be seeing the same few repeated ad nauseum. This is well below anything that was seen in Spider-Man 2.
Yep, there's clear signs of a rush to conicide with the film's release everywhere, from some hilarious glitches like pedestrians walking right through Spidey to enemies getting stuck in walls, to more subtle things like Spider-Man's legs sinking right into grass like goo. At the very least, the game sounds decent, with an appropriately cinematic score that picks up during key events like boss battles. On the other hand, the voices are seriously lacking. You'd think that bringing in the film's cast would be a big boon, but only JK Simmons sounds the least bit enthused about reprising his role. Like in the other movie tie-ins, Toby Maguire is clearly just reading off the script, though given the really lame lines he's saying it's hard to lay the blame entirely on him. Likewise, James Franco, Kirsten Dunst and Topher Grace all sound like they really don't want to be in that recording studio. But the worst comes from the random citizens you'll speak to. Either they'll sound flat as paper or put on forced accents, which are made more laughable by the fact that the recycled models all look Caucasian. At least Bruce Campbell is back to lend his trademark deadpan snark as the narrator.
Ultimately, the ps2 version of Spider-Man 3 is really, really disappointing. The boring combat, lame missions, and shit graphics combine to drag this straight down to the bottom of the barrel for the Spider-Man movie tie-ins, and what little this game gets right (like the web swinging), has been done better in previous games. If you're dying to play a game to go along with the movie, stick with the next-gen versions. With so many half-decent superhero games out there, and so many better-than-decent Spider-Man games, there's simply no reason to bother with this ramshackle mess.
Gameplay: 5
Graphics: 3
Sound: 6
Value: 4
Overall: 4/10