Spider-Man 2: The Movie
Posted August 3, 2004
It used to be a given, some sort of inalienable gaming law, that video game adaptations of popular movies had to be inherently awful. Publishers rested on the strength of the license rather than solid gameplay, resulting in innumerable rushed, sloppy titles flooding store shelves. That tide's slowly started to turn in recent years, although the likes of Minority Report and Enter The Matrix are still more common than not. The first game in a long while to convince me that there remained a glimmer of hope for these sorts of licensed titles was the multiplatform Spider-Man: The Movie. Although there were elements that bugged me, particularly the barrage of consecutive stealth levels, I was impressed enough that I hoped a followup from the same developers would accompany the inevitable cinematic sequel. Hitting stores a day before Sam Raimi's second take on the webslinger swung into theaters, Spider-Man 2: The Movie isn't a half-hearted rehash of the previous installment with some additional graphical polish and a different villain seizing the spotlight. It's a completely different experience, resulting in some brilliant, addictive gameplay. Unfortunately, the brevity and repetition of the game it's wrapped around probably leaves Spider-Man 2 best suited to a rental.
Gameplay:
Treyarch's previous Spider-Man title unfolded linearly, with the webhead progressing from one level to the next until the end credits unspooled. That concept was ditched entirely for Spider-Man 2. The game is set in a scaled-down version of Manhattan, complete with all of its legendary landmarks. Every inch of the city is accessible from the time the game starts, and even after story mode is completed. Spidey has free reign throughout the city. The game is divided into chapters with a story that unfolds throughout, mirroring the progression of its celluloid counterpart, but players aren't forced to complete the tasks defined for each mission in a fixed order. If there are three goals on your plate and you want to swing around and look for badniks knocking over a store, go for it. Since this is the Big Apple, the sidewalks are teeming with people, some of whom will try to flag down Spidey and let him know if someone is need of help. These include rescuing travelers on a sinking ship, shuttling the injured to a hospital, lending the police a hand in a frenzied shootout, saving a worker hanging perilously on the edge of a high-rise office building, racing after a carjacker, or just being duped into a street brawl. Spidey can also stop muggers or retrieve stray balloons for whiny children. Each time he finishes one of these tasks, he's rewarded with Hero Points. These points can be exchanged at shops throughout the city for additional swinging speed, new combos, beefed-up abilities, or a recharged health meter. If you get tired of one good deed after another, Spider-Man can snag additional loot by snapping shots for the Daily Bugle, delivering pizzas, or participating in speed and skill-based challenges. Like Grand Theft Auto before it, the open-endedness of Spider-Man 2 is a huge part of the appeal. Even when I had several tasks I needed to finish to advance to the next chapter, I found myself more interesting in swinging around aimlessly because that alone is so much fun.
For my first couple of evenings with Spider-Man 2, I was completely smitten. It's such a blast being able to zip around a sprawling city at incomprehensibly high speeds without being bogged down by load times or annoying objectives getting in the way. The luster wore off a bit after that point, though, but I'll start with the gushing praise. A lot of superhero games are fairly interchangable, with the license as the only thing really differentiating them. What Spider-Man 2 does exceptionally well, what alone makes this game at least an essential rental, is the fact that you are Spider-Man. A wide assortment of abilities are incorporated into the controls. There's the usual kicking and punching, of course, and they can be incorporated into combos or used to throttle enemies mid-air. Spider-Man's webbing is even more advantageous (!) than ever this time around, allowing him to yank thugs towards him with a webline, use a web to quickly pull himself towards a wall, blind or disarm robbers, dangle thieves from a lamp post, or launch a concussive webbing blast, just to rattle off a handful. To aid his navigation throughout the city, Spidey can also dash on the streets or sprint up walls, and his ability to latch onto any surface is wholly intact. Spider-Man can also rely on his Spider-Sense to warn him of gunfire or other assorted attacks, and a successful dodge is one of the ways to charge up his spider reflexes. In Spider-Reflex mode, the game slows down to bullet-time speed to really dish out a lot of damage at once. Delving into a full list of everything Spider-Man can do would double the length of this review, but it's impressively diverse. Even better, the excellent controls make it a breeze to pull off. Where the game really excels is the web swinging. There are two different options -- easy swinging, which takes the challenge (and the fun) out of the process, and the normal swinging that offers much more flexibility with the added expense of a learning curve. Normal swinging does take a short while to really get a firm grasp on, but when it's mastered, the game takes on a whole new life. One new change is that Spider-Man can't latch his webs onto a cloud or some indeterminate, unseen object floating miles above the city. No, his webline has to connect to a building or something similarly substantial, and it's just a flat-out thrill to plummet from a skyscraper, latch a web onto a building moments before colliding into the pavement, use that inertia to propel Spidey high up in the air, and soar across Manhattan. It's easy to forget that there is an underlying story and just fling myself across the Big Apple with no goals or direction in mind.
