Spider-Man 2
G'head, take New York for a spin... Just don't expect anything mind-blowing.
Published: July 25, 2004
Hey, how bout that Spider-Man 2 movie, eh? If you haven't seen it yet, it's probably best that you stop reading this now and head out to see it. It's cool, we'll chill here and wait for you....... Hey, anyone want a beer? Yeah, that part was awesome. Anyone want a smoke? Naw, I don't smoke ciga--HEY, you're back! So, bitchin' movie, eh? What? You don't use bitchin' anymore? Bogus.
Anywho, Spider-Man 2 the movie is the shizniggity. The game, however, is another story. Yes, you get to swing around New York, built to vertical scale in a way that hasn't been seen before. Yes, you'll hurtle through the city with animation ripped straight from the movies. Yes, you'll rock ol' Spidey's powers the way you should be able to, but even with all this freedom, the game still feels amazingly... well, boring.
Let me explain. For those that haven't quite caught on yet, Spider-Man 2 the game loosely follows the events of Spider-Man 2 the movie. To help pad things, classic Spidey villains like The Shocker, Rhino and Mysterio are peppered throughout the events that would normally make up the movie. Developer Treyarch did a decent job of modeling the various environments like the Daily Bugle, Peter Parker's apartment, and a handful of other scenes and locales more of less as approximations of the sets you'll see in the movie. They also scattered the city with various challenges, be they time trial races around the city, hint markers that give you nuggets of wisdom, various pedestrians that call out for help, or random crimes that you can just sort of come upon while swinging around the city.
The problem is, the pedestrian missions are endlessly repetitive, involving a store robbery, a person dangling from a building, an ambush, an armored car holdup, a police shootout, a police chase, a lost balloon, a sinking ship or a main game villain henchman attack. The random crimes you can spot are break-ins, thug meetings, road ragers, purse snatchings, muggings... You get the idea. It's not that there's not a decent amount of stuff to do, it's that, much like my laundry list there, things quickly become rather boring.
There's also one of the game's other major shortfalls. It, um falls short. As in time required to complete it. Oh, Treyarch spent many an hour placing hint markers and race challenges around the city in little nooks and crannies, but the storyline actually cuts out at about halfway through the game. It's then up to you to try to stop all the random crime in the city, deliver pizzas, race to meet up with Mary Jane, snap photos for the Daily Bugle, etc. etc.
The problem is, with all these stuff to do, there ceases to be any real motivation to do it. The main game storyline moves along so fast that you arrive at the end of it long before you've stretched your legs with all the stuff you can do besides the main story missions. Once you've beaten the story, however, the extra filler stuff is all you can and it turns something that was a nice diversion into the rest of the game, which just isn't enough to hide the fact that aside from the scale, the character models look like crap, the same half-dozen comments are uttered ad nauseum both to and by Spidey, and the game is prone to crashing (and there is no auto-save, it should be noted) right when you start to make some progress.
I'm not saying the game isn't fun in parts. Swinging around the city really doesn't ever get old, since Treyarch's team of animators absolutely nailed Spider-Man's animations. He doesn't just jump, he flings himself up and forward; when web swinging, there's the constant feeling that things are just a bit out of control, and for once it's not because of the controls; launching yourself into the air after hitting the high point of your arc results in Spidey contorting and posing with a fluid grace that just makes you feel all geeky inside. This is exactly how Spider-Man would move if the comics somehow came to life.
There's also plenty to upgrade, from combat moves to stuff you can just do to show off while swinging around the city. You can boost the number of baddies you can web up at a time, learn some fancy finishing moves (there's something evilly fun about webbing up an enemy then dashing off a high-rise, leaping out into the open air and tucking into a thousand-foot corkscrew pile driver from hell), and generally just trick out Spidey's moveset.
The problem here is that you can buy most of these moves rather early on if you fart around for an hour or so, and suddenly you have 10 new moves with no real way to learn them all before you have the opportunity to buy a bunch more. With a game that stresses a "gotta get 'em all" attitude to all the little goodies hidden around the city, it would have been a much better idea to spoon feed the moves to players so they can really see the growth in abilities.
I mentioned the graphics, and while there are some decent effects here and there (the nighttime neon-like blooms on the office buildings and reflections in windows during the day are nice), most of the game begins to look rather fugly when taken in up close. The character models are very, VERY loosely based on their real-world counterparts (meaning Doc Ock looks like Moe from the Three Stooges, Peter Parker could be any four-eyed poindexter, and MJ just looks like someone took a hubcap to her face), and some of the models, like Peter's 'roid rage linebacker geek look is just downright embarrassing. Pedestrians sport perhaps a dozen or so different looks, so there's the impression that New York is populated by clones.
