Spiderman 2
Spiderman, Spiderman, does whatever a pedestrian can.
by Susie Vee

PLATFORM: XBX, PS2, GC

PUBLISHER: Activision

DEVELOPER: Treyarch

GENRE: Action

ESRB: Teen

Since the Spiderman 2 movie is leaps and bounds above the original flick, it’s heartening to see that the Spiderman 2 game is also an improvement on the previous title.

Not that there was anything wrong with the first Spiderman movie tie-in. It followed the successful strategy of the previous Activision Spiderman games for PS1, adding the costumes and voices from the film. It looked great, too, and was one of the first big movie-based titles for the current console generation.

Now, with Spiderman 2, Activision and developer Treyarch have added some surprising new twists to the bitten-by-a-radioactive-spider genre. Taking a cue from the great success of Grand Theft Auto and its copycats, Spidey 2 offers us a first for a superhero game – a free-roaming, life-size city.

As Peter Parker and his costumed alter-ego, you can wander around a huge chunk of Manhattan, from the southern tip to Harlem. The city is done in about half scale, so going from SoHo to Times Square is only about 20 blocks, not 42, but the effect is still fairly convincing.

As NYC natives, we’d have to point out that, like almost every other game based on a real city, the New York in Spiderman 2 is not very accurate. Streets are fairly random, and buildings and shops are cookie cutter. But many major landmarks are represented, even if they’re not always in the right place. We were pleasantly surprised to find a realistic representation of Stuyvesant Town, but puzzled by the absence of Union Square. There’s also a WTC memorial site, which is situated a little too close to the river.

You can even visit Roosevelt Island (which no New Yorkers ever actually do), but alas, there’s no tram – just a bridge.

Gameplay is a combination of missions, like the ones in the previous Spiderman games, and random crimes you can choose to get involved in or not (but that’s not very heroic of you, is it?)

The crimes are all very similar in nature, and expose some of the game’s shortcomings, most of which can be attributed to the game trying to do too much. There are only a handful of crime types – the armored car heist, the police car chase, etc. – and once you’ve seen them, the only reason to keep on fighting the same crooks is to earn enough points to move the story along.

The story is great – combining the plot of the film with other Spidey villains, like The Rhino and Mysterio. But it takes far too much swinging from one end of town to the other and gathering “hero points” to get the plot to move along. But, at least that swinging is much improved over the previous games as well. This time, since the city is fully realized, from the rooftops to the streets, you have to swing by attaching your webs to real-life objects. It takes a little getting used to, but is hugely satisfying once you get the hang of it.

Tobey McGuire, Alfred Molina and Kirsten Dunst add a nice touch to the voice acting, especially Tobey and his random quips as you speed around town. But most of the other actors from the film are missing – and the replacement J. Jonah Jameson is downright sad. We dug the addition of the Black Cat as a foil for Spidey, but her outfit seems to have come straight out of a Dead or Alive game.

The graphics, even on the Xbox, can be a little blocky at times, but that’s understandable, as the game presents you with several square miles of Manhattan with no loading times.

Despite these problems, Spiderman 2 is a wildly ambitious game that has more than enough content to keep most gamers engaged for many hours of web-swinging fun.