I can't even imagine how much time, cost, and effort went into fleshing out this miniature Manhattan, implementing Spider-Man's vast array of powers, and tweaking the control scheme to perfection. Apparently that sizeable task gobbled enough resources that there wasn't enough left for Treyarch to build much of a game around it. Although the major points of the movie's plotline are incorporated into Spider-Man 2, the story still seems kind of thin, and the story mode is short enough to easily tear through with a weekend rental. It took me nine hours and change to rip through its fifteen chapters, and I historically take considerably longer than average to finish a game. Like the Grand Theft Auto games, Spider-Man 2 doesn't end just because the meat of the game is finished, but it's still surprisingly brief. I'd rather play an incredible game that takes ten hours to beat than a twenty hour game that's riddled with filler, but I unfortunately can't lump Spider-Man 2 into the former category. It's almost mind-numbingly repetitive. Passerbys on the sidewalk only have a few different mission types to dole out, and although they're rotated reasonably well and are fairly short (you can expect to finish any of these goals in 20 - 90 seconds), there are only so many carjackings I can thwart before really wanting to move onto something else. Side quests like delivering pizzas -- one of the most infectiously fun aspects of the game -- help liven things up, but I kept craving something new, something different. I didn't find myself painfully bored accomplishing the same few side tasks incessantly, but the replay value still takes a serious hit as a result. Aside from what you can buy in the Spidey Stores, there aren't any unlockables. I finished the story mode with a hair under 50% completion, and although I could continue playing the game to beef up that percentage, all I could gain are more 'acquired' labels next to a long list of different rewards. Swinging around is enough fun that I can see myself frequently giving the game a spin for ten or fifteen minutes a pop, but Spider-Man 2 doesn't offer anything compelling enough to make me want to do more beyond that.
Sam Raimi's Spider-Man 2 revolves around a single villain, but Treyarch tossed a few appearances by other costumed characters into the game..."few" being the operative word. The Black Cat is a constant presence throughout, even moreso than lead villain Dr. Octopus. Most of her appearances require Spider-Man to chase after her throughout the city, something that has to be done no fewer than five times. Hardly anything changes other than the path she takes in each chapter. Even the vaguely jazzy music that accompanies each of those chases remains the same. Although Otto Octavious is a staple of the game's cinematics starting early on, he doesn't rear his head as Dr. Octopus until the game's final few chapters. His appearances are rather short, and each strikingly similar direct encounter involves Spider-Man trying to take him out in precisely the same way. It felt like I spent more time pitted against Mysterio than the primary villain of the movie this game is based on. The developers seemed to have a blast with the character, mining all sorts of vintage sci-fi cliches and even tossing a theremin in the sound mix every time he appears on-screen. Although chunks of the primary Mysterio level are frustrating, the only particularly difficult part of an otherwise very easy game, the ultimate payoff is equal parts brilliant and hysterical. The only other supervillains in the game are The Rhino and The Shocker. The Rhino appears just once early on and is laughably easy to take down. The Shocker rears his electrified head a few times, twice in-costume and once without, and none of those encounters are particularly memorable. Since the game is teeming with muggers and standard issue thugs scattered throughout the city, it would've been interesting to have some supervillains randomly wreaking havoc too. To have so few villains and such repetitive encounters with them is a real letdown.
