Look! Up in the sky…it's a bird! It's a plane… No! It's Supermonkey throwing his copy of Spider-Man 2 out the window. *sigh* Never before had I felt this positive about a movie-to-game licensed title. I really thought Treyarch could pull it off. Unfortunately, as you'll discover in this review, I found this not to be the case. I had seen a preview of it over at GH HQ, and I even got a little hands-on time with it. At the time I thought, What great fun! I can swing around *anywhere* in New York as everyone's favorite web-slinger! This is awesome! And it is awesome…for about an hour's worth of play time. Then the thrill of swinging around the faithfully replicated New York City-scape begins to become mundane with each passing swing. Oh sure, there are challenges (read: some form of race; either wall-sprinting, wall-jumping, or circles you must pass through using any means necessary) for you to complete, with regular times to beat, and MEGA times, which are insanely difficult to come in under. But we'll get into more gameplay details in a second…for now let's simply continue…

A Swinging Time in the Old Town Tonight

In the gameplay department, the engine boasts many options for you to get more in the shoes of Spide…er, the suit of Spide…er, the webs of Spide…er, never mind, there's a lot of options, okay? The problem with the options you have is that none of them are very interesting for very long. In terms of what you run around doing, there are many street level missions available to you, which are handed out by citizens on the street. The missions consist of citizens in distress for you to stop and help; there are road raging drivers for you to halt (by pounding on their cars, no less! Um…shouldn't we find another way to halt road ragers? Perhaps pick up the back of their cars, in classic superhero style, or webbing up their tires or steering wheel? I found it a little funny to be stopping road rage with "Spider rage"…); children's stray balloons for you to return to the little tykes who lost them; muggings to thwart; ambushes to fall prey to and then foil; falling citizens to rescue; and some other random Challenges for you to face.

The main story loosely revolves around events in the summer blockbuster, with the notable exceptions being where other Spider-Man villains pop up, such as The Rhino, Shocker, and Quentin Beck/Mysterio. Also appearing in the game, though nowhere to be found in the movie is Black Cat. The game consists of 15 chapters for the main part of it, with two "Chapters" following those. The chapters which featured interacting with Black Cat were some of my favorites. When you first meet Cat you suspect her of being a thief, but as the story progresses you eventually come to trust her to fight crime in her own unique way. The game's story plays up a love triangle between Black Cat, Mary Jane, and Peter Parker/Spider-Man (no not THAT kind of love triangle, you sickos! That's in Spider-Man XXX!), but fails to hit the emotional buttons that the movie deftly pushed. And unfortunately advancing the story doesn't really help you hone your basic skills in the game as Spider-Man, you must hone those on your own time. And that's another pitfall of this game; the difficulty quickly ramps up to ludicrous levels too early, then relaxes, and then gets even more insanely difficult; the kind of insane that other insane people aspire to…(okay---that's me paraphrasing a Spidey line from the game…which he utters during one of the insanely difficult missions…ironic, no?)

For those wishing to get out and about in the city and do stuff, there are a lot of things to get out and collect, and Challenges to try to beat a time in. The Challenges consist of wall-sprinting, wall-jumping, swinging, or touching a certain spot, which looks like a glowing circle, on the ground far away. The aforementioned things to collect are exploration tokens (secret, skyscraper, hideout, and buoy), and information/tip icons. Most of the hint icons are voiced by Bruce Campbell, who returns as the voice of the Tour Guide. I say most of them because I would find tokens with no audio on them at all, but the text was still there.

That's the problem with this game---it's so near being great, as in, one of the greatest of all time, but it falls short because of drastically poor gameplay in certain areas, i.e. the main story! What I mean by this is, yes, swinging around the city is certainly awesome for the first couple of times you're trying it out, but it by no means assures that the rest of the game is as enjoyable. The main problem with this game is the lack of stuff to do during the main game until after the main game is over…*then* the Arcade gets unlocked, as well as the Daily Bugle missions, Mary Jane's missions, and the Pizza Delivery missions. To have these options available while the main game was being played through would have been a better way to go. Why you can do these things in GTA, but not in this GTA clone slapped over with a Spider-Man movie license is puzzling. The gameplay cloning aspect was fitfully transparent; why not go all the way with it? Why not allow players a reprieve from the main story and allow them access to these trivial side quests that indubitably break up the "been there, done that" gameplay of the main game? The answer simply eludes me.

