Review: Spider-Man: The Movie (XBX)

What has got appalling dress sense, a tongue sharper than an over-ripe lemon and is able to secrete sticky fluids? No- its not you're average male adolescent but Spider Man, and he's swinging his way to the latest batch of next generation consoles.

With Spider Man the movie breaking all sorts of records over in the U.S. it was inevitable that a game featuring your favourite wall-crawler would make its way to your local games emporium. Although Spidey has appeared on various consoles in the past it wasn’t until his reappearance on the Playstation that a whole new crowd got to see him up to his usual tricks in a sometime frustrating, but fun 3 dimensional game. 

Gameplay wise, its business as usual for anyone accustomed to the Playstation original. You use your various skills to traverse the impressive looking but ultimately short levels while taking out various henchmen. Seeking out gold spiders adds various combos to your repertoire, and although this makes Spidey more powerful it still leaves you using very basic combat moves. One advantage of being bitten by a radio-active spider is that you can stick to any surface, thus making it easier to use stealth to outfox your opponents rather than just pure brawn and certain areas of the game contain dark niches where you become totally invisible to your assailants. After the success of Snake's latest adventure it was perhaps inevitable that this would feature more prominently than before, but luckily this doesn’t become Metal Gear Spidey and instead helps to expand upon the already bland game.

True to form Treyarch’s new game has many secrets to be discovered, and as the levels are selectable upon completion you will find yourself returning to your favourites to boost your score and unlock such delights as bowling, videos and extra characters.

Instead of sticking religiously to the movie and just using the Green Goblin as Spidey’s only nemesis, you instead got to meet a larger selection of motley villains with which to do battle with. Memorable enemies range from the yellow duvet padded Shocker to the X-box exclusive Craven (The Hunter) all of whom have had the same loving attention to detail as the wall-crawler himself.

Graphically the game is pretty sweet with some wonderful flare and lighting effects, - one stage has you battling the Green Goblin whilst dodging rampant electricity and the sheer amount of colours on screen has it looking like a seventies disco. The game runs constantly at 60 frames per second with only the occasional slow down occurring when there is a large amount happening on screen. The game is particularly impressive in the external locations. As you swing your way effortlessly through the New York skyline tall buildings loom majestically all around, reflecting their surroundings via massive windows. Looking below you can see hundreds of cars patrolling the busy streets just begging to be explored, unfortunately look is all you can do as it is totally non interactive and just pleasant looking eye-candy.

As I stated already Spiderman himself looks fantastic, he has a wide variety of moves from zip-lining for fast getaways to just simply swinging lazily through the detailed environments. His combat arsenal has been greatly improved and now includes all manner of kicks and punches which can be strung together to create new combos. With the same level of detail being given to his arch foes it’s a shame that the lesser opponents and civilians haven’t been giving the same attention with some (Mary Jane in particular) looking very crude and poorly animated. Superb cut-scenes intersperse the levels and the presentation in general is pretty faultless.

Just like in the film Toby Maguire and Willem Dafoe each supply the voices of their relevant on screen alter –egos Maguire in particular capturing Spidey’s constant jibes and taunts. Regular Raimi stalwart Bruce Campbell relates all other information to the player and delivers it with his typical cock-sure casualness. The music to the game is typical movie related fodder and the effects are also nothing out of the ordinary.

The biggest let-down of Spiderman is it size, after the impressive cities of Grand Theft Auto, hopes of exploring a bustling metropolis were high, instead you end up with small linear levels, thus ruining a potentially great feature. The sometimes-awkward controls are another cause of concern, you are not always able to change direction unless you remove your thumb from the analogue stick first and this can get incredibly frustrating when in the middle of a heated battle. Finally when chasing enemies through the air it soon becomes apparent that they can move through beyond the constraints of the level, this results in your web-slinger being thrown in the complete opposite direction without warning and can only come down to lazy design.

At the end of the day fans of Spiderman fans will find plenty to enjoy as they relive all their childhood fantasies. Although it is one of the better film titles available when compared to the likes of Harry Potter and Monsters INC it is still along way off from such killer apps as Halo and Project Gotham. Hopefully Fox will be able to address this imbalance with the soon to be released Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

This review was originally from 2002 but was lost during the last version of Gamestyle. The review remains unchanged and we are pleased to be able to release it again online.

Rating: 6 / 10

Words by Darran Jones