Ultimate Spiderman

Written by Kyle Coare in PC Game Reviews, Saturday 6 September, 2008

The Not-So Ultimate Spiderman

Being a massive Spiderman fan ever since I was a wee nipper, it's always a joy to find something new based on the licence, and so when I heard there was a new spider man game out for the PC, well I had to give it a try. This game is based on a fairly new set of comics, The Ultimate series is a reinvention of the original series, with spider man now still being a high school student and the whole idea of the series is a little more high tech, whilst still having a nod towards the more traditional comics. Treyarch have been making the spider-man games since the first movie based game, and with each on have took a good idea and increased on it a little, so as a fan I was quite hopeful of something special here.

The previous Spiderman game to this, Spiderman 2 was a stunning yet quite flawed game, with you in control of our friendly neighbourhood webslinger, on the whole it was a good game with a nice freeform version of New York city to swing your way around, and plenty of baddies to hang from lamp posts etc, unfortunately where this game fell down was that the game was too short, and there wasn't enough variety in the game to warrant extended play, so after a year have treyarch made enough changes to the game to make it a classic? We shall find out over the course of this here review!

So lets start at the start here, you've just been into your local game store and have handed over the £25 - £30 that this game might set you back, you've got it home and your ready to install it, you insert the first of the three disks and follow on screen instructions, and before you know it you have a shiny new icon on your windows desktop!

So now it's into the game proper, you're past all that boring installing and its time for a bit of action, but what can you expect from the game? Well the first thing that will hit you is the all new graphics and I mean hit you, these really pack a nice punch. All of the in game graphics have been done in a 3d cel shaded style, which basically means the game looks like a cartoon, none of the realism from the previous games, this is pure cartoon action.

The main story is told in a series of cutscenes, these can be skipped, but I would advice you not to as you would be missing some of the most gorgeously realised moving comic book style cartoons I have had the joy of witnessing, the story and artwork has all been done by the writer and artist of the actual comics, and their quality really shows through. The cutscenes have some really nice touches such as the panel borders as you would see in an actual comic, They really are like a comic come to life and I really cannot do them justice here.

So Into the game itself, the first thing you notice is how similar this is to previous Spidey games, you are given a fairly big city to explore, although not quite as big as spidey 2's city. In this city you can jump around, swing on your webbing, you can generally do what a spider does, so far so good.

To progress during the game you must pass a certain amount of cit challenges, these are basically the same as what you used to do in the previous game, such as saving people from falling from a building or beating up a group of thugs, you also have to collect tokens and complete races in order to progress the story, there will be more about this later, but for now lets talk about the storyline missions. These missions are all basically Boss battles on a fairly big scale, usually following a set pattern, one section will be a chase across town, usually with some evil doer causing accidents and near death experiences for the citizens of the colourful cartoony New York. After you have saved the lives of these poor unfortunate people its usually onto some spectacular action sequence where you try to work out the enemies weaknesses without getting your body flattened into the ground, these are in reality quite an ordinary gaming element, but for some reason in this game they feel so much better than usual boss battles, and they can also be quite challenging, which will give the older gamers something to test their reactions against.

As well as Spidey, you also get a chance to play as venom at certain points in the game, venom is basically a bigger evil version of spider man (Im not going to tell you all the history of the characters!). These missions are vastly different from spidey's, with the controls handling different and the fact that you are actually a bad guy and you have to smash things up. These add a bit of depth to the game, but also cause the game to loose a few points as they become very repetitive very quickly, they are basically an all out scrap with as many people as the good guys can throw at you, entertaining at first but gets quite boring as time passed.So aside from venom this sounds like a great game? Unfortunately not, as the game is about as flawed as its predecessor.

The main problem with the game is the city goals, these are challenges that have to be completed before you can progress the story, these were also in Spidey 2 although in that game you could choose if you wanted to do them or not, whereas this time they are compulsory, which wouldn't be a problem if their was a little variety, but on the most part they involve beating up a group of thugs or saving people from falling off buildings. This is all well and good for the first five minutes, but soon begins to get on your nerves when all you want to do is see the next cutscene and fight the next boss battle.

As bad as these are they are not as bad as the ultra annoying races, these are the usual swing from checkpoint to checkpoint in a certain time style races, which alongside another of the games problems causes progression to be quite difficult and boring, namely the fact that treyarch have messed up the swinging style, in Spidey 2 you could choose simple swing or expert swing, with the latter you could really control the way you used your webs and controlling spidey was so much easier for it, unfortunately they have taken this option out and left us with simple swing which makes control appallingly bad. This basically means you will be trying these races over and over again, not fun believe me!

There are quite a few other niggling little problems with the game, for example the buildings have all been shortened and their seems a lot less skyscrapers etc. this makes swinging around even harder, which considering that one of Spiderman's main selling points is his ability to swing from webs, really doesn't make much sense.

Well, I wanted to love this game, I have always been a fan of spider man, and although I'm not 100% sure I like the new direction these comics seem to be taking, I still wanted a great spider man game, and unfortunately didn't get it. The graphics are some of the best cartoon/comic style that ive witnessed and the story missions of the game are quite fun and involving, but the city goals and some other silly niggling things stop this quite some distance from greatness.

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