Spidey, Spidey, Spidey…  Of all the comic book heroes that have had games made of their exploits, yours are probably the biggest mixed bag in terms of quality.  Ever since i was a little kid, the idea of a Spiderman videogame seemed like a no-brainer;  After all, who wouldn’t want to go swinging around buildings, beating up bad-guys, getting the girl – it made a young nerd’s heart leap.  So it was with great excitement that I went over to a friend’s house after being told he had a Spiderman game for his Commodore 64.

Great level name, or greatest level name?

Upon seeing it for the first time, the words “What the hell is this?” were the first to come to mind.  The entire game consisted of bizarre platforming levels, very few badguys to punch, level names that made no sense, and controls that assured me that even if i was playing the game with my feet.  I would probably have about the same level of fun.  This was not the Spiderman game my childhood dreams had imagined.

Over the years, there have been roughly 10 to 15 attempts at creating Spiderman games on various systems,  most of which I could apply my review to the Commodore 64 game without changing a word.  Fortunately, Activision/Treyarch, 25 years after the first Spidey game was released, managed to solve a whole ONE of those problems – there are more badguys now.

But seriously, let’s get into the game at hand – Spiderman: Web of Shadows.

The game opens with one of the best opening sequences I’ve seen in quite some time, with Spidey himself walking along a rooftop in slow-mo as some introspective classical music plays in the background.  As he walks toward the edge of the roof, head hanging low, the camera zooms out to show that all living hell is breaking loose.  SHIELD agents are firing at unknown alien creatures, helicopters are exploding in the sky, and winged creatures are picking up soldiers and dropping them to their deaths.  As Spidey reaches the end of the rooftop, he vaults off, and the player assumes control.

This is also the point where the flaws in the game engine become immediately evident.  Due to my admitted Spidey fanboy-ism, I was willing to let some minor design issues slide, if only to simply engage in some aerial combat, some swinging through the city, and some general super-hero action adventure.  Unfortunately, it seems like through the majority of the game, Spidey’s main nemesis is the camera.  Part of the appeal of the game is that its one of the first games to make you feel like you’re fighting they way Spidey would actually fight: quick web attacks, swinging the enemy into the air for crazy aerial combos, and bouncing from enemy to enemy mid-air without ever touching the ground during combat.  The problem is, the camera can’t be bothered to keep up with Spidey half the time, and you end up getting knocked out of the air or taking damage from an attacking enemy because the camera can’t whirl around fast enough to show you what’s coming at you.  This is especially true in the second half of the game, when you face symbiotes that, like Spidey, can crawl on walls.  The camera will attempt to maintain a lock on the enemy you’re fighting (or the closest enemy, depending on your camera preference), but as half of the wall-attack maneuvers have you whizzing past or into the enemy at a dash, you spend half the battle with the camera whirling around like mad, giving you a nasty case of Cloverfield-style motion sickness.

The same can be said for the swinging mechanics, as occasionally Spidey will swing too close to a building, or land on a ledge facing the “wrong” direction, and the camera will completely freak out and dive “into” the building, or below Spidey’s feet, looking straight up.  Needless to say, neither of these are very helpful.

Note how the camera is showing you as well as the enemies.  Don’t get used to it.

Camera issues aside, however, you can tell that a lot of work has been put into developing a new “Spidey-engine” that gives you a lot more options in terms of how you want to play the wall-crawler.  From the start, Spidey has two suits, the familiar red-and-blue suit, as well as the black and white “symbiote suit.”  Players can switch between suits on the fly, even mid-combo, to cause maximum damage to enemies.  At the highest levels, you can start with a punching combo as red-suit, switch to black and land a couple more hits, then launch him to the air, switch back to red, web-up to the enemy in the air, finish him off with an aerial combo, and with one button-press, web-sling yourself like a javelin directly at the next enemy to start again.  As Spidey offs the (seemingly unlimited) supply of enemies the game throws at him, he gains experience that can be spent to buy additional combo moves, or power-up existing moves.  The moves are divided by suit and category, so you can tailor your webslinger to your preferred method of combat: ground, aerial, web-shot, web-sling, etc.

As i mentioned above, the supply of basic enemies is seemingly endless, and that’s where my arch-nemesis, “arbitrary game lengthening” comes into play.  The game follows a repetitive formula throughout the entire run: meet new superhero, superhero tells you he’s got some insight as to what’s going on, but before you do that, you have to do some other quests for him.  These quests, 90 percent of the time, involve running around the city and killing “quotas” of badguys.  For example, about halfway through the game, you meet up with Wolverine, who (after a completely ridiculous quiz sequence involving pie) tells you that he knows that symbiotes are posing as regular joes.  But before he can lead you to where they’re infecting them, you have to wander around the street and “help” (read: murder) about 40 infected.  Apparently Logan forgot where the symbiote production areas are, and the only way he can figure it out is through punching dudes in the face.  These types of quests literally double the length of the game; it’s like someone came to the producer and said “okay, you’ve got a good, solid 4 hour game, but we need it to be 8, because the graphic designers already put that on the box, and they won’t change it unless we buy them lunch”.