The one thing I can't really knock the engine for, however, is the scale, and if nothing else, this is a wonderful building block for Treyarch to expand on this whole idea of a GTA: Spidey-type go-anywhere world. Things scale well enough, and up high, being able to look over the city and all its various skyscrapers and traffic down below is a fun novelty (even if the buildings turn to flat shaded polygons and the traffic swaps out for a network of low-res placeholder images that don't match up with the polygonal cars).
The audio is probably the strongest and weakest part of the game. Fantastic voice acting from all the characters - particularly Tobey Macguire chiming in with dead-on Spider-Man one-liners and spunky banter - and an awesome turn as star guide for Bruce Campbell who finally gets the voice time he deserves means there's plenty to love the first or even second time you hear it. Of course, like everything else, there's a down side. You'll hear most of those above mentioned one-liners at least 50 times throughout the game, and then there's the seven or eight praises or taunts from the pedestrians that, inexplicably all say the same thing, despite them coming from a couple different voices. Must be that whole clone thing.
The inclusion of KMFDM for battle and mission music was a wise one, as the thumping instrumental tracks fit perfectly with the action. Even the snippet of Danny Elfman's movie theme works well while just swinging around the city, and melds perfectly with the orchestral movements that were wrapped around cutscenes and key levels like the Black Cat rooftop chases. It's probably the one area of the game that doesn't suffer as much from crushing repetition. Sure, you'll hear the songs plenty of times, but usually it's only for a few seconds at a time.
Spider-Man 2 is a great game for the first hour or so. The sensation of swinging around New York with webbing that actually attaches to geometry (though I'm not sure why this was much of an issue; in the comics, Spidey's webs never really stick to anything, and that's just fine by me), of catapulting yourself through the air, of narrowly missing buildings or just running against them and then backflipping into your next big web swing feels damned perfect. It's just that everything else about the game, from graphics to recycled speech to those unforgivable crashes (which, incidentally happen on the Xbox version as well) show that while Treyarch has certainly come a long way since the days of Draconus: Cult of the Wyrm (yes, guys, I was fortunate enough to do PR for that game), they're still got plenty of room to grow before they can really flex that programming prowess. This is a definite rental (everyone should experience swinging around the city), but in about a month, you're going to start hating yourself if you pay full price.
Anywho, Spider-Man 2 the movie is the shizniggity. The game, however, is another story. Yes, you get to swing around New York, built to vertical scale in a way that hasn't been seen before. Yes, you'll hurtle through the city with animation ripped straight from the movies. Yes, you'll rock ol' Spidey's powers the way you should be able to, but even with all this freedom, the game still feels amazingly... well, boring.
Let me explain. For those that haven't quite caught on yet, Spider-Man 2 the game loosely follows the events of Spider-Man 2 the movie. To help pad things, classic Spidey villains like The Shocker, Rhino and Mysterio are peppered throughout the events that would normally make up the movie. Developer Treyarch did a decent job of modeling the various environments like the Daily Bugle, Peter Parker's apartment, and a handful of other scenes and locales more of less as approximations of the sets you'll see in the movie. They also scattered the city with various challenges, be they time trial races around the city, hint markers that give you nuggets of wisdom, various pedestrians that call out for help, or random crimes that you can just sort of come upon while swinging around the city.
The problem is, the pedestrian missions are endlessly repetitive, involving a store robbery, a person dangling from a building, an ambush, an armored car holdup, a police shootout, a police chase, a lost balloon, a sinking ship or a main game villain henchman attack. The random crimes you can spot are break-ins, thug meetings, road ragers, purse snatchings, muggings... You get the idea. It's not that there's not a decent amount of stuff to do, it's that, much like my laundry list there, things quickly become rather boring.
There's also one of the game's other major shortfalls. It, um falls short. As in time required to complete it. Oh, Treyarch spent many an hour placing hint markers and race challenges around the city in little nooks and crannies, but the storyline actually cuts out at about halfway through the game. It's then up to you to try to stop all the random crime in the city, deliver pizzas, race to meet up with Mary Jane, snap photos for the Daily Bugle, etc. etc.
