Ultimate Spider-Man
Posted October 22, 2005
Spider-Man has spent most of this generation in movie adaptations or as a supporting player in games like "Rise of the Imperfects", but this latest title from Activision 
returns to the comic for inspiration. If you're unfamiliar with Marvel's "Ultimate" universe, it shrugs off the baggage of decades worth of stories and reinvents the company's classic characters. Peter Parker once again is a teenager in high school. He's not married, and there are no clones meandering around. His friends and enemies haven't died, returned, died again, returned, and...oh, why not?...died one more time. It's a back-to-basics approach that makes Spider-Man easier for new readers to dive into, and the creative team of writer Brian Michael Bendis and artist Mark Bagley have given Spidey a glossy new sheen without betraying what made the character so great in the first place.
"Ultimate Spider-Man" isn't directly based on any single storyline from the comic, but it does pick up in the wake of the Venom arc from issues 33 to 39. The game opens with Peter catching up with his childhood pal Eddie Brock, who introduces him to their inheritance: a genetically-engineered suit developed by their late fathers in the hopes of curing cancer. The 'Venom' suit is immensely powerful but uncontrollable, dominating Brock and fueling a murderously violent streak that attracts the attention of military industrialist Bolivar Trask. "Ultimate Spider-Man" doesn't just chronicle one side of the struggle between Spider-Man and Venom -- players take control of both characters in different parts of the game, pitting them against Trask and a legion of characters from the Ultimate universe.
Gameplay:
Like its predecessor, "Ultimate Spider-Man" is a free-roaming game set in a sprawling reproduction of New York City, this time incorporating Marvel Universe landmarks like the Baxter Building and the Latverian embassy. In place of small, linear levels, Spider-Man has to swing around the city and complete a certain set of tasks to progress the story and move onto the next big boss battle. These short missions include racing through pre-plotted courses, bringing down packs of gang members, bashing robbers, smashing runaway cars, rescuing people in need, and finding tokens scattered throughout the city. Once those requirements are knocked out, the story -- penned by Brian Michael Bendis and closely matching Mark Bagley's distinctive style -- unfolds through a series of animated comic panels.
"Ultimate Spider-Man" is as easily accessible as its comic namesake, adopting a simplified version of the control scheme from "Spider-Man 2". The learning curve with webslinging in "Spider-Man 2" has been smoothened out, and Spidey ends the game with the same general set of moves he starts out with -- no more hitting a store and buying upgraded combos. Another change is that...at least when playing as Spider-Man...standard-issue enemies don't just fade away after being pummelled. Spidey has to web them up, and if he's distracted by other bad guys and takes too long, his enemies can get back up and start wreaking havoc again.
Venom isn't just the key villain in the game -- he's a playable character. Certain stretches of "Ultimate Spider-Man" require using Venom, but once story mode is completed and players have free reign of the city, they can switch between the two characters with a few button presses. The controls for Venom are similar to Spider-Man but have a different feel; Venom is lumbering and has a greater heft to him, whereas Spider-Man is lean and swift. Venom can't sling webs like Spider-Man, but he can use his tendrils to propel himself towards a building or object as Spidey can with his webs as well as lash those tentacles around like a whip. In place of webslinging, Venom can leap to massive heights, and he can also pick up and throw cars, smash people headfirst into the ground, and even eat passersby to restore his ever-dwindling health. I didn't find Venom to be quite as much fun to play as Spider-Man, but he does add some much-appreciated variety to the game.
Although Venom
is the only other playable character in "Ultimate Spider-Man", the game is littered with cameos from other familiar faces from the Ultimate universe. The surprise is part of the fun, so I won't spoil any of 'em for you. It's also worth pointing out that the game features a large number of the villains from the comics -- Venom, Electro, The Shocker, Carnage, The Green Goblin, and, making his Ultimate debut, The Beetle. There's no overlap between the rogue's gallery in this game and "Spider-Man 2", and the handful of remaining characters like The Sandman and Kraven the Hunter are referenced in the background, so keep your eyes peeled.
