$10 More For This?!
Collector or no, there's not a big enough Spidey fan out there that would feel they got their money's worth on this deal.
Published: May 9, 2007
By far, though, my biggest gripe with the game is the overall presentation, and in particular the visuals. There are times when you're screaming around downtown and the music is blaring and you've got the perfect flow of speed boosts and charged jumps and Spidey is twisting and flipping and contorting himself and it all just feels great, but those moments are the overwhelming minority unless you count the non-interactive cutscenes, which still absolutely drip with attention to detail in how at least the suited-up Parker moves. Instead, any time you head inside, you get to fight with the camera while you try to disarm bombs or fight enemies in close quarters. The camera sucks for anything but open-air web swinging, and I almost instantly dreaded any mission bit that had me heading inside.
From the nauseatingly bad way wall crawling is presented with a whipping, unwieldy angle to the basic lack of detail on most of the character models in the game (yes, they're normal mapped so they have wrinkles on the clothes, but little else) to the flat, lifeless feel of the city and its buildings, this doesn't have the feel of a next-gen game -- and that's not even counting how crap the framerate can get, even in standard def (break a crate or something in 720p and watch the world slow to a crawl). Tobey Maguire is sorta bug-eyed in real-life, but when J.K. Simmons' digital rendition of J. Jonah Jameson is more bug-eyed and stiffly animated than Tobey, you know there are some weird priorities in the modeling department.
And it should be noted that not only are the likenesses, but the actual voices (all save for Kirsten Dunst, who is subbed in by Kari "Sexy Female Voice" Wahlgren) for the main characters are all reprised by their big-screen counterparts. Once again, Maguire is sort of excused a little for his half-comatose delivery since that's how he talks in real life, but everyone else just sort of seemed to go through the motions too, which bummed me out. Even the consistently awesome Bruce Campbell just didn't seem to pop with the same kind of humor as he did while narrating the previous games.
Of all the cast, I'm guessing that Topher Grace, who actually knows the comics, would have jumped at the chance to flesh out Eddie Brock/Venom, but Spidey's ultimate nemesis has arguably the fewest number of lines of any of the characters. Even if he did have lines, though, it's likely that it wouldn't have mattered given how fast and loose Treyarch played with the actual storyline and character development.
If nothing else, though, the game certainly sounds like the movies. The squirt of Spidey's webs, the rush of air while bombing around the city, the surprisingly accomplished score by Tobias Enhus that was done just for the game (it's not quite Danny Elfman, but then he hasn't done the music for the movies either since the first one), all of these things have the kind of pop and clarity that you'd hope for. If you have a decent 5.1 system, you'll get it pumping through all channels too, and the meaty, muffled thump of punches and kicks, kissed with a light whipping sound, will give your subwoofer a nice workout too.
Maybe we're just seeing a repeat of what happened with the PS2 Spidey releases. Maybe Treyarch is still finding their feet and messing with what works, but given how much of a leap Spider-Man 2 was over the first game, it's hard to think that the next game in the series will put Spider-Man 3 to shame -- at least in terms of scale. All it would really take to shame it otherwise, would be improved combat, a completely new indoor camera, a storyline that actually appreciates and develops the characters, more stuff to do in the city beyond collecting tokens and kicking car engines... well, you get the idea. Nobody will bag on how good swinging around the city feels, but for $60 (or more if you go for the near-worthless Collector's Edition), the game needed more... well, game.
