Difficulty:

Hard

Time Spent:

10 to 20 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Rent it first"

Despite most movie-based games being terrible, the first 2 spider-man movie games were some of the few exceptions in the industry. Well, the third spider-film came out recently, and it turned out to be one of the highest grossing films ever, so guess what developer Treyarch was thinking? Its cash-in time! Unfortunately, they didn't put nearly as much care into this entry to the series, and it ends up being one of the most frustrating games in the spider-man canon.

You play as Peter Parker/Spider-man, who is still fighting crime in the streets of Manhattan. Unfortunately, the story of the film was quite weak, so the developers didn't really have much to work with here. I'm not really going to spoil much here. Spider-man must fight against 3 villains: New goblin, Sandman and Venom. In the meantime, an alien symbiote infects his suit, making him more aggresive, and he has to end up fighting himself too. That makes the total 4 villains. Did we need that many?! But wait, that's the amount of villains in the movie, in the game they decided to add in around 10 more. What were they thinking? Weren't there enough villains already?

Anyways, lets talk about the gameplay. Spider-man basically starts in an open ended Manhattan, where he can swing around, access missions, find random crimes, do activities and so on. The first major complaint is how lifeless the city is. Sure there are lots of cars everywhere and civilians walk the streets, but you can't interact with them at all. None of them are surprised to see you or cheer you on, and if you bump into them or attack them, they just keep walking. The only thing they do is run away if bad guys are nearby, So it really takes away from the atmosphere. There's a useful map you can use, and if you select a starting point for a mission, a point marker will appear in-game and show where to go, which is useful.

The missions are structured as you might think. They give you objectives that you must complete in order to complete it. Sometimes these missions take you to a specific place that you can't access normally, and you usually can't leave them without quitting the mission. Each storyline has around 3-5 missions, and there are 42 missions in all. It will take you around 12 hours to complete all the missions. There are also activities and random crimes you can complete, but these don't really give you much of a reward and are mostly there for fun.

Spider-man can swing around, combat enemies, etc. The swinging is fun and thanks to the great control it really makes you feel like spider-man. However, the combat has been considerably watered down compared to other spider-man games. It now consists mostly of button mashing. The game remarks: "It uses a simple but in-depth combat system." In-depth meaning you can collect tons of attack combos, more than you'll ever need. There are more than 2 thirds of them which I don't even know that I have. There is also a really frustrating counter attack system where you must go into slow-motion and wait for the enemy to attack, then counter-attack. It's very annoying, especially in boss encounters where you'll need to do it very often. There are also some God of war style quick-time events. However, these tend to require very precise reactions, and the unresponsive control can make it difficult. Also, these seem to come out of nowhere, making it pure trial and error.

On the technical side of things, Spider-man 3 is a mixed bag. All of the characters resemble human beings, but they're designed in an almost cartoonish way, clashing with the realistic environments. The game uses physics, but they're not very believable, and, combined with the graphics, make for a strange experience.

The sound quality is also lacking. All of the explosions and punches sound cheesy, and the voice acting isn't that great, even with the voice talent of the stars from the movie.

So in the end, Spider-man 3 is only worth a rental for casual fans of the movie, and only worth a purchase for spidey fans, even at its cheap price now. Still, most people will be better off with the recent Spider man: web of shadows, which is much better fan service and more fun.