The boss battles begin with a destructive chase. When playing as Spider-Man, the webslinger often has to rescue people caught in the villains' wake, either by pulling them out of harm's way or by precision button-mashing to lift heavy objects off of pinned victims. If Spider-Man lags too far behind or if a civilian dies, he has to start the pursuit over again. The chases might take a try or two to nail down, but they're rarely frustrating (Venom tailing Electro halfway through the game being the only real exception), and they're a great lead-in to the boss battles. Those brawls are the best parts of "Ultimate Spider-Man", boiling down to figuring out a pattern and enduring whatever's thrown or zapped at you.
"Ultimate Spider-Man"'s leaner gameplay gives it an arcade-like, pick-up-and-play feel, and that's both good and bad. I liked the way brawling is handled, and even without combos, web balls, or web gloves, it's been beefed up in other ways. There's more to it than just pressing a punch or kick button -- it's a blast to rapidly bounce around off walls and batter everyone in Spidey's path, and Spider-Man can also hang muggers from lamp posts or grab a guy on the end of a webline and smash him into other robbers. Spider-Man can't sprint anymore, and the charged jump is ditched in favor of a double-jump. It's not a big loss, and there's a pretty funny nod early on about how the physics of a double-jump don't make any sense. Although Spider-Man can't pick up new combos, he does earn upgrades throughout the game, both through normal gameplay and by winning high-speed races against the Human Torch.
The most drastic change is the overhauling of "Spider-Man 2"'s web swinging. That game took an hour or two to really get a grip on the webslinging mechanics, but once that was mastered, it was an indescribable amount of fun to fling myself across New York City. Actually having missions to complete and bad guys to pummel were just frosting on that cake. "Ultimate Spider-Man" doesn't have that sort of learning curve, but it loses the sense of speed and rock-solid control. The webslinging handles a bit differently, and only being able to shoot one web at a time saps away a fair amount of what made "Spider-Man 2" so amazing. Don't get me wrong -- webslinging still works well, and I still had a blast just zipping around the city, but it's a step back from "transcendentally great" to merely "good". Web zipping can be immensely useful as well, especially in the high-speed chases that precede the boss battles.
There may not be a lot of variety in the city events that have to be completed to keep the story moving, but one upside is that everything you do rolls over to the next mission. If you swing around and find a couple dozen tokens, you can go the rest of the game without having to pick up another one. If you tear through lots of races, combat tours, and city events early on, that frees you up to concentrate on the story later in the game. Even with the limited variety, "Ultimate Spider-Man" doesn't force an unduly large amount of these tasks on the player, and they're short; many of the city events literally just take a few seconds. I guess the statistics are right, though -- crime is down, and it takes a lot of swinging around to stumble upon the red dot on the map that indicates a city event is nearby. I swung around for fifteen minutes once and managed to find four, a drastic downturn from "Spider-Man 2", and I can only assume that's to stretch out the length of the game.
Even with those additional tasks padding it out, "Ultimate Spider-Man" is a surprisingly short game. It took me six and a half hours from start to finish, and I've seen posts on other message boards where people have zipped through it in just over four hours. Some players might be determined to unlock all of the different costumes, land the top spot in every race, and unearth every last collectible token, but unlike "Spider-Man 2", I didn't feel compelled to keep playing once I finished. The difficulty level is pretty light, and most players won't need more than one or two tries to complete most of the challenges. Aside from a frustrating chase with Venom bounding across the city after Electro, "Ultimate Spider-Man" doesn't really get remotely tough until
its last few boss battles. Even then, the only boss that took me more than a few tries to defeat was the very last battle against Venom. The game's not insultingly simple, but it's short enough and easy enough that it seems much better suited to a weekend rental rather than a fifty dollar purchase. That's the disappointing thing -- "Ultimate Spider-Man" is a very good game; there's just not enough of it, and a lengthier story mode and maybe a little more variety in the other challenges would've made this a much more highly recommended title.
