N-Philes

Spider-Man: Battle for New York

Posted January 2nd 2007 by Adrian DeHerrera.

I would really, really hate to live in New York City in the Marvel Universe.

I mean, you can't go more than a few nights without getting your overpriced apartment demolished by a giant robot or have your walk in Central Park ruined by a psychopath on a green glider who kidnaps your girlfriend into the sunset. Even worse, the Devourer of Worlds always seems to want to consume the Earth right when you're about to get busy with your newly-rescued girlfriend and you just know your car's going to get flattened by a size-50 purple space boot by the morning.

Then again, I'm sure it's not all bad, because for every maniacal villain willing to annihilate an entire city, there will be a hero to help stop him. In this case, it's your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man who has taken on the responsibility of fighting off the likes of the Kingpin, Green Goblin, and other criminal scum. Sure, heroes like Spidey probably cause more collateral damage than they help save, but we need them. If not to constantly save our asses, to appear in mediocre comic-to-videogame adaptations as filler between better games.

Spider-Man: Battle for New York pits our most favorite webhead against the usual suspects and their legions of faceless lackey thugs. Everything is introduced to the player in snazzy hand-drawn comic panels that flash across bottom and top DS screens. Each is faithfully drawn, taking from the Ultimate Spider-Man line with artwork that looks like Mark Bagley himself could have done it. After a fun (and well written) hand-drawn cutscene, the player is tossed into a side-scrolling action adventure that puts you in control of not only Spidey, but the Green Goblin as well.

If you can imagine Viewtiful Joe with a Spider-Man theme (minus any innovative gameplay) you'll get what the game has in store for you. There is a 3D aspect to the environments that your animated wall-crawler fights in, but you swing left and right across the screen as a sidescroller. Essentially the player is put into a linear environment to either rescue hostages, beat all the enemies in the level or complete your objectives within a certain time limit.

Now this may sound a lot like every other action/adventure game in the universe, but the developers decided that Spider-Man: Battle for New York needed that special something to separate it from the pack; a super-fun gameplay device that would make fun literally explode out of kids' nostrils. Sadly, it seems as if they only had eight hours and two programmers from a temp agency to assist because the small mini-games, which utilize the Nintendo DS' touchscreen, consist of mundane tasks like touching blinking circles of light and connecting the dots. Apparently, the way to turn off an intricate network of alarms installed into a multi-million dollar den of corruption is to draw straight lines in the shape of a spider web. Who knew?

Not only are these games completely unnecessary, but also come at inopportune points in the game that make it awkward to go from the midst of battle to having to grab your stylus and perform inane touch-screen antics to lift a car or push a wall down. Most of the time, I just substituted the stylus with my thumb to get the action over with, but some, like aforementioned connect-the-dotting, require a sharper tool.

These complaints aside, the game is a solid beat-‘em-up with Spider-Man (or Green Goblin) able to perform a myriad of attacks like web shots, grabs, whips and my personal Goblin favorite: grabbing a faceless soldier and punching him repeatedly until he dies, all while laughing maniacally. Now, that's entertainment. Also, you can use special attacks after you raise your Whupp-o-Meter (I coined it) that grows as you continue smacking people into unconsciousness. Boss fights require dexterity in jumping, attacking, dodging and swinging, but the battles take way too long to finish. I swear I jump-kicked Silver Sable in the face against a wall for around 2 minutes straight, and, as fun as that sounds, it does get boring.

Whereas the dashing comic book panel cutscenes are something to be admired, Spider-Man's style gets watered down when transferred into the game. Graphically speaking, the game is fun and fluid in terms of animation and the environments vary nicely from urban city blocks to high-rise buildings to public schools (sans overcrowding, but realistically rife with gang activity). The character designs themselves are less-than-gorgeous but are functional, and Spider-Man's crawls, jumps and swings are just as you'd expect them to be. The enemies vary slightly from level to level, but like most generic adventures, each is a faceless soldier or thug, although bosses do have personality to them.

One of the best things about the game is that Spider-Man sounds like Spider-Man. Kudos to the person who hired this particular group of voice actors because they came through in every way with humor and vigor, something rarely seen in games of this nature. The dialogue writers definitely got Spider-Man's snappy comebacks down perfectly and for once, the actors seem to have some sort of understanding of the comic characters they're portraying. Still, the musical score itself has some range, but overall is standard videogame fare with nothing to make your pulse pound or whistle to yourself while sitting on the can.

Slight Pulse - Spidey doesn't quite live up to his great responsibility.

Overall, Spider-Man: Battle for New York is a shaky ride. The good thing is that the developers seem to have a grasp on what makes Spider-Man fun: humorous dialogue, lots of action and epic villains. The sad things is that there's not a lot of substance in terms of gameplay we've seen a thousand times before – and what is up with these anemic touchscreen mini-games? This is the epitome of what it means to try to stick touchscreen components into DS games, if nothing than for the sake of having them. It's fun for an afternoon to run through the game as a rental but your spider-sense should tingle if you're thinking about buying.

Posted in: Reviews

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