Spider-Man 3 is game that, at best, is a light-hearted experience even for the most die-hard of Spidey fans.
I’ve always been a die-hard Spider-Man fan, even since the days of his comic book outings, and have always enjoyed his adventures as Peter Parker and Spider-Man. The Spider-Man movies were always going to be a risk as let’s face it, most don’t live up to their name nowadays and thus the Spider-Man movies were either going to make or break – fortunately for us, they were a huge success. And so we all rejoiced in the success and hoped for a sequel or two and, fortunately, we were granted those sequels…So what’s the problem? The problem is that the games haven’t expanded upon the movies all that much and, generally, have let Spider-Man fans down. The main thing that you would expect from a Spider-Man game is bags and bags of fun. A game that lets you swing around a huge city, being able to do whatever you want…and not follow some strict, laid out path. Spider-Man 3 loosely does this, but is always pointing you in some direction. The game advertised that you could choose from ten different story arcs but, in reality, you have to do an arc to trigger another arc – which in turn triggers the main arc and certain points, so it doesn’t really put the game in your hands. The story arcs aren’t particularly large either. You’ll generally find yourself completing 3-4 missions (with the odd exception) within an arc, and moving on to the next one within a couple of hours – it really is that easy. It’s initially appealing on how they introduce infamous villains, like Kraven and The Lizard, though these characters are only encountered in boss battles…and aren’t really all that difficult. The end-of-arc battles usually consist of linear fighting structures, where they’ll often throw the same fighting process – again with the odd exception, that requires you to ‘button bash’ to win. Simply slamming your hands across the buttons on your controller will win you the fight, and leave you contemplating whether you can really be bothered to complete the next arc. You don’t really get anything out of it too; you might get the odd swing upgrade or a new move, but nothing more. There isn’t any level up structure which allows you to gain experience from battles, and bonus exp. from boss battles, which then allows you to choose Spider-Man’s stats – which I personally think would have been much more effective, and would have put much more value and life into the game.
From a graphic perspective, Spider-Man 3 isn’t all the good. You’ll generally find that Spider-Man 3 had a coat of paint splashed about on it, with the odd reflection and shiny surface, but once you sit back and look around you’ll find it is rather shabby. The buildings look like they have been rushed, the edges aren’t smoothed out for one, and the character models aren’t too good either. The likes of Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson don’t even look like their counterparts, and they look like they have been rushed. The only character model that stood out to me was Spider-Man himself; an incredible amount of detail was put into his costume, and even little details were there – but, unfortunately, this didn’t apply for everyone else. The vehicles are also weak and the water effects aren’t brilliant either, it is barely anything more than a basic Xbox 360 game. For a console of its power goodness knows how they didn’t make this game look brilliant, they could have made it look much better than it does, but instead made it look like a polished Playstation 2 game – which isn’t good at all. The only silver lining to this cloud is that while playing the main storyline you won’t be outside all too much, which is good, and if you are you’ll only be swinging by at fairly fast speeds – which causes everything to appear in a bit of a blur.
The gameplay side of Spider-Man 3 is fairly repetitive and frustrating. You’ll constantly find yourself button bashing away, which will win you the day, a hordes of enemies try to bring you down. You’ll also be holding down the reflexes button constantly, which lets you dodge attacks with ease – only occasionally prompting you to press the button, as you bash away at groups of enemies. And you will find yourself doing this throughout the whole game, bashing buttons without any strain of thought to get through every group…and it can get very, very tedious. They also introduced button prompts in the cutscenes, much like God of War did – only this wasn’t as successful, where the game requires that you press a chain of buttons to get Spider-Man from one place to another. For some reason though you don’t even get a warning that this will happen, meaning that you will never know when this will happen – often resulting in you pressing the buttons too late, resulting in your demise. This happens at pivotal points in the game too meaning that if you fail, you’ll have to activate the cutscene again…which is incredibly frustrating.
Spider-Man 3 is game that, at best, is a light-hearted experience even for the most die-hard of Spidey fans. A game that fails on numerous aspects and, potentially, had so much promise.