Graphics:
"Ultimate Spider-Man" uses a variant of cel shading to reproduce artist Mark Bagley's style on-screen, and Treyarch really nailed it -- the game's characters look like they've been ripped straight out of the comic. The similarity is especially striking during the cut scenes that weave the game's story through animated comic panels. Like a lot of free-roaming multiplatform titles, the environments are fairly flat and boxy, but the lack of any lag or load times as Spidey swings across Manhattan makes the trade-off worth it. Some of the other platforms reportedly suffer from a stuttering framerate, but I didn't run into that problem with the Xbox version. A really nice looking game.
Audio:
I'm not familiar with most of the vocal talent behind "Ultimate Spider-Man", but they do a much better job than the actors from the movie who phoned in their performances for the "Spider-Man 2" game. With comic scribe Brian Michael Bendis contributing the dialogue -- including Spidey's trademark sarcastic one-liners -- they have plenty of good material on-hand. Like "Spider-Man 2", a lot of the same few lines repeat over and over again, and in the longer chases and boss battles, this can get particularly annoying. That's not entirely unexpected, and the audio as a whole complements the visuals effectively. Gamers with Dolby Digital 5.1 rigs will notice the same sort of multichannel ambiance as Spidey zips across New York as in "Spider-Man 2", and that sort of directionality can come in handy in brawls against badniks like The Beetle.
Conclusion:
After tearing through "Spider-Man 2" last summer, I was impressed by the controls and a free-roaming concept that really suits a superhero like Spidey, even though the rest of the game didn't stack up. I was convinced that Treyarch's follow-up would have the foundation necessary to build something genuinely impressive on top of it, but as much of a good time as I had with "Ultimate Spider-Man", it's not the step forward I'd hoped it would be. The graphics are a spot-on match for the comic, bringing in Mark Bagley and Brian Michael Bendis is a huge boon, and it's fun while it lasts, but the game is too short and a bit too repetitive to fully warrant its $49.99 price tag. "Ultimate Spider-Man" is worth seeking out, especially for fans of Bendis and Bagley's comic, but it's better suited to a rental until the price eases back.
returns to the comic for inspiration. If you're unfamiliar with Marvel's "Ultimate" universe, it shrugs off the baggage of decades worth of stories and reinvents the company's classic characters. Peter Parker once again is a teenager in high school. He's not married, and there are no clones meandering around. His friends and enemies haven't died, returned, died again, returned, and...oh, why not?...died one more time. It's a back-to-basics approach that makes Spider-Man easier for new readers to dive into, and the creative team of writer Brian Michael Bendis and artist Mark Bagley have given Spidey a glossy new sheen without betraying what made the character so great in the first place."Ultimate Spider-Man" isn't directly based on any single storyline from the comic, but it does pick up in the wake of the Venom arc from issues 33 to 39. The game opens with Peter catching up with his childhood pal Eddie Brock, who introduces him to their inheritance: a genetically-engineered suit developed by their late fathers in the hopes of curing cancer. The 'Venom' suit is immensely powerful but uncontrollable, dominating Brock and fueling a murderously violent streak that attracts the attention of military industrialist Bolivar Trask. "Ultimate Spider-Man" doesn't just chronicle one side of the struggle between Spider-Man and Venom -- players take control of both characters in different parts of the game, pitting them against Trask and a legion of characters from the Ultimate universe.
Gameplay:
Like its predecessor, "Ultimate Spider-Man" is a free-roaming game set in a sprawling reproduction of New York City, this time incorporating Marvel Universe landmarks like the Baxter Building and the Latverian embassy. In place of small, linear levels, Spider-Man has to swing around the city and complete a certain set of tasks to progress the story and move onto the next big boss battle. These short missions include racing through pre-plotted courses, bringing down packs of gang members, bashing robbers, smashing runaway cars, rescuing people in need, and finding tokens scattered throughout the city. Once those requirements are knocked out, the story -- penned by Brian Michael Bendis and closely matching Mark Bagley's distinctive style -- unfolds through a series of animated comic panels.