I like to think he’s giving me a ride to a picnic – in the sky!

A lot of negative press has also been given to the fact that you have to fight each boss in the game twice – once in their regular form, and once in a “symbiote form,” as each boss becomes infected with the symbiote and goes on a rampage through the city.  I personally didn’t find this part nearly as irritating as the quota killing, because regardless of the fact that you were fighting a variation of the same boss, the boss fights remained interesting.  This was especially true the second time you fight the Vulture, as the ENTIRE fight is in the air from start to finish.  As you approach the Vulture, he sends out his vulture-ling symbiotes, which you use as web-sling stepping stones to get to the Winged Wanker himself.  Once you make it to him, you can use your air combos to do damage to him, all the while bouncing off his minions to keep yourself up in the air and in the fray.  If you miss, you fall, and you die.  It could be looked at as frustrating, but i felt like it actually added tension to the battle, which in many action games, is sorely lacking.

The story of the game is a mixed bag.  Treyarch decided that instead of trying to shoehorn a plot from one of the major story arcs of Spiderman continuity, they would create their own independent story outside of the Spiderman universe at large.  I, for one, appreciate this choice, as I feel it makes the storytelling less stilted overall.

As the story opens, Spiderman is in the midst of assisting SHIELD in fending off what looks like an advancing symbiote invasion.  After you fend them off, Peter flashes back to the week before, when during a fight with Venom, in which a part of Venom’s suit comes off and binds itself to Spidey (giving him the black-suit powers that you can use throughout the game).  After Spidey runs Venom off, he assists various superheroes in the area in fending off gangs of people who appear to be having some sort of psychotic affliction, giving them superhuman strength and, unfortunately, a desire to kill and destroy everything in sight.  Turns out, Venom’s symbiote has been busy spreading its wild oats; infecting not just Peter, but everyone in the city that he can get his hands on.  As the infection spreads, the symbiotes come out of hiding, showing their true forms and launching a full-scale war on the city.  With SHIELD having quarantined the city, and fully prepared to nuke it to stop the infection from spreading, Spidey takes it upon himself to confront Venom and stop the infection at the source.

At least that’s the idea.  Unfortunately, beyond the major brush strokes that define the characters, it feels like no one at Treyarch had ever actually read a Spidey comic… Spiderman is sarcastic, Wolverine is gruff and violent, Luke Cage is a bruiser, that’s about all you get; There is very little to distinguish them beyond this. The writers also seem to have gone to the school of the Spiderman movie writers, as Spidey’s real identity is the worst kept secret in the world – every character will walk up to him and say “Hi Peter!” in the middle of a crowd of civilians, and Peter himself doesn’t seem to have a problem with it.

For a story that is supposed to add a moral aspect to the Spiderman tale, you never end up feeling anything for any of the characters.  After you fight each boss, you’re presented with the games’ “morality choice,” in which you’re prompted to “CHOOSE YOUR SIDE,” red or black.  If you choose red, you go the “good” route and web up the enemy, leaving them for the authorities.  Choose black, and you usually beat the tar out of them and throw them off a building, or some other dickish move that would make emo Tobey Maguire proud.  While at the beginning of the game I thought that this would affect the overall story, it seems to only affect characters’ reactions to you, and the support characters you can use.  Good guys will only help you if you’re a good guy, and bad guys will only help you if you’re a jerk.  The irksome part is, as usual, there’s no in between.  You’re either the paragon of virtue, or you’re kicking puppies into traffic.  Regardless, outside of support characters, the only other thing that really changes is people on the street saying “yay spiderman” or “fuck you.”  If good or bad choices don’t really make a difference, why even bother to put them in there?

FINAL THOUGHTS:
Overall, this game, like its predecessors, is a mixed bag.  However, I believe it’s definately worth a rent.  Swinging through the city and beating up badguys is a lot of fun, but gets old after you have to go on your 900th “kill 30 guys and come back and talk to me” mission.  The plot itself is decent, but the characters are less than memorable in the outing.  The boss fights are truly epic, including a final boss fight whose scope actually makes it feel like the culimination of a long, hard fight.  The only thing keeping me from giving it two thumbs up is the fetch/quota missions, as well as the abysmal camera control, which unfortunately drop the game down to a solid rental.