GENRE
	Action/Adventure
	DEVELOPER
	Vicarious Visions
	PUBLISHER
	Activision
	NUMBER OF PLAYERS
	1
	WI-FI ENHANCED
	No
	DS COMPATIBLE
	No
	BUY NOW AT

It’s once again summer, which means ‘tis the season for mediocre video games tied to blockbuster movies. In years past, the Spider-Man franchise has bucked that trend, producing some solid efforts that really captured what it felt like to be the popular wall-crawler. Tragically, Spider-Man 3 drags the series back into the licensed-title morass that we all know and hate, screaming "rushed development" all along the way.

visuals

When compared to last-gen Spider-Man titles, Spider-Man 3's graphics leave much to be desired. The GameCube Spider-Man titles had smooth framerates, large draw distances, slick lighting and shimmering water effects. This game has choppy framerates, poor draw distance (standing on top of the Empire State building looks atrocious), noticeable pop-in, odd-looking lighting effects and bodies of water that look more like blue sand. The game is still visually passable, but anyone familiar with the previous Spider-Man titles will wonder why Vicarious Visions’ engine looks so inferior to the one Treyarch used three years ago.

The cutscenes are equally disappointing. Many of them are rendered with the game’s engine, and they have -- like the main game -- regressed from previous incarnations and now feature bizarrely-crafted characters moving in a bafflingly stuttered framerate. Occasionally the game shows off a slick CG cutscene which looks great, but only serves to highlight the disparity between what should have been and what is.

Compounding the graphical woes of the game is the sheer lack of variety. There are only about a dozen or so variants of New Yorkers and even fewer variants of vehicles. There is some variety among buildings, but they are so blandly textured that a few scattered door signs here and there can’t save them. Perhaps worst of all, every single criminal informant in the game -- and there are dozens of them located across the map -- looks exactly the same, even though many of them have completely different voices.

audio

The audio is reminiscent of a lot of licensed titles -- solid music lifted from the movie combined with authentic, but largely uninspired, voice acting. The music score, taken from the movie, is fully-orchestrated and both ethereal and atmospheric, although it has a tendency to cut in and out at odd times. Sound effects get the job done nicely; the streets of New York bustle with the sounds of cars and horns and the bristle of the wind as Spidey vaults through the air.

As most experienced gamers know, excellent screen acting does not always translate into good video game voice work (i.e. Patrick Stewart). Spider-Man 3 is voiced by the movie’s cast, but it’s an inconsistent job at best. Some of the work, particularly J.K. Simmons as Jameson, sounds fantastic. Others, like Thomas Haden Church (Sandman) and Topher Grace (Venom), sound flatly uninspired. Ditto for the voicework of the nameless citizens of New York City. Kirsten Dunst as Mary Jane Watson is a mixed bag, as is the colorful narrator voiced by B-movie icon Bruce Campbell.

And then there is Spidey himself, Tobey Maguire. Maguire’s trademark is his understated tone, and at times that comes through nicely. More often than not, though, Maguire sounds disinterested or awkward in places that he should be emotional, and those moments really damage the "immersiveness" of the game. Equally aggravating is the repetition of Maguire’s voicework that leaves the player with the same sleepy one-liners over and over again.

gameplay

The gameplay seems to be more or less a lateral move from previous Spider-Man iterations. In other words, the gameplay pretty much imports all the virtues and vices of the previous games without doing much to improve the gameplay or eliminate the warts. Spider-Man 3 plays out in a sandbox set in New York City, and the playable map is bigger than previous games. That would be great, except that the game is so short on unique content that the extra real estate means little. Spider-Man 3 also incorporates an RPG-style experience system that allows the player to accrue experience points he or she can use to purchase character upgrades. Those upgrades, represented as a web in the game’s menu, are both meaningful and varied, and some of them (such as the ability to swing your foes in a circle around you) are a lot of fun to use.

