James Butler WDS Article Author, Frontiers Nerd, Star Trek Geek, Console Inventer Wannabee... View all articles | Contact author

Release Date:05/04/2007
ESRB Rating: Rating Pending
Genre: Action
Publisher: Activision
Developer: Treyarch

I can only imagine what Uncle Ben would say if he had picked up SpiderMan 3. You're on nextgen platforms now, Spidey, and you sure as hell don't look it. You know that PS2 game with shiny characters and lots of bloom lighting look that plagues PS3 and 360 ports of lastgen titles? It's dripping all over SpiderMan 3. Except it's not a port. Which is almost okay, until it throws in some vicious slowdown whenever you make the mistake of breaking environmental objects.

SpiderMan 3 doesn't look hideous, exactly. In fact, it looks an awful damn lot like SpiderMan 2. I just expected a lot more, especially when playing on the console that borrowed the movie's font. Maybe it's not entirely fair to compare currentgen titles to lastgen standouts like God of War or Chronicles of Riddick, but it's undeniably bad when a game looks like ass next to aged titles running on even more aged hardware.

The rest of the game is a pretty straightup combination of the better bits of SpiderMan 2 and Ultimate SpiderMan, except with absolutely punishing quicktime buttonpressing events. A, B...ugh! A, B, Up...damn! A, B, Up, X... F***! And each failure is punctuated by a load screen and unskippable cutscene where you get to hear Tobey Maguire sleeptalk through the same stupid line for the dozenth time. I've been getting pretty used to this kind of gameplay element over the last few years, but the timing in these things, especially in later boss fights, is absolutely unforgiving.

Not that the entire game is a complete and utter hell or anything. A score of 5, you'll recall, means average. Most of the stuff that was fun in SpiderMan 2 remains fun here. And by that, I mean swinging all over the place just for the glee of it. SpiderMan 3, however, is still an openworld game where there isn't a hell of a lot to do in that open world. It's an empty space to flip through on the way to the next cutscene, brawl, or quicktime event. You want to affect that world? Well, you can smash newspaper vending machines (and nothing else). You've got a very small number of collectable tokens on top of a couple of skyscrapers (they don't do anything, just in case you were expecting Crackdown here). It's not a badlooking town, but it's lifeless and noninteractive. New Yorkers are supposed to be famously jaded, but come on. At the very least, passersby should look up when you're punching some fool right over their heads.

If you really liked SpiderMan 2 and/or Ultimate SpiderMan, you won't go wrong giving 3 a shot. Just don't expect any evolution in graphics or gameplay. It's an awful lot of the same with a new cast of guys to knock around (including a filler gang of, I s*** you not, Gothic Lolita Valley Girls) and a tiein to an equally stale flick. Its foundations are still solid, but I honestly expect a little more built on top of them by now.