There’s something gloriously fulfilling about controlling Spider-Man and zipping through the streets of New York City – doing flips, free falling and spinning webs that propel you with amazing speed past skyscrapers and traffic jams. It’s hard not to swing around town without a goofy grin on your face. Spider-Man 2 delivered a similar feeling but on a nice HD display, doing the same thing on an Xbox 360 is simply exhilarating. If only the rest of the game was as fun as touring around the city, Spider-Man 3 would be a success – but it’s not, and it isn’t.
There are two main problem areas in the game: the camera and the combat, both of which play a prominent role throughout the course of the main story and the myriad of side missions.
The combat is basically a button mashing fest that tends to get old because of the sheer stupidity of the bad guys. They cannot figure out how to walk around basic obstacles (like a tree...) and there’s no sense of teamwork when a group of thugs tries to corner Spider-Man during a fight. They all just rush Spidey – and it’s the same for the first fight as it is for the 100th, and by that time all of the cool combo moves you unlock during the game become meaningless.
For example, during a Boss fight early in the game with the New Goblin, you can simply press “X” over and over and over again to do a crazy 100-punch combo to knock Harry out and win the fight. Go Spidey go! Who needs any special moves when 100 speed jabs will do the trick just as well? There are a lot of special tricks Spidey can perform but you rarely need to use them, which tends to defeat their purpose.
New to the series are the sequences where you must press a button or a bumper on the gamepad when it flashes on-screen, prompting Spidey to perform certain maneuvers. If you mess up, you have to start the sequence over again which is terribly annoying when you get to the end and press Y when you meant to press B. It’s not a terribly exciting gameplay mechanic.
Then there’s the camera. When you need to do some wall crawling it becomes impossible to tell where you are because the camera always tries to self-adjust, spinning wildly out of control and sometimes becoming completely bugged, zooming in on Spidey so that you can’t see a damn thing. Several missions become unplayable because of this and a restart is needed to fix it. For much of the game the camera isn’t a big deal; it’s when you get into confined areas that the view becomes a major issue, such as the first stage of the Scorpion mission.
One area where the series continues to excel is bringing in additional bad guys from the canon that aren’t in the movies. The Lizard and Scorpion are just a couple of the villains in the game; in fact the story surrounding Scorpion is better than anything in the latest movie, and it’s nice to see these classic bad guys show up unannounced. Spider-Man 2 did this with the likes of Mysterio and Rhino, and it works equally well here. In fact, a lot of what made Spider-Man 2 a good time still works in Spidey 3; the problem is that there isn’t enough that’s new and improved to warrant a $60 purchase. On the other hand, water is no longer Spider-Man Kryptonite. You can actually swim in the river, so the game has that going for it.
In truth, the first half of the game isn’t too bad, repetitive combat aside; it’s still a pretty cool jaunt through New York. The second half is a maddening ride of terribly forced camera angles and aggravating Boss battles where one slip up requires a complete redo. Fighting Kingpin might be the most frustrating and simply non-entertaining videogame sequence in recent years. Shouldn’t these big fights with classic villains be, you know, the selling point rather than cruel and unusual punishment? During the Boss fights you are required to press the LB button when prompted to do so; this allows Spidey to dodge an oncoming attack, which is actually a pretty cool mechanic. What’s not cool is doing this over and over and over again during a key fight. It becomes monotonous and boring.