The main storyline isn’t terribly long and an average player with sufficient patience could probably plow through in eight to ten hours. The game does allow the player to continue exploring New York and take on side quests after the main storyline is complete, but there isn’t much motivation to do so, as will be explained shortly. Much of the storyline necessarily deviates from the movie, but to the developer’s credit the game does not simply throw Spider-Man against a line of disparate foes. Instead, Vicarious Visions weaves together a story that is interconnected; characters from early chapters in the game stick around and often play a key role in later chapters. It’s rather nicely done and makes the endgame more entertaining for it. The main story also features some unique and memorable boss battles; and the challenge level -- particularly with the game’s last boss -- is sufficiently enough to test even veteran gamers.

Sadly, it’s with the side quests that the game really falters. Namely, they’re excessively repetitive. Like previous Spider-Man efforts, there are only about a dozen or so side quests and they get old quickly -- a gamer can only retrieve so many fruit pies, rescue so many ambassadors, and save so many ambushed cops before the game takes on a been there, done that feel. It is here that the Spider-Man series really fails to capture the essence of the just one more side quest addictiveness of the GTA series. Instead, side quests quickly become a chore to be bypassed for the storyline. Unfortunately, the storyline is not without its repetitiveness either; a few of the main quests repeat the standard sling the bomb from the building or extract information from these hoodlums fare.

One additional comment on quests and side quests is in order. During the game, I observed a few annoying script bugs. In some side missions, I ran into a bug that caused me to fail the mission the moment the mission started. In other cases, side quest-essential items or people were either poorly located or not on the screen at all. In still other cases (including once during a main quest boss battle), I got stuck in a wall or in a position where I could not move or fight and got pounded to death. I’ve also read scattered reports that there are actually rare game-ending bugs, but I did not encounter any of those during my playthrough.

Control was one of the issues I was most curious about going into the game, and I must say that it is an area that Vicarious Visions clearly put some time into. The Wii controls are intriguing, to say the least. Web-slinging, for example, is accomplished by pushing a button on either the Wii remote (B) or nunchuck (Z) and flicking the respective hand. It’s an ingenious mechanic that even reacts to the direction you flick the remote or nunchuck and is one of the most immersing parts of the whole game. A second example comes from the cutscenes, which use Resident Evil 4-style inputs. During those scenes, a player has to flick the remote or nunchuck in a certain way in order to produce the desired effect. Most of the time, this mechanic works nicely and are satisfying to pull off.

Unfortunately, while the controls are ripe with potential, they ultimately fall short. For one thing, Spider-Man 3 shares Spider-Man 2’s finicky controls, meaning that most of the time I felt like I was just barely in control of Spidey. This made things difficult enough even with the precision of button-pushing, but when transferred to the more imprecise medium of motion control it could be downright aggravating. In concrete terms, I felt I was able to make the hero do what I wanted about 80% of the time. The other 20% of the time I was overshooting targets, flying off in the wrong direction, accidentally jumping off buildings, or muffing attack combos. Also of note, the camera, which is mapped to the C-button and nunchuck tilt, is generally pretty bad, but the game uses an auto-targeting system that minimizes the problem.

The last of these -- attack combos -- is integral enough to the game that they deserve special attention. The developer opted to use a Twilight Princess-style approach to attacks, mapping weak attacks to a slash of the Wii remote and strong attacks to the A button. Unfortunately, Spider-Man 3’s combo system is at its best when a player can string together strong and weak attacks, but the gesture-based system is so imprecise that it is far too easy to gesture one time too many and ruin the opportunity to finish the combo with a strong attack.

multiplayer

N/A

overall

I really wanted to like this game. The Wii remote seems custom-made for the Spider-Man experience and previous Spider-Man titles have shown real promise. Sadly, the game fails to address the shortcomings of past games and even adds in several new ones. The game’s content has not evolved from Spider-Man 2, with the sidequests still as mundane and repetitive as ever. The graphics have taken a step backward and look worse than any of the last-gen Spider-Man efforts. And the Wii-specific controls, for all their promise, are too unwieldy to warrant consideration as an alternative to the standard controller, at least in the form present in this game.

It is clear that the Wii has the potential to serve up an awesome Spider-Man experience, but it will not be found here. This game has flashes of brilliance, but the rush to finish it in time for the release of the film shows through, especially considering the game’s glitches and bugs. It is probably worth a rental, if only to experience the web-slinging, but it is hard to recommend for purchase.

6.0/10