"Ultimate Spider-Man" is as easily accessible as its comic namesake, adopting a simplified version of the control scheme from "Spider-Man 2". The learning curve with webslinging in "Spider-Man 2" has been smoothened out, and Spidey ends the game with the same general set of moves he starts out with -- no more hitting a store and buying upgraded combos. Another change is that...at least when playing as Spider-Man...standard-issue enemies don't just fade away after being pummelled. Spidey has to web them up, and if he's distracted by other bad guys and takes too long, his enemies can get back up and start wreaking havoc again.
Venom isn't just the key villain in the game -- he's a playable character. Certain stretches of "Ultimate Spider-Man" require using Venom, but once story mode is completed and players have free reign of the city, they can switch between the two characters with a few button presses. The controls for Venom are similar to Spider-Man but have a different feel; Venom is lumbering and has a greater heft to him, whereas Spider-Man is lean and swift. Venom can't sling webs like Spider-Man, but he can use his tendrils to propel himself towards a building or object as Spidey can with his webs as well as lash those tentacles around like a whip. In place of webslinging, Venom can leap to massive heights, and he can also pick up and throw cars, smash people headfirst into the ground, and even eat passersby to restore his ever-dwindling health. I didn't find Venom to be quite as much fun to play as Spider-Man, but he does add some much-appreciated variety to the game.
Although Venom
is the only other playable character in "Ultimate Spider-Man", the game is littered with cameos from other familiar faces from the Ultimate universe. The surprise is part of the fun, so I won't spoil any of 'em for you. It's also worth pointing out that the game features a large number of the villains from the comics -- Venom, Electro, The Shocker, Carnage, The Green Goblin, and, making his Ultimate debut, The Beetle. There's no overlap between the rogue's gallery in this game and "Spider-Man 2", and the handful of remaining characters like The Sandman and Kraven the Hunter are referenced in the background, so keep your eyes peeled.The boss battles begin with a destructive chase. When playing as Spider-Man, the webslinger often has to rescue people caught in the villains' wake, either by pulling them out of harm's way or by precision button-mashing to lift heavy objects off of pinned victims. If Spider-Man lags too far behind or if a civilian dies, he has to start the pursuit over again. The chases might take a try or two to nail down, but they're rarely frustrating (Venom tailing Electro halfway through the game being the only real exception), and they're a great lead-in to the boss battles. Those brawls are the best parts of "Ultimate Spider-Man", boiling down to figuring out a pattern and enduring whatever's thrown or zapped at you.
"Ultimate Spider-Man"'s leaner gameplay gives it an arcade-like, pick-up-and-play feel, and that's both good and bad. I liked the way brawling is handled, and even without combos, web balls, or web gloves, it's been beefed up in other ways. There's more to it than just pressing a punch or kick button -- it's a blast to rapidly bounce around off walls and batter everyone in Spidey's path, and Spider-Man can also hang muggers from lamp posts or grab a guy on the end of a webline and smash him into other robbers. Spider-Man can't sprint anymore, and the charged jump is ditched in favor of a double-jump. It's not a big loss, and there's a pretty funny nod early on about how the physics of a double-jump don't make any sense. Although Spider-Man can't pick up new combos, he does earn upgrades throughout the game, both through normal gameplay and by winning high-speed races against the Human Torch.
The most drastic change is the overhauling of "Spider-Man 2"'s web swinging. That game took an hour or two to really get a grip on the webslinging mechanics, but once that was mastered, it was an indescribable amount of fun to fling myself across New York City. Actually having missions to complete and bad guys to pummel were just frosting on that cake. "Ultimate Spider-Man" doesn't have that sort of learning curve, but it loses the sense of speed and rock-solid control. The webslinging handles a bit differently, and only being able to shoot one web at a time saps away a fair amount of what made "Spider-Man 2" so amazing. Don't get me wrong -- webslinging still works well, and I still had a blast just zipping around the city, but it's a step back from "transcendentally great" to merely "good". Web zipping can be immensely useful as well, especially in the high-speed chases that precede the boss battles.
