Spider-Man 3 (Wii)

After Spider-Man 2 for the PS2, XBOX and GC I’m surprised at how much a game can go backwards. This game brings nothing new to the great Spider-man formulae. Unfortunately the game reeks of movie cash in. The whole game looks rigid and square and with a terrible draw distance, you can expect buildings to appear from nowhere right in front of you. Environments are bad and characters are even worse, there are only a few pedestrian models meaning you’ll see one person in a street and on the next corner you’ll see them again. Even sound falls into this pit of despair as characters sometimes sound exactly like each other or even say the wrong things at the wrong times.

We have to give credit to the developers for trying to get to grips with the Wii technology, but it’s as if they forgot about the buttons and tried to map everything to flailing about as if you’re on fire. Admittedly the web swinging is cool; by using both the wii remote and the nunchuk a player can web swing with much more freedom than before, however when it feels like you’re swinging through the most horrible rendition of New York in Spider-game the novelty soon wears off. After sort of nailing web swinging, they go too far with the Wii loving and mapped combat to shaking the remote side to side. Shaking the remote doesn’t quite give off the impression of being an agile super hero pulling of controlled combos, you feel more like a gorilla upset because he can’t get any bananas. The level up system is pretty good, with a web where intersections give extra skills and improvements, meaning your spider man will be completely different from some one else’s spider man. Then there’s the black symbiotic suit, that increases the strength and speed of Spider-man while at the same time you gain rage which means eventually the player will pass out. To get rid of the black suit the player will have to waggle the wii remote in certain directions to wrench the suit from Spidey’s body.

All in all, this game is an embarrassment to the world’s greatest super hero. With a little more time and polish, this game could have been much better than what it is, which is unfortunately terrible.