N-Philes

Ultimate Spider-Man

Posted November 23rd 2005 by Jordan Mammo.

Back when Spider-Man 2 first came out, it surprised gamers with an amazingly fast and fluid web-swinging system that nailed the feeling of zipping around as the famous wall-crawler perfectly. Yet while traversing New York City was incredibly fun, the game lost its touch as soon as Spidey hit the ground or found himself indoors. With Ultimate Spider-Man, developer Treyarch looks to not only solve the shortcomings of the previous title, but also craft a story and world that closely resembles that of the comics.

Well, it was a good effort at least.

The first thing that hits you about Ultimate Spider-Man is its presentation. It looks great; Treyarch's "comic inking" really shines and captures the spirit of Mark Bagley's character designs perfectly. The comic-panel presentation used during cut-scenes also emphasizes the idea of it being a comic book come to life, and the game looks great because of it. It also doesn't hurt that the introduction is ripped directly out of the pages of Ultimate Spider-Man. A fan-pleaser to be sure.

Much has been made about the tweaks to this title's web-swinging system compared to its predecessor's, and although it may not sound as appealing on paper, in action the swinging is just as fun. It's just less complex. The "invisible ceiling" that all but became a Spider-Man trademark is back, but not in a poorly implemented manner as seen in pre-Spider-Man 2 titles. You can't expect to be on top of a large building and just shoot some webbing into nothingness. The webbing still has to hit something, it just takes less deliberate directional aiming on the part of the player.

Aside from toying around with the web-swinging, Treyarch also revamped Spider-Man's fighting style. Combat feels considerably different to the last game, since Peter Parker is younger, lighter and weaker in the Ultimate universe. But overall, once you've gotten the controls down, it comes together pretty well. Once you realize it's not very effective to simply run at a hooligan head-on and beat the pulp out of them, you'll be bouncing off walls, swinging people around your head and over lamp posts and even chaining moves together. It's not amazingly deep and rarely is it ever taken full advantage of, but the engine is definitely an improvement over Spider-Man 2's once you understand how the game wants you to play.

The biggest and most exciting game play addition isn't the new battle system, though, but rather the ability to play as one of Spidey's most popular and famous villains: Venom. He's fast, he's strong, he leaps tall buildings in a single bound...and he kills people. What more would you want? The first few missions you take on feel surprisingly restricted compared to what you can do as the wall-crawler, but as you progress through the game, you're really allowed to let loose some old fashioned mayhem on the city. Venom's symbiote suit is constantly draining his health, so players must keep a watchful eye on it and feast on civilians and enemies to keep him alive. Fortunately the health meter doesn't drop very fast, so it's never too difficult to keep Venom alive, and instead adds an interesting dynamic to his missions, especially during boss fights where the threat of running out of health is more real.

So now we've got a fun swinging system, an improved combat engine, and a fun change of pace with the Venom missions... it's all good, right? If only. The problem with Ultimate Spider-Man is that while each of these things work and are fun, the lack of variety in the underlying game play brings everything down. The game is like a giant chase scene, since the game's story missions almost entirely consist of chasing down boss characters, and then fighting them. This is usually bearable because swinging around is fun to do, but there really should be some more diversity in the missions.

What's equally disappointing is that the city missions seem to have even less variety than before. In Spider-Man 2 it was disappointing, now it's just unacceptable. Especially after the developers vowed to fix this problem. Save the guy about to fall; chase the crooks in a speeding car; beat down some delinquents; rush some dude to the hospital... uh, that's about it actually. Ultimate Spider-Man won't take very long to beat either, as it can easily be finished in around five hours. There's both upsides and downsides to this. On one hand, it's not really long enough for you to become frustrated with the lack of variety in the missions. On the other hand, there isn't much incentive to come back and replay the game or try and 100% it, since doing the same thing you just did over and over again for 15 hours wont keep you glued to the TV screen.

This game gets an N-Philes score of C+.

On the surface, Ultimate Spider-Man seems to fix everything that was wrong with Spider-Man 2. Yet despite adding an improved combat system and a new playable character, the main problem remains unsolved, leaving us with a fun game that's worth a play through but is brought down by a lack of variety in the game play. Like its predecessor, Ultimate Spider-Man is worth a rental but not much more.

Posted in: Reviews

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