Web Stinker.
By PaulEMoz

If there’s one thing Spiderman has been good for over the years, it’s being squeezed into videogame form on almost every platform known to man. From the Atari VCS right up to the current generation, if it’s had a joystick or D-pad and buttons, it’s had a Spidey game. Rather than a spider, he must feel a bit like a prize Friesian by now; he’s been milked so much.

Still, any game that gives you the chance to soar through a city like a Metropolitan Tarzan has to be worth a shot, and as is usually the case with a Spiderman game, that sense of freedom and feeling of exhilaration is enough to draw you in. It doesn’t last.

Spidey rushed to the rescue of the man that ate the out-of-date Ready Brek.

One of the main problems is that, much like Spiderman 2, you spend a lot of time just swinging around the city, doing the same old boring stuff, like rescuing clueless citizens from fire escapes. I mean, it’s still a noble cause, but really it’s beneath a superhero in his own game. It’s just not heroic enough. And there are other issues.

I’ll be honest; I don’t read comic books. Judging by this game, Ultimate Spiderman must be based on the whiny teenage years of Spidey. To me, having to beat a taunting Johnny Storm in a race around the city just to unlock the next section seems a little childish, and reduces the game (at times) to a superhero version of The OC.

“I really loved him, but then he told me he was into swinging.”

When you’re not racing from point to point, taking the umpteenth sick person to hospital, or putting idiots back on the ground where they belong, the game is decent. The story sections are by far the best parts of the game, but they’re too few and far between. They do seem to ramp up a bit as you get further into the game, but even then you’ll find yourself dying over and over again at first, and the enjoyment of a big battle will soon turn to frustration.

I’m not overly keen on the way the game handles the Venom sections either. They make the game feel disjointed, although again, things seem to come together as you get further into the game. And from the first major fight you have as Venom early on, it seems as though they’ve just tried to shoehorn stuff in as a way to appeal to a cross-section of Marvel fans. It comes across as a cynical attempt to broaden the reach of the game for sales purposes.

Silver Surfer says, “Stop blindly throwing your money at cynical cash-ins,
foolish mortals.”

There’s a load of unlockable stuff here for Spider-fans. That’s not handled very well, either. For instance, you can unlock piles of classic Spiderman comic book covers. However, all you can do is view them: they sit there at a funny angle on the screen and you cannot manipulate them in any way. No zooming in, nothing.

Same goes for the characters. Every time you encounter a new character, their model becomes available from the options screen. But all you can do is watch them spin on the spot. Let’s face it, when you can unlock character models, the only thing you want to do with them is zoom in on the cartoon cleavage. Here, there’s absolutely no interaction at all, making features such as this rank barely one step above “pointless”.

So you’re not going to let me ogle your tits? Well, that was a waste of time.

Superhero games are getting better, that’s for sure. But by and large, they still don’t give you enough out-of-the-ordinary things to do, where you feel as though you ARE that superhero. The Hulk game last month got that just about right; Ultimate Spiderman falls a little bit short. It’s been getting rave reviews in most places, but for a superhero game, to be frank, I don’t see what’s so super about it at all.

November 2005

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