Spider…Sense…Tingling…In A Bad Way…

Unfortunately, the game doesn't even boast some great graphics to bolster the lackluster gameplay mechanics. In every in-game animation I saw, there were some choppy motions---poor Spidey looked like he was having an epileptic fit! And something else I noticed about the in-game cinematics versus the pre-rendered cinematic cut scenes is that the pre-rendered character models don't look like the actors, but the in-game ones do? That was fairly jarring to me. In the texture department, I would have to say that the game suffers from poor texture work as well. The civilian character models also needed some additional work before they could have been considered passable according to today's industry standards.

As previously stated, the game environment is a fairly extensive recreation of New York City, complete with Roosevelt Island, Ellis Island, and the Statue of Liberty. This fact alone is very impressive. There are no loading times to speak of, unless you venture into a location such as the Daily Bugle. The faithful rendering of New York is awesome and a joy to swing around in. It's too bad that the gameplay couldn't have showcased more of the environment in more interesting ways other than just racing around touching or swinging or jumping through glowing circles.

A.I., A.I. Owe You, You! I Sometimes Cry…

The A.I. in this game suffers from what many games suffer from---when there are people who are in the vicinity who should have the ability to help your character; they rarely are programmed to do so. For example, if you are fighting a gang of thugs while a police officer is nearby, they never help. Citizens in the street (or in one of the Hideouts) don't run away while an all-out Spider Brawl is happening, etcetera. The only useful A.I. character in the game, I feel, is Black Cat, who helps you stop an auction of Power Armor Weapons of Mass Destruction *insert joke about the President here, if you so choose*. If it wasn't for the Cat, my career as Spider-Man wouldn't have been lasting very long indeed. Of course her incessant prodding during the final Shocker mission was a bit tiresome, but you take the good with the bad…

The Sound of Disappointment

The cast of voices include Alfred Molina as Otto Octavius/Doc Ock, Kirsten Dunst as Mary Jane Watson, and Tobey Maguire as Peter Parker/Spider-Man. I must say that Tobey is definitely getting the hang of the Spider-Man character, the more he re-visits the character. I found myself actually laughing at some of the classic Spidey one-liners (his interactions with Mysterio were particularly funny to me) that Maguire pulled off quite nicely. The rest of the voice acting population in the game doesn't fare so well, and the other voices are either really cheesy or just suffer from plain bad acting---the J. Jonah Jameson in the game sounds a pale imitation of his movie glory (in the movies J.J. is portrayed by J.K. Simmons---it sounded as though the voice acting director told the actor to sound as much like J.K. Simmons as he could---he uh, failed.). Exceptional voice acting standouts in this game are Holly Fields and Bethany Rhoades, the actresses who voice Black Cat and Betty Brandt, respectively. The webbing sounds are good, but the wall-climbing sound has got to go…it sounds like an octopus with butter on its tentacles trying to climb a glass wall…just, trust me, it's bad. The fighting sounds bad…it just doesn't sound like a guy hitting another guy, where's my BAM! ZOK! and who could forget KA-POW!? The gunshots are horrible and are reminiscent of old school NES gunshot sounds, I know retro is cool, but come on people…

Squash It, Crumple It Up In Tissue Paper, and Flush It Down the Toilet

It's amazing to me to think back playing through the whole game just to give ol' Spidey a fair shot. I mean, I *wanted* to like this game so bad. If I were rating it purely on it being a "Spider-Man Swinging through New York" simulation game, then I'd give it a 10, but the gameplay isn't deep enough to warrant much more than the scores you see here. I mean, after sitting through the grueling game difficulty, the boring street level missions, the unrewarding Challenges, I have to be fair and honest at the end of the day and ask myself what rating to give this game---I only give games a rating they deserve. And the answer to the game rating is that I truly was expecting something amazing to come out of this title, to hearken to the titular hero's Title often given to Spider-Man. The only Amazing thing about this Spider-Man is that it's somehow hoodwinked others into believing it is a good game. Unfortunately, it's not.