As I approach the end of Spider-Man: The Movie, I guess I can review it properly. It's not a particularly deep game, just a sporadically-inspired action romp. I wonder if it was rushed to ride the crest of Spider-Man movie hype (uh, yeah), because there's so many times that the game comes up short. The downsides aren't powerful enough to wreck the game entirely, thankfully... just a couple of key places that make you frown and hope for a fixed sequel.
The game follows the plot of the movie, in a roundabout way. You start out as an un-costumed Peter Parker for the training levels, and even have a run in his spider-prototype togs. Through cutscenes, you confront Uncle Ben's killer and put on the v2.0 tights. Since the movie has only one boss villain, Green Goblin, the game throws in Shocker, Scorpion and the Vulture... all suffering from a tacked-on feel. As a comics fan, I loved going against the other enemies anyway, but they never really mesh with the movie's "new hero in training" vibe.
The action occurs mainly in infiltration-like levels, where Spidey sneaks into an office building or sewer or secret lab and has to make his way to the given goal points. These levels are always packed with generic thugs and occasional robots that you must dispatch with the usual punching, kicking and webbing.
The attack animations are varied, much improved over the older generation versions. Jumping onto a bad guys shoulders and punching him in the head while they try to ram you into a wall is a hoot. Throughout the game, you collect gold spider tokens that add new attack combos to your repertoire. I found active selection of the three-button combos very difficult. Perhaps you'll find a few you like and become fluent in them, but I tended to resort to button mashing in most situations.
But punching and kicking (as fun and primal as they are), are not the meat of being Spider-Man. His webbing is. Believe me, when I browsed the manual on my way out of Toys R Us, I fell to the ground and kissed Mother Earth when I saw that the webbing controls were changed. Web attacks are much much easier to pull off in S-M:T M than they were in the PSX/N64 games. Instead of having lightning reflexes and a prehensile tail, you can now use the Left shoulder button as a shift key, and combine that with a regular attack button to pull off a particular web attack. Now if you intend to do a Web Dome, you won't end up doing Web Gloves instead... or, more likely, just jerking Spidey ineffectually to the right. The L-shift idea makes webbing a viable option, not just a lucky break.
That said, web attacks still feel sidelined. Yes, I use the dome when surrounded, and impact webbing when I can, but I still feel that the game would be happier if I just stuck with punching and kicking. However, where the webbing has been vastly improved - and thus made much more useful - is in transportation.
The zipline move is more fluid than ever... a great way to escape a baddie dogpile or just zip around all the tight annoying corridors you'll be stuck in. And if the hallway is big enough, you'll even be allowed to web-swing your way through, just like in the outside levels.
The levels have various goals. Some ask you to keep to the shadows, unseen (my favorite indoor challenge.) One has you collecting computer passkey elements, resulting in a matching puzzle that I still don't understand; Rhonda had to solve that one for me. The climb up Vulture's tower is unnecessarily tough, as is the warehouse fight against the big Oscorp robot. The help-a-deranged-Scorpion level is hit or miss, because you have to protect Scorpion and he will completely disappear at times. The Subway station level where you have to protect several innocents felt the most "Spider-Man-like" to me (very realistic-seeming architecture in that one), but it suffers from the most disruptive and frequent cutscenes.
One big problem in these indoor arenas is that it's very easy to confuse the game's camera, especially if you're spider-crawling from wall to ceiling and vice-versa. When the camera messes you up, it's best to run off into a safe area where you can re-orient... and if you're being chased by enemies, where you can re-position yourself to face their attacks.
The stinky camera works much better in the few exterior missions. I enjoyed the outside levels quite a bit, more so than the indoor missions. In the outside levels, you're constantly web-swinging, with the freedom to crawl on the sides and rooftops of the many skyscrapers. The camera will sweep along behind you... and if you enable the target lock, it will allow Spidey to rotate around the locked enemy, which makes high-altitude stunting easy and fun. Most of this game's coolest levels involve you going after an airborne baddie, where you have to get the hang of using the target lock to home in your midair kicks, punches and webbing. It's exhilirating to web-swing your way in close, then let go of the webline so you fall towards the target, smack the kick button for a well-timed bash while in freefall, then spray out another webline to get back your lost height. The Vulture and flying Goblin levels are hugely fun.
One drawback to the outdoor levels is that the age-old invisible barrier becomes sadly obvious. If you try to webswing out of the level's bounds, you'll get a snide comment from Tobey Maguire and an automatic 180 back around. And - although the city levels do have a "floor" this time around, complete with cars and passerby sound samples - if you get to close to the bottom, you'll fall out and die. Someday we'll get a GTA3-styled Spider-Man, where you can webswing all the way to the island's edge and fall all the way down to the street.
I thought the graphics and sound were passable. There's nothing outrageously impressive, but nothing egregiously terrible either. The draw distance is usually spot-on when you're outside. The wealth of sound samples is nice, and the use of actual movie actors Maguire and Willem Dafoe is great... considering that without them, we have very little reason to even call this a movie-based game. Bruce Campbell does all the training, bonus, and hint audio... in a less sardonic artist, these tracks would have come out cheesy and annoying, but Bruce - being The Man - understands how to deliver them in appropriately funny ways.
The only really embarrassing moment is your first ground fight against Goblin. He leaps on your head in a strange, stiff sort of moon-jump. It looks very silly and it's extremely damaging. You do not want to attack him close, if only to avoid seeing his ridiculous pixie-hop.
Bonuses include secret cheat codes, Pinhead Bowling, production artwork galleries, and some hidden animation tests. You get most of them based on your accumulated point score.
Overall, it's a great action game. As far as super-hero games go, it's outstanding. I think the developers would like it to be a finesse game, but it's not. Combat is too quick to utilize all the web abilities and fight combos with any degree of planning.
