Spiderman 2 Game Review
Posted: Saturday, July 03, 2004
by Fingers Flynn Barkan
KiLl EveRyTHiNG
Ok. The world must be coming to an end. In the past month there have been no less than 2 separate games based around Hollywood blockbuster films and neither of them have sucked. First we had The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay and now it’s Spiderman 2. This is completely unheard of both of these titles were supposed to suck. Personally, I advise you all to invest in canned food and shotguns. But first, go buy Spiderman 2. Here’s my report.
The graphics on the Xbox are excellent, especially during the in-game cinema sequences. Although there are several CG movies as well, most of the game’s story is advanced using the game engine. The body language of the characters is particularly impressive the people in these story sequences are often rendered so convincingly that (with a little imagination) you could be convinced that you’re watching video of real human beings. There’s a range of expressiveness in Spiderman’s hand motions and shoulder-shrugs far beyond anything I’ve ever seen before. This really helps the player to get into the game.
I won’t go into the story (save the world, stop the bad guy, rescue the girl, etc.) but it is worth noting that, unlike a lot of titles, Spiderman 2 works because you actually come to care about the characters a rare feat (and daunting challenge) for any developer or publisher.
Cinema aside, though, the real star of the game is New York City itself. Like many games from the last year and a half, the environments are enormous and open for you to explore. Spiderman swings high above the city streets, jumping and flipping in endless chains of acrobatic feats like a pro. Surprisingly, there is some noticeable draw-in as the game replaces the lower-res textures with higher ones but, after a few minutes, it becomes nearly un-noticeable. Still, I expected more from the Xbox.
As mentioned, Spidey’s moves are fun to play with. By firing his webs at nearby buildings, he’s able to swing through the city at a break-neck pace, leaping through the air for long intervals as he hurls himself towards his destination. He can also crawl on walls and jumps absurdly high. When you first start the game, you’re introduced to the concept of hero points which are granted for doing heroic things. These range from catching children’s run-away balloons and restoring them to the crying kid to fighting bad guys clad in heavily-armed mechanized suits. You can then use these experience points to purchase upgrades like faster swing-speed and new combos for combat. It’s a good system and works well.
Speaking of combat, the fighting system in Spiderman 2 attempts to incorporate elements of subtlety into the festival of endless button-mashing that most battles become. While some of these work, most of them are scarcely noticeable. One of the more important elements of the combat system is the way Spidey dodges attacks and hostile environmental hazards. Prior to being hit, Spidey’s head will flash white (presumably representing his Spidey-sense). If you press the dodge button, he will evade whatever is coming at him, opening up your opponent for a counter-attack. This looks especially cool when dodging bullets Spiderman will bend, bob, and weave ala the Matrix while evading them.
You’ll spend a lot of time dodging attacks because Spidey can’t block, making most of the fights into fast-paced (but predictable) battles. Depending on what or who is attacking him, Spiderman responds appropriately there are a lot of different dodging animations, all of which are well-rendered.
One of the nicest things about the game, though, are the little touches that Treyarch incorporates into the story and the city. When you first meet the comically pathetic and cheesy Mysterio, he appears as a 7-story tall hologram standing on a stage in a theater. He declares war on all of humanity and then, before disappearing, simply adds “You have no chance to survive. Make your time," referencing “All Your Base." Some of the dialogue during the street missions is also surprising and funny. For instance, while fighting a gang of female punks, one of them shouted “Now for a bit of the old ultra-violence." I’ve beaten the game but have only heard this once. Although most of the dialogue from these mini-missions gets really old pretty quickly, it’s still nice to find little things thrown in.
If I have one major complaint about Spiderman 2, it’s that the game is actually a little short, clocking in at around 6 hours. After completing the story, the player is then invited to collect an enormous amount of hero points by completing street missions. I’m not sure how much fun that will be considering that these missions are based around only 8 or 10 different types of tasks, but it does help to pad out the game’s length. There are also hundreds of collectibles and various different awards for completing certain challenges, all of which further help the replay factor. Regardless, exploring the city never seems to get old.
Spiderman 2 is a great game, definitely worth the $50. Its excellent combination of story-driven action and dynamic web-slinging is very hard to resist, even if you hate superheroes. Check it out and, as always, kill everything.
-Seth "Fingers" Flynn Barkan is the games columnist for Las Vegas CityLife and is the author of the video game poetry collection Blue Wizard Is About To Die!: Prose, Poems, and Emoto-Versatronic Expressionist Pieces About Video Games (1980-2003). He can be reached at to rg o 2 (*) pip eline . com
Copyright 2004 by Seth Barkan. No portion of this work may be reproduced in any form, either print or electronic, without the consent of the author.
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