Best Spiderman game ever made, by a mile.
Web of Shadows takes a much needed departure from the Spiderman 1 - 3 games. It sums up all the things that made me adore Spiderman back when life only involved going to school, coming home and watching Fox Kids for 5 hours. Uncomplicated, accessible, and with stunning graphics. The story immediately sucks you in. In fact, the intro movie sucks you in. It's that good. Spidey walking across a roof top amid the chaos of the symbiote invasion, explosions all around with only Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata to set the tone. Which it does, as you'd expect, superbly.
While I do say accessible, there is the initial learning curb which I'd say lasts about 20 minutes to half an hour. As with most games. The hardest aspect of gameplay to master, I'd say, is the web... thing, you press triangle to initiate it anyway. Many combos are often reliant on timing by the player, which can be off-putting (and slightly frustrating) initially. You'll have become adept at it pretty quickly though, I'd say.
Perhaps something to consider before getting into combat is one of the more prominent features of the game, which is the ability to switch between the normal Spidey costume and the (pretty damn cool) black symbiote costume. Each one has its own unique abilities - the classic red and blue's being webbing and the black being physical strength. And tenticles. Cool eh? You'll also be faced with decisions throughout the game to either follow the good Spiderman path or the evil symbiote route, which adds a nice RP element to the game. I've only played through it once and I took the evil route (as you do). I felt terribly guilty after doing some of them, there's a particularly nasty one following a fight with Wolverine that I won't spoil for you. But yes, both suits have their benefits, and they certainly add some replayability to the game.
New York looks stunning on the PS3 and the detail on all the characters is very high. The City is littered with blue and red spiders that you can collect to increase your health and speed. Tracking them down is surprisingly satisfying, although the idea itself does admittedly sound a bit tedious. They're nice to pick up as you're swinging through the city on the look out for gang wars or robberies though.
The boss fights are thrilling and a lot more fun than you'd expect. WoS doesn't inflict the boring boss battles on you that involve detecting a pattern and such and such - just a straight forward fight, occasionally involving a God of War-style button bashing session. Again, very enjoyable. Highlights I'd say would include Wolverine and the Black Cat. Venom was played down a bit, sadly - he's my favourite Spidey villain.
Other heroes and villains from the Marvel universe can also be called to your side in the middle of a battle, which makes things much more interesting. Heroes will come to your aid if you have been following the good red/blue decisions, and villains if you have been giving in to the symbiote. However I have found that while this is a very fun feature and I'm grateful for it being implimented, it's not all that useful and I feel most battles can be won by Spidey on his own. But a very, very nice touch nonetheless.
However, WoS loses the extra 1.5 score with its few, noticeable flaws. One being the all too recurring awkward targeting system and camera angles. The targeting system isn't particularly awful it's just not very easy to target what you *want* to target, it just flicks to the nearest enemy. I try not to rely on it too much. Then there's also the red points/black points system which for the most part dictates which heroes and villains you have access to when you need some help in a fight. It's far too easy to gain black points and far too difficult to gain red points, in my experience.
All in all, I think WoS is one of the best games I've played on PS3, and most certainly the best Spiderman game to date. You don't need to be into the comics to get into it (although I have no idea who Moon Knight is...) and the controls are very, very easy to grasp if you have an ounce of patience. It has beautiful graphics and immersive gameplay, marred by sometimes dodgy camera angles and an unsteady targeting system, and a few slightly useless (but nice) features. Definitely worth a look on ebay!