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Treyarch follows up with a promising sequel. Spider-Man 2 was praised for its excellent recreation of New York City and for being the first game to truly nail the experience of swinging like Spider-Man. Even though Spider-Man 2 set the bar quite high, Spider-Man 3 looks like it will be another top-notch game to add to your collection.
As with previous games, Spider-Man 3 follows the film’s plot with additional sequences thrown in. The movie’s villains—Sandman, Green Goblin, and Venom—are included as part of the main storyline but there are also many additional plot lines based on the comic book. For instance, one of these plot lines involves Scorpion and another tasks you with lowering Manhattan’s crime—more on the latter in a second. The demo Activision allowed us to play showcased many of the game’s new features. It consisted of a tutorial on swinging and combat, an interactive cinematic against the Green Goblin, a fight against one of the game’s gangs, a race against Scorpion, and a fight against Sandman. We were also able to use the game’s new spider sense system (which works similar to the goggle filters in the Splinter Cell games) to detect hidden items and enemies.
Treyarch was wise to not tinker with the swinging mechanism too much since it worked so well in the previous game. Nonetheless, Spider-Man is faster and more acrobatic in this game. For instance, you can swing around poles with ease. Combat is also faster-paced and more fulfilling thanks to a quicker Spider-Man and a greater variety of moves. Dodging and counter-attacking is emphasized in the game since Spider-Man’s spider sense goes off before he’s going to be attacked, which gives you opportunity to dodge or counterattack. The biggest change to the combat engine is the addition of the black suit. When you’re donning the black suit, Spider-Man is more powerful and fills up a rage meter as he attacks. When this meter is full, Spider-Man basically loses it but becomes incredibly powerful—something very helpful for boss fights. When playing in the standard red-and-blue suit, attacking also fills up a different meter that enables you to use stronger attacks.
The interactive cinematics are essentially what they sound like. Similar to Call of Duty 3 or God of War, the game will move into a cinematic and require button presses at specific moments. If you hit the buttons at the right time everything moves smoothly and works well. These interactive cinematics provided some of the demo’s biggest “wow” moments such as struggling in the air against the Green Goblin (while playing as Peter) and jumping through lasers as Spider-Man.
The gang fight and Scorpion race were helpful in reinforcing combat and swinging skills. Interestingly, there’s a very cool minigame before the Scorpion mission that will bring a smile to many Spider-Man fans. Lastly, the fight against Sandman was epic. Aside from simply fighting this guy, you have to try to throw him (and avoid being thrown) into subways that come and go throughout the battle. If you plan your moves and counterattacks carefully, you can even grab his head and hold it out so that it is grinded on by the moving subway. And if you plan it really carefully you can even throw him in front of the subway. It was an enjoyable change of pace from previous fights and showed the potential for other boss fights.
Activision also showed us the new 3D map in the game. It is an overheard version of the actual city—complete with all of its architecture. It looks quite good, especially when you transition from the actual game to the map. Areas of the city that are facing strong gang violence will be highlighted in red giving you the choice of stopping it now or putting it off until later. Be warned, though, that you’ll eventually have to put an end to the crime since the city’s citizen satisfaction index (CSI) is tied into how much crime is in the city.
Visually, the game is shaping up quite well. The highlight of the graphics is undoubtedly the recreation of Manhattan. While it was impressive in Spider-Man 2, this sequel takes it to unprecedented heights. All of the buildings have realistic textures and lighting effects and the game’s draw distance seems to go on forever. Swinging to the top of a building and free falling is quite a sight. Spider-Man’s character model is also more detailed, shinier, and nimbler than he has ever been. The same applies to Sandman and Scorpion, who is unbelievably detailed in this iteration. While the other enemies don’t share the same level of detail, they look quite good overall.
Activision told us that the main game will be more or less then same for both the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. The Xbox 360, of course, will include unlockable achievements and the PS3 version will have some Sixaxis functionality. The PS3 collector’s edition, however, will include the Green Goblin as an unlockable, playable character. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to play that part of the game.
Overall, Spider-Man 3 is shaping up to be another must-have from what we have seen. If Treyarch is able to make the other boss fights and missions as compelling as the ones we saw, and flesh out the game with varied crime missions it has a sure-fire winner on its hands. -- Jose Liz, PGNx Media
---- Apr 5, 2007
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