The problem is, with all these stuff to do, there ceases to be any real motivation to do it. The main game storyline moves along so fast that you arrive at the end of it long before you've stretched your legs with all the stuff you can do besides the main story missions. Once you've beaten the story, however, the extra filler stuff is all you can and it turns something that was a nice diversion into the rest of the game, which just isn't enough to hide the fact that aside from the scale, the character models look like crap, the same half-dozen comments are uttered ad nauseum both to and by Spidey, and the game is prone to crashing (and there is no auto-save, it should be noted) right when you start to make some progress.
I'm not saying the game isn't fun in parts. Swinging around the city really doesn't ever get old, since Treyarch's team of animators absolutely nailed Spider-Man's animations. He doesn't just jump, he flings himself up and forward; when web swinging, there's the constant feeling that things are just a bit out of control, and for once it's not because of the controls; launching yourself into the air after hitting the high point of your arc results in Spidey contorting and posing with a fluid grace that just makes you feel all geeky inside. This is exactly how Spider-Man would move if the comics somehow came to life.
There's also plenty to upgrade, from combat moves to stuff you can just do to show off while swinging around the city. You can boost the number of baddies you can web up at a time, learn some fancy finishing moves (there's something evilly fun about webbing up an enemy then dashing off a high-rise, leaping out into the open air and tucking into a thousand-foot corkscrew pile driver from hell), and generally just trick out Spidey's moveset.
The problem here is that you can buy most of these moves rather early on if you fart around for an hour or so, and suddenly you have 10 new moves with no real way to learn them all before you have the opportunity to buy a bunch more. With a game that stresses a "gotta get 'em all" attitude to all the little goodies hidden around the city, it would have been a much better idea to spoon feed the moves to players so they can really see the growth in abilities.
I mentioned the graphics, and while there are some decent effects here and there (the nighttime neon-like blooms on the office buildings and reflections in windows during the day are nice), most of the game begins to look rather fugly when taken in up close. The character models are very, VERY loosely based on their real-world counterparts (meaning Doc Ock looks like Moe from the Three Stooges, Peter Parker could be any four-eyed poindexter, and MJ just looks like someone took a hubcap to her face), and some of the models, like Peter's 'roid rage linebacker geek look is just downright embarrassing. Pedestrians sport perhaps a dozen or so different looks, so there's the impression that New York is populated by clones.
The one thing I can't really knock the engine for, however, is the scale, and if nothing else, this is a wonderful building block for Treyarch to expand on this whole idea of a GTA: Spidey-type go-anywhere world. Things scale well enough, and up high, being able to look over the city and all its various skyscrapers and traffic down below is a fun novelty (even if the buildings turn to flat shaded polygons and the traffic swaps out for a network of low-res placeholder images that don't match up with the polygonal cars).
The audio is probably the strongest and weakest part of the game. Fantastic voice acting from all the characters - particularly Tobey Macguire chiming in with dead-on Spider-Man one-liners and spunky banter - and an awesome turn as star guide for Bruce Campbell who finally gets the voice time he deserves means there's plenty to love the first or even second time you hear it. Of course, like everything else, there's a down side. You'll hear most of those above mentioned one-liners at least 50 times throughout the game, and then there's the seven or eight praises or taunts from the pedestrians that, inexplicably all say the same thing, despite them coming from a couple different voices. Must be that whole clone thing.
The inclusion of KMFDM for battle and mission music was a wise one, as the thumping instrumental tracks fit perfectly with the action. Even the snippet of Danny Elfman's movie theme works well while just swinging around the city, and melds perfectly with the orchestral movements that were wrapped around cutscenes and key levels like the Black Cat rooftop chases. It's probably the one area of the game that doesn't suffer as much from crushing repetition. Sure, you'll hear the songs plenty of times, but usually it's only for a few seconds at a time.
Spider-Man 2 is a great game for the first hour or so. The sensation of swinging around New York with webbing that actually attaches to geometry (though I'm not sure why this was much of an issue; in the comics, Spidey's webs never really stick to anything, and that's just fine by me), of catapulting yourself through the air, of narrowly missing buildings or just running against them and then backflipping into your next big web swing feels damned perfect. It's just that everything else about the game, from graphics to recycled speech to those unforgivable crashes (which, incidentally happen on the Xbox version as well) show that while Treyarch has certainly come a long way since the days of Draconus: Cult of the Wyrm (yes, guys, I was fortunate enough to do PR for that game), they're still got plenty of room to grow before they can really flex that programming prowess. This is a definite rental (everyone should experience swinging around the city), but in about a month, you're going to start hating yourself if you pay full price.
