When I reviewed the first movie-based Spider-Man game, I made the comment that "someday we'll get a GTA3-styled Spider-Man game" after noting that Spidey could not touch ground in that one. I honestly don't recall if I knew anything about the sequel when I wrote that, so maybe it was an inspired act of foretelling because Spider-Man 2 is that game. Or maybe the first one was so annoying in its limitations that the step to a free-roaming gameworld was obvious.
Either way, Spider-Man 2 is a vastly different game from its predecessor... so much so that comparing the two is pointless. The first game was the usual linear level paths with fun combat and useless webbing... this one is unassisted exploration with boring combat and the most fun you'll ever have web-swinging.
That's really the end of it. Web-swinging through a minimally detailed NYC is what drives this game. And it is fun enough to support it, although I realize it doesn't sound it. The combat, missions, and awful awful boss fights are the flaw in the ointment, a textbook case of bad design that only serves to slow down all the fun you'll have web-swinging. Keep on reading if you want more complaining.
Spider-Man 2 includes all of the movies major plot points - really, all of them, exactly one of which will be a surprise if you've already seen the sadly overedited movie trailer - and tosses in the expected minor league villains for the sake of a couple extra challenges. Can't really call them "levels" anymore because Spider-Man 2 is largely a "level-less" game, existing almost entirely on free-roaming exploration of the city and randomly-generated crime missions. Stopping street crimes (purse snatchings, break-ins, road rage drivers, etc) gets your hero points, and every couple hero point brackets triggers a new plotline mission to appear.
The random crimes are initally intriguing - you'll be swinging along and hear someone call for help - but they quickly pale. For one, there's not that many different crime events, so there's a ton of repetition. (Especially since you need tens of thousands of hero points to proceed and most street crimes generate 150 damn points.) But you can't really fault them too much on that because what game doesn't repeat crap over and over again? You play Soul Calibur, you're kicking things. You play Mario, you're jumping on things. You play Halo, you're shooting things. What makes it work is when the repetition is A) fun in and of itself, or B) you get better at it either by in-game enhancements or real-world skill.
Here's where the random crimes of Spider-Man 2 fall short... yes, you get to "buy" fancier attacks and abilities for Spider-Man, but very few of them are any more effective than simply dodge-attack-attack-attack. There's a laundry list of web moves and combo attacks, but they get so stupidly button-dependent that you will never use them. F that. Just like the first game, we have a pile of supposedly amazing attacks that you'll never be able to pull off. Blah.
The only upgrades worth getting are the overall ability ones that makes him swing faster and run up walls longer. Having a four button combo just to tie a baddie up in web fluid and hang him from a lamppost is both impossible and unnecessary.
But you'll probably buy them all anyway because what else are you going to spend your vaunted hero points on? Plus, sometimes you get lucky and manufacture a cool move in the midst of all that frenzied button mashing. I'm wondering two things: either developers accept that all these impossible moves are useless fluff and leave them out, or they adopt a system like in Wolverine's Revenge... an utterly horrible game wth sweet-looking kill moves that were essentially randomly chosen as long as you hit the Strike! button.
Then there's Spider Sense and Spidey Senses. Spider Sense is great in a city where even average thugs can Remo Williams your web shooting (which pisses me off.) When an enemy is about to swing or shoot, your head lights up... so you hit the dodge button and then counter with an attack of your own. For some extra-special NYC street thugs, dodging/countering is the only way to kill them. Did you get that? Spider-Man can't attack certain normal, everyday purse-snatchers without waiting for them to throw the first punch. Ugh.
Spider-Senses is a slow-motion Bullet Time mode. You build up your time meter by performing cool webswinging tricks (which is not hard at all) and then turn on your Senses when you want them in a fight. Spider Time gives you more time to react on a counter, and enables certain combo attacks that can't otherwise be performed (again, who cares about that.) It does look cool, and it often provides the edge you need in a game war against 10 foes who can all dodge your web shooting (GAH.)
So combat basically turns into a classic Final Fight sort of thing, where you pretty much have a jump button and an attack button and that's plenty. And again, you're going to be doing a lot of this sort of thing, so make peace with so-so fighting controls right now. Like I said, you're in this for the swinging, but I'm saving that for the end of the review.