Treyarch has laid the groundwork for an incredible followup. The control scheme is powerful and virtually flawless, and I love the open-endedness of the game. For instance, the game gives a clear suggestion on how to tackle Doc Ock -- dodge his tentacles and then web them to the ground. I had a hard time pulling that off, so I opted to use my Spider-Reflexes and pummel him with uppercuts and charged punches. There's no single path to do anything, and if I felt like latching onto three different helicopters to make my way to a particular destination, I can give it a shot and probably be successful. But as brilliantly implemented as some of these features are, the short length of the game and sheer repetition cause it to stumble. It's a near-essential rental, but its shortcomings make Spider-Man 2 difficult to suggest shelling out fifty bucks to buy.
Graphics:
There are no load times or stutters as Spider-Man swings across Manhattan, and the draw distance is incredibly expansive. There is a cost, of course, and that's in comparatively lackluster graphics. The models aren't incredibly detailed, particularly the PSX-grade passerbys on the street who dole out additional tasks without moving their lips. Even some of the main characters in the movie are unrecognizable. I'd have never known that was supposed to be Mary-Jane Watson or Harry Osbourne if the game hadn't expressly said so. Still, the trade-off is worth it -- Spider-Man 2 benefits greatly from its speed and accessibility, and a graphical polish would've just weighed it down. Even though the models don't boast high polygon counts or detailed textures, they're animated well, with Spidey's wall-crawling and Doc Ock's seemingly sentient robotic tentacles being particularly eye-catching. The frame rate remains rocksteady for the most part, with the only slowdown I spotted occurring during the second battle against The Shocker. This isn't the type of game to whip out and show what this generation of consoles is capable of accomplishing graphically, but the visuals complement the gameplay well enough.
As is the Xbox standard, Spider-Man 2 includes a progressive scan mode, but there aren't options for high-definition or widescreen gaming.
Audio:
The voice acting is pretty wretched. Even though Tobey Maguire, Kirsten Dunst, and Alfred Molina provided the voices for their characters, only Molina manages to come through with any degree of skill. Tobey Maguire sounds like he's reading disinterestedly from a stack of notecards, and Kirsten Dunst's voice is as undistinguished as her character's scarcely-recognizable 3D model. The same few lines tend to be muttered unrelentingly, particularly near the end of the final chapter. After the eight quadrillionth "look out!" from Mary Jane, I started to question whether or not she was actually worth saving. Harry Osbourne's voice is even worse, sounding absolutely nothing like actor James Franco, and for the stock New Yorkers, Treyarch really might want to consider ponying out enough cash to hire real voice actors instead of dragging friends, family, and employees into the recording booth. At least Bruce Campbell is back for the tutorials and is snarkier than ever. The Dolby Digital 5.1 audio adds some directionality when navigating around the city, and it's neat to hear a voice pan across different speakers as Spidey sprints by. The surrounds aren't used at all in the cinematics, even when a decrepit warehouse tumbles down around our hero. It's a decent sounding game, but I get the impression it was designed more with plain stereo in mind, and the shoddy voice acting knocks the overall score down a couple notches.
Conclusion:
Spider-Man 2 has the foundation of a phenomenal game, but the small handful of supervillains, having to pore through the same few types of missions incessantly, and its short length leave it better suited to a rental. I highly recommend checking out the game, just for the exceptionally well-implemented experience of soaring through Manhattan on a webline if nothing else, but I'd suggest holding off on a purchase until the price tapers off into the $29.99 range.
Gameplay:
Treyarch's previous Spider-Man title unfolded linearly, with the webhead progressing from one level to the next until the end credits unspooled. That concept was ditched entirely for Spider-Man 2. The game is set in a scaled-down version of Manhattan, complete with all of its legendary landmarks. Every inch of the city is accessible from the time the game starts, and even after story mode is completed. Spidey has free reign throughout the city. The game is divided into chapters with a story that unfolds throughout, mirroring the progression of its celluloid counterpart, but players aren't forced to complete the tasks defined for each mission in a fixed order. If there are three goals on your plate and you want to swing around and look for badniks knocking over a store, go for it. Since this is the Big Apple, the sidewalks are teeming with people, some of whom will try to flag down Spidey and let him know if someone is need of help. These include rescuing travelers on a sinking ship, shuttling the injured to a hospital, lending the police a hand in a frenzied shootout, saving a worker hanging perilously on the edge of a high-rise office building, racing after a carjacker, or just being duped into a street brawl. Spidey can also stