Quick (and Old) Review: Spiderman: Web of Shadows
The underlying conceit behind a Spiderman game has been turned into something of a science these past few years: take an open-ended New York City, fill it with recognizable (or semi-recognizable) Spiderman and Marvel characters, slap together some sort of fast-travelling web-slingery, and push your product out upon the masses. This has been the rubric since Spiderman 2 back in 2004, and it has undergone few changes.
Which in the right hands may not necessarily be a bad thing. Hell, Spiderman 2 rocked. It remains one of the best licensed superhero games to date, and made you feel like you were a part (albeit an omnipotent part) of the greater New York surroundings. Unfortunately, it seems that Spiderman: Web of Shadows was not put into the right hands, which is really too bad because there was so much potential.
You play Spiderman amidst a New York invasion of symbiotes, those alien-suit things that created Venom and enjoy generally screwing around with Spiderman. There’s little explanation why they’re back, why there’s suddenly a terrible invasion, or why Spiderman’s apparently responsible, all that really matters is that New York’s going straight to shit, your favourite Marvel characters (and by that I mean Wolverine) are all symbiotized (?), and it’s up to a multi-suited Spiderman to save the day! And with his new bipolar suit disorder comes (of course) a morality system, the lens flare mechanic of 2009.
I’m certainly not the first one to gripe about this, but it isn’t a morality system when the only choices are A: Stoic Hero, or B: Childish Prick. It’s just a way to artificially lengthen your goddamn game.
But what really matters about a Spiderman game is the combat, and this game is all about the combat, almost too much so. To the extent where every mission boils down to “Kill X amount of bad guys in a certain way” or “Go to Y and kill one certain bad guy”. The combat can look cool at times, especially when you’re slinging from enemy to enemy while hundreds of feet in the air, but it has a terrible, buggy feel to it, where attacks will seemingly land or miss based on the game’s mood and opinion of you at that current moment in time. Climbing buildings and web-slinging around New York also suffers from a bad case of the bugs too, with the camera acting like an angry spastic any time you come near a building, which is severely debilitating considering, you know, the entire game is spent either travelling or fighting.
Even if you’re like me and picked this game up for twenty bucks at your local video jobber, it’s still not worth it. The story, while having such great potential, is essentially the kind of incoherent slash fiction you’d expect from the darkest bowels of the internet (What if, like, Wolverine and Spiderman Totally Fought! But, like, it was an EVIL Wolverine who had, um, like, a SYMBIOTE SUIT!). Combine this with the fact that every possible mechanic is also buggy and unpolished, and you’re left with an unfulfilled true believer.
Sidenote, the voice actor for Spiderman was so catastrophically terrible he caused me to want to jab something sharp into my brain just to distract my attention. Someone needs to rescind his right to speak into a microphone.
SKIP.
Score:
