WR: Spider-Man: Web of Shadows (360, PS3, PC)

May 26th, 2009 by

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Developer: Shaba Games/Treyarch
Publisher: Activision
Genre: Third-Person Action
Platform: Xbox 360 (reviewed), PC, PS3, PS2, Wii, DS, PSP
ESRB Rating: T (Teen)
Players: 1
Hours Played: 12
Game Progress: Finished single player

Spider-Man has always been my favorite super hero. The costume Peter Parker made is pretty cool, he is intelligent and has incredible strength. Spider-Man even gets to climb up walls and web-swing from buildings! Who doesn’t want to do that? Since no one actually can, video games are as close as we can get to becoming the friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man. There have been numerous games starring my favorite hero, and we all know they are not always the greatest games ever made. The thing that makes this game stand out from the rest is the mainly a unique story, the ability to change between the black and red suits, good web-swinging mechanics and a giant open world that is your playground. I’m sure you are thinking, “Boy, that sounds great Jack, is there actually anything wrong with this game, because it sounds fantastic?” Well yeah, there is usually something wrong with every game. Read on, dear reader, to find out if Spider-Man’s legacy lives or dies through this game.

The game starts you out training with Luke Cage, doing the basic missions to rescue “x” number of civilians and defeat “x” number of bad guys so you can get a feel for controlling Spidey. Basically, you start out helping Cage clean up the streets from gang fighting and eventually have to help stop or encourage an all out gang war. You see, there are certain moments within the story where you will be faced with moral decisions. There are two choices which show up on screen as the different masks of the different suits. The red suit stands for the good choice and obviously the black suit means the evil choice. These decisions actually have a impact on how the story plays out and eventually you’ll have one of two endings depending on what choices you made throughout the game. The thing about these choices is the way in which you make the good or bad choices.  The game will stop and a menu with two options appears, one for good and one for evil, your pick.  Having the gamer simply choose either good or evil in this mechanical way is both bland and unimaginitive.

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The story does pick up from beating up gang members all day, or at least it tries. Somehow the game manages to include almost all of Spider-Man’s usual enemies and still manage to throw in a few twists. Rhino, Electro, Vulture, Tinker, Kingpin, Black Cat, and Venom are all added to a “Venom symbiote spreading and infecting the city” story to create an epic tale, sort of. There is a very interesting story here, but it unfortunately feels very rushed, unpolished and slapped together.  There were multiple times where I would be watching a cut scene and it would end early, cutting off whatever the person was saying. Oh, and don’t worry, the ear bleeding caused by Spider-Man’s voice goes away eventually. The voice acting is so-so, in some parts it’s not bad and in others it’s just down right terrible.

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Venom infecting the entire city will keep you busy, civilians turn into black Venom-ish looking creatures and even the super villains get infected to keep things interesting. New York is huge and luckily web-slinging is a whole bucket of fun in this game, maybe even two buckets. The web swinging mechanic is pretty darn close to perfect, I had a blast just flying through the air with the greatest of ease, waving at civilians and S.H.I.E.L.D. members as they were overtaken by the symbiotes. You are able to increase Spidey’s health and web-slinging speed by collecting red Spider-Man icons which are located all over the city. The problem with the Spidey icons is that once you get to about Level 7 you need to collect 300 or so icons to level up again, which can take you a very, very long time. When you do decide to help out the good guys there are a number of combos at your disposal. You are capable of pulling off a number of ground, air, web, and special combos. All of the combos look really good, my favorite one is the final ground combo with the black suit. Spidey unleashes two axe-like tendrils from his hands and swings them around, jumps into the air, slams down and then lets loose dozens of tendrils in front of him inflicting massive amounts of damage on anyone lucky enough to be there. Each combo has many different levels that you are able to upgrade to using the experience you gain from missions and beating up bad guys. The problem with the combos is that they are so simple to do, it’s just “x,x,x,x,x, brief pause, x,x,x”. It’s not just the combos that are simple, the whole game leans heavily to the easy side.

Boss fights are much too easy once you figure out what the pattern is. Even the final boss was a joke, I would say he was actually one of the easiest fights in the game. The cool part of boss fights are the quick-time events.  You get to watch Spidey pull some sweet moves if you can hit the buttons at the right time, but miss a button and you haveto start the entire quick-time event over. The controls are pretty rock solid, though the transition between swinging or running and going onto a wall does screw up the camera making you run sideways when you want to run upward. Locking onto enemies is easy beans, just hit the left trigger and move the right analog stick to change targets. The thing is trying to lock onto a civilian to save them can be very difficult, instead you will just cycle through all of the enemies while you watch the civilian get beat up by baddies.  This is not exactly what you want if you are trying to be a good Spider-Man. I’m not sure if it’s just the lock-on system or the actual game as a whole, but there were multiple times when I would lock onto nothing, and still be able to pull off combos against open air, take that sucka!

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I have a few more issues with this game and one of them is the frame rate. The further into the game I got the worse it became until near the end when it became almost unplayable. Anything I did, swinging, fighting, even cut scenes made the game chug to the point it became extremely annoying. Along with the bad frame rate, pop-in became a greater issue the further into the game I got as well. Another point to mention is the magically disappearing enemies. There were parts when I was fighting a group of enemies when in the middle of an air combo all the enemies suddenly disappeared, poof! I’m not kidding, packs of bad guys would just not exist anymore, the game acted as if they never existed in the first place.  Too bad you can’t earn invisible XP from invisible and disappearing enemies.

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Web of Shadows tries to tell a unique story and include some of the best web-swinging to date with a fun combat system. With the sub-par graphics, enemies disappearing, camera issues and frame rate problems the story gets put on the back burner and instead you focus primarily on the issues. Even if the game didn’t have all the technical problems, the story still falls on it’s face, there is simply too much going on at once. I felt there was no real reason why all of the villains and heroes needed to be there. I have always wanted to play as Spider-Man in an open-world game swinging from building to building, but after playing Web of Shadows I may wait before I do it again.

Summary

Graphics:

+ Spider-Man and other main characters look okay

+ Combos look really cool

– Cut scenes are not done very well

– Major performance issues throughout the game

Audio:

+/- Voice acting is a toss up, some of it is good and other bits not so much, particularly Spider-Man’s voice.

Gameplay:

+ Controlling Spidey is fairly easy

+ Web-Slinging is ridiculously fun

+/- For the most part the camera works well, but when it doesn’t it’s very frustrating

+/- Combos look cool and are easy, can get by by just smashing buttons

– Story tries to be huge and interesting, but lack of polish really ruins it

– Lock-on system sometimes doesn’t lock on

– Groups of enemies magically vanish into thin air

Lasting Appeal:

+ Can play through the game as good or evil Spider-Man

+ Lots of collectibles to level you up

5.5