I’ll spare you the usual story about movie licences and film tie-ins. We all know how bad or simply forgettable they’ve been, so there’s no need to cover all that old ground again. What I will start by saying is that ever since I first loaded up Grand Theft Auto III back in 2001, I’ve been looking for a game that made me first of all say “Wow” out loud, and then make me want to explore the environments on offer for the sole reason that I want to find out exactly how many corners the development team has had to cut in order to make the game so huge.
Spider-Man 2: The Game is that game. From the introductory cutscenes that teach you that Tobey Maguire is giving Spidey his voice, to the first time you get control of the webslinger himself, the anticipation continues to build. When you do get dropped on to the side of a building and the quirky but humorous tutorial kicks in, you’ll notice exactly how darned far away from the ground you are. Then, the voiceover tells you to swing – and boy, do you swing. Explore the ledges and peaks of any building in an accurately recreated Manhattan, swing at lightning speed through the absolutely stunningly lit Theatre District at the dead of night, climb to the top of the tallest radio mast on the tallest 100-plus storey skyscraper in the city and leap off. If you want to do it, as a famous sports company once said, just do it. You’ll soon realise, as I did, that the developers really didn’t cut that many corners.
The game does have a basic structure, with each “Chapter” comprising of several tasks which are placed on your “To-Do” list – accessible from the pause menu. You can complete these tasks in any order that you wish and when you do, you move on to the next chapter. Simple. If you fancy taking a break from this format, just swing around the city delivering pizza to earn cash, take part in one of a bunch of race challenges, save citizens in one of several different types of side-mission, see if you can pick up all 200 green “Hint” markers or try to collect the tons of “Skyscraper Tokens” that appear at the top of the tallest buildings. There is a hell of a lot to do, and I’m pleased to say that what I’ve listed there isn’t the half of it. Just looking at the “Awards” screen, which gives you a rundown of what you have and haven’t done is enough to prove that point.
Graphically, Spider-Man 2 will knock your socks off. However hard you try to make it happen, the game refuses to show any serious pop-up, and even with nine or ten opponents on screen in melee combat, there is no slowdown to be seen – just how things should be. As a part of the game, Spider-Man is required to purchase upgrades to his skills using “Hero Points” that are collected by successfully stopping crime in it’s tracks. These upgrades are generally of use, although some can be difficult to use unless you activate Spidey’s “Spidey Sense” mode which, like bullet-time, slows down the game for a limited period and allows you to approach things with more of a strategy than if you were surrounded by crooks who are all firing bullets from semi-automatics at you at full speed.
Some things do grate in-game though. The repetitive and cheesy lines that Maguire comes out with are just too hammy to deal with at times, and also the side-missions can become repetitive too. I mean, how many armoured cars get held up at gunpoint in Manhattan every day’ And how many people need to be saved from falling twenty storeys to the floor’ In Spider-Man 2, as many as you can stomach. There seem to be only about seven or eight different types of mission, although rarely, the game sometimes does throw a curveball your way and asks you to do something different. The storyline is a fair one that places new and mildly interesting tasks at your door, but only enough to keep you interested. It feels like your path through the game is one of your own choosing, which is great, even though the chapter challenges are there to loosely guide you through to the game’s climax.
If it wasn’t for the fact that a lot of those chapter challenges feel like unadulterated filler material, we’d be looking at a perfect score. Having to complete 8 side-missions on the trot after filling up your list of tasks, just so that you have enough Hero Points to progress isn’t an ideal way of doing things, especially when those missions are so repetitive and in some cases, cruelly timed and very inconveniently positioned. Add this to the one upgrade that is generally required to be purchased on each chapter, causing you to have to sling yourself across the city to the nearest store, and you have two items on your task list that certainly wouldn’t be missed if they were absent.
But that, thankfully, doesn’t stop the game from being classed as “stunning” for the most part. Play through the game for a while and you’ll find something new that you previously wouldn’t have believed possible. As I mentioned before, climbing up to the top of the highest skyscraper is something that simply has to be tried by all. I climbed up the side of the building, snickering to myself that something would happen to throw me back down, as there was obviously no way that the game would let me do it. How wrong could I be’ I climbed, climbed some more, climbed yet more (for about two minutes) and took a leap up to what I thought was the peak. Then I realised that a radio mast was in place and clambered up it. Then a smaller radio mast…so up I ventured. And there I was, Skyscraper Token in hand, looking down on the city in it’s entirety, and I just couldn’t resist. One giant leap for Spiderkind…falling gracefully down the side of that building until I was nearly a goner, firing out a web line just a split second before becoming pavement pizza and swinging up to a ledge on the nearest building.
Astonishing, satisfying, and quite simply an experience that sums up the aesthetics of the rest of the game. As for the gameplay and storyline progression, a dash more polish could have been added, true, but even though Spider-Man 2 isn’t a perfect game, it most certainly is a damned good one that stands head and shoulders above the majority of the shelf-filling discs out there.