There may not be a lot of variety in the city events that have to be completed to keep the story moving, but one upside is that everything you do rolls over to the next mission. If you swing around and find a couple dozen tokens, you can go the rest of the game without having to pick up another one. If you tear through lots of races, combat tours, and city events early on, that frees you up to concentrate on the story later in the game. Even with the limited variety, "Ultimate Spider-Man" doesn't force an unduly large amount of these tasks on the player, and they're short; many of the city events literally just take a few seconds. I guess the statistics are right, though -- crime is down, and it takes a lot of swinging around to stumble upon the red dot on the map that indicates a city event is nearby. I swung around for fifteen minutes once and managed to find four, a drastic downturn from "Spider-Man 2", and I can only assume that's to stretch out the length of the game.
Even with those additional tasks padding it out, "Ultimate Spider-Man" is a surprisingly short game. It took me six and a half hours from start to finish, and I've seen posts on other message boards where people have zipped through it in just over four hours. Some players might be determined to unlock all of the different costumes, land the top spot in every race, and unearth every last collectible token, but unlike "Spider-Man 2", I didn't feel compelled to keep playing once I finished. The difficulty level is pretty light, and most players won't need more than one or two tries to complete most of the challenges. Aside from a frustrating chase with Venom bounding across the city after Electro, "Ultimate Spider-Man" doesn't really get remotely tough until
its last few boss battles. Even then, the only boss that took me more than a few tries to defeat was the very last battle against Venom. The game's not insultingly simple, but it's short enough and easy enough that it seems much better suited to a weekend rental rather than a fifty dollar purchase. That's the disappointing thing -- "Ultimate Spider-Man" is a very good game; there's just not enough of it, and a lengthier story mode and maybe a little more variety in the other challenges would've made this a much more highly recommended title.Graphics:
"Ultimate Spider-Man" uses a variant of cel shading to reproduce artist Mark Bagley's style on-screen, and Treyarch really nailed it -- the game's characters look like they've been ripped straight out of the comic. The similarity is especially striking during the cut scenes that weave the game's story through animated comic panels. Like a lot of free-roaming multiplatform titles, the environments are fairly flat and boxy, but the lack of any lag or load times as Spidey swings across Manhattan makes the trade-off worth it. Some of the other platforms reportedly suffer from a stuttering framerate, but I didn't run into that problem with the Xbox version. A really nice looking game.
Audio:
I'm not familiar with most of the vocal talent behind "Ultimate Spider-Man", but they do a much better job than the actors from the movie who phoned in their performances for the "Spider-Man 2" game. With comic scribe Brian Michael Bendis contributing the dialogue -- including Spidey's trademark sarcastic one-liners -- they have plenty of good material on-hand. Like "Spider-Man 2", a lot of the same few lines repeat over and over again, and in the longer chases and boss battles, this can get particularly annoying. That's not entirely unexpected, and the audio as a whole complements the visuals effectively. Gamers with Dolby Digital 5.1 rigs will notice the same sort of multichannel ambiance as Spidey zips across New York as in "Spider-Man 2", and that sort of directionality can come in handy in brawls against badniks like The Beetle.
Conclusion:
After tearing through "Spider-Man 2" last summer, I was impressed by the controls and a free-roaming concept that really suits a superhero like Spidey, even though the rest of the game didn't stack up. I was convinced that Treyarch's follow-up would have the foundation necessary to build something genuinely impressive on top of it, but as much of a good time as I had with "Ultimate Spider-Man", it's not the step forward I'd hoped it would be. The graphics are a spot-on match for the comic, bringing in Mark Bagley and Brian Michael Bendis is a huge boon, and it's fun while it lasts, but the game is too short and a bit too repetitive to fully warrant its $49.99 price tag. "Ultimate Spider-Man" is worth seeking out, especially for fans of Bendis and Bagley's comic, but it's better suited to a rental until the price eases back.