Tuesday 25 Nov 2008

Imagine you’re Marvel. I mean, imagine you’re someone who works for Marvel, or you’re a director of the company. You have this little comic book called Spider-Man that has been quite popular over the years. In 2002 you release a movie that breaks all kinds of records on its way to a top 5 finish on the US all time box office charts, and follow it up with two more $300m plus movies. Spider-Man, friends, is one of the biggest movie series of all time. Why then, has it failed to light up the gaming world?

It must be said first of all that there are no comic-to-movie-to-game adaptations that have lit up the video gaming world. In fact, from a brief, non-exhaustive study of the publicly available numbers, Spider-Man is the most successful of them with over three previous games that have sold over a million copies on a single platform (all PlayStation platforms). But I can’t say this is evident in the games themselves – at heart the gameplay has been decent if you like button mashers, and the swinging is fun, but the lack of polish detracts so much from the experience it’s no wonder it isn’t far more successful.

Potential potential potential!

Of course, you don’t really care about sales figures right? But they do give some indication as to how gamers have historically turned a blind eye to the release of blockbuster movie tie-ins, and usually with good cause. Spider-Man: Web of Shadows (which is not a movie tie-in as such) doesn’t deserve the neglect its ilk has caused, but it also doesn’t do as much as it could to change the collective opinion of the gaming world. One assumes Activision believes it better to make an average, solid game on a reasonable budget than a really good game on a really big budget. I guess it would take a number of really impressive comic-to-movie-to-game titles before the prejudice is cleared, and with Activision’s game-a-year policy I can’t see this happening.

However, if you like Spider-Man a lot, if you like button-mashers a lot, if you have the finger control to utilize every button on a Sixaxis or Dualshock, if you like to repeat everything you do between three and ten times, if you have a great capacity for bad dialogue, weak voice acting (not the movie cast, I’m sure they would never have agreed to say some of these lines) and a plot that feels like a stream of non-sequiturs, then this is the perfect game for you! For me, two out of seven makes it an enjoyable action brawler interspersed with entertaining-in-a-random-way plot-driving cut scenes.

Solid combat, repetitious scenarios

New York City is a big place, room enough for at least eight super heroes. As Spider-Man you get to appreciate its skyline a little more because you can do as Spider-Man does and swing from building to building. In the interests of gameplay the developers (Treyarch and Shaba, although I don’t know which did what) saw to it that you can swing from the empty sky too, so you are never left to run around on the ground like mere mortals. This is a good thing because a lot of time is spent simply going from a to b talking to someone named Moon Knight, going from b to c to say something inane to Luke Cage, swinging from c to d to deliver a pizza to Kingpin and so on. I kid, I kid – although there is a lot of travelling it never seems to grow old, especially when every few seconds you’re stopping to pick up a little glowing spider emblem that was floating on top of a building you sailed past. Pick up enough of these and you get stronger and faster, allowing you to pick up glowing emblems at a faster rate.

Spider-Man’s Spider-Sense makes itself evident in the way he has a built in mini-map, complete with icons that tell you where the bad people are. If you feel like beating some people up you can swing by (make sure you kick while you do) and take them down in a rapid succession of Square-Square-Square-Square interspersed with a Triangle here and there. You might have gathered that Square punches, and with each upgrade (you get XP for taking down people which you can spend on new moves) an extra Square is added to your combo making it last about 30 seconds by the end of the game. Triangle is a little more fun – with this Spidey does a web shot which hooks him towards the enemy (everything is auto targeted, pretty much), and pressing Triangle again at the right time does something that hurts the poor non-super-hero. Of course, once you have the move, pressing Square at the right time allows you to ride the hapless henchman like a surfboard or swing them round like a cowboy time and again in succession, taking down all but the hardiest of pseudo-zombies. It’s all quite spectacular, and thanks to the move upgrades stays entertaining for the duration of the game.

The signature impressiveness of the combat engine though is the way you fight in the air – some boss battles are fought without even touching the ground (or the top of the building you’re near I should say), and it’s a great feeling to not be constrained like other, lesser heroes, like, say, Wolverine (who for some reason you fight twice in the game) to the ground. Spider-Man’s alternate suit (the same from the Spider-Man 3 movie, the alien symbiotes) has a tendril-pull which either pulls little guys to Parker (I’m amazed how many people know Spider-Man’s real name without it getting out to the general public), or, more often pulls Parker to the big guys, allowing him to slam into them with force (with a correctly timed Square, of course).

And just when you might be falling below the height of the Empire State Building (which I found conspicuously absent, although I might have just missed it with all the textures appearing and disappearing), you can always pop your web sling out and, in a move that would cause Newton to rewrite his Laws of Motion, hook on to a building below you and be flung upwards. Despite its utter unrealism (which, lets face it, we left behind at the name Spider-Man), or perhaps because of it, the combat is really entertaining. My only real complaint about it then is its tendency to rinse and repeat. I mean, you kill the boss, but he runs off, replenishes and you have to do it again, and then once more to make sure. And then, after all that the game pops a question in the form of a blue and a red head, which, I’m guessing, means bad person choice or good person choice. Having no idea quite what Spider-Man is capable of, I picked red every time and he made up with the person he had just nearly killed three times.

Full of heart but a little short on execution

Web of Shadows is really a game with its heart in the right place. The elements are all there, the good combat engine, the wall-running, web slinging action, the variety in combat styles between the two suits, the move upgrade tree and impressive special effects and mayhem produced near the end. Even the boss battles are good despite some repetition. It’s simply all implemented without the polish it needs to shine – things like camera issues, clipping glitches, and obvious shortcuts like swinging from the sky and story padding get in the way. I can’t help the feeling that Activision might do themselves some good if they simply gave the team more time to sand the rough edges and make this a series that is respected by gamers, not just enjoyed by Spider-Man fans willing to overlook the shortcomings. Then again, it might be too late for that.

I forgot to mention the plot: it involves the alien symbiotes trying to take over the world while Spider-Man stops them, all the while making corny jokes and trying not to fight with MJ. Pretty much.

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Contributor:	Peter

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