I can't recall a single boss fight that didn't completely suck. Really. Rhino and Shocker are okay (christ, them AGAIN?), simple pattern breakers. The battle against Mysterio's floating fortress at the Statue of Liberty is a total game breaker, so good luck with that one. Every fight against Dr. Octopus involves you webbing his tentacles to the floor before you can hit him, but he can get very cheap, doing max damage to you during a sequence of hits that you often can't escape. (Although Doc Ock's movement animation is pretty nice.)
Beyond the humdrum street crimes and the atrocious boss fights, there's also a couple Daily Bugle photography missions (which could have been much cooler if you actually had to use a camera for fuck's sake, instead of just tapping a button at the appropriate Kodak Moment location), some Holy- Crap- I'm- Late- To- Meet- Mary Jane missions, a couple Chase- Super- Hot- Black Cat missions, and an unlockable arena with endurance and timed battles.
And scattered throughout the city (which is to scale, by the way, so jumping off the Empire State Building is very very cool) is sets of collectible tokens and challenges. The token sets (Hideout, Secret, Buoy, Skyscraper, Hint) are largely there for completion's sake, but I find searching for them more fun than chasing down the hundredth road raging driver (landing Spidey on a car roof is stupidly inexact) or fetching a kid's hundredth lost balloon (catching a balloon mid-air is stupidly inexact.) The challenges range from Easy to Insane, literally, and generally involve you racing through checkpoints across the map. Once you have the major speed upgrades and have gotten the hang of swinging, these can be fun... although since they are timed, they can fall under the category of "This one is completely impossible, I'm out of here."
Finishing the storyline missions puts you at 50% complete, according the game's Vice City-inspired stats tracker. So all those challenges and upgrades and whatnot make up half the game.
There is no loading. That is awesome. The entire island of Manhattan (and Roosevelt!) is available to you without any pausing. They really had to do this, because it would have been terrible to have the game pause and load while you're in mid-swing. It's bad enough in Vice City, but it would totally wreck the ballet-like elegance of a good web-swing. There's even plenty of buildings you can enter, which are better decorated on the inside than on the out.
The trade-off for this is that the graphics are pretty lousy. The buildings are nondescript, generic textures. (Ironically, this NYC has almost no landmarks.) The people are awful low-poly models, made all the more noticeable by an embarrassing zoom-in when they give you a crime mission to solve. But you know what, I'll take that trade. And just close my eyes when you have to talk to someone.
Movie stars Tobey Maguire, Kirsten Dunst and Alfred Molina all reprise their roles. Dunst is fine, although her in-game model is not... Molina is great... Maguire sucks. If he was not Mr. Tobey Maguire Movie Star, we'd all be loudly mocking his sleepy, monotone performance. Since he is, I guess he gets a free pass. Regardless, he comes off dull and droning. I don't care if he is the Movie Spidey. I want a Game Spidey to have an exciting, actiony voice. Not once does he sound like Spider-Man; he just sounds like some guy who wishes he could have landed a hobbit role.
The pedestrian voices are varied, but lame. You'll hear lots of different voices (although not all recorded under the same audio conditions, bleah) but they usually all say the same thing based on the current event. Illusion dropped.
But the swinging. The blissful, relaxing swinging. Sure, the special moves are impossible, half the challenges are too hard, collecting buoy tokens means constantly drowning, the graphics are mediocre, the bosses are awful... but the swinging. You can seriously enjoy the swinging and let everything else slide right off. First of all, you have to have a building (or something) nearby and above you to swing, decidedly answering the age-old Spider-Man question "What's his web-line attached to?" Secondly, there's a whole series of intuitive, physics-accurate (maybe) controls to finesse your swinging. This is the one thing this game does superbly well. Lucky for them it's most of your playtime.
You'll dive off the tallest building and shoot out a webline at the last second. You'll launch yourself through an intersection and zip out a 90-degree turn on a dime. You'll whip around corners, threading skyscrapers like needles. You'll hurl yourself at a building, go into a wall-run for a block, then take to the webs again. You will learn to think like Spider-Man, and that is an amazing feat.
The web-swinging is so great that it makes up for one final problem: how silly it looks when Spidey is running along the sidewalk amongst the normies.
Super hero games aren't exactly a killer genre, because it's very difficult to take the fantasy of the comics and turn it into a full featured game. There's a very normal game here. Fruitless combo attacks, repetitive missions, collecting random objects. Spider-Man 2 is definitely the peak accomplishment, but it rides exclusively on that wonderful wonderful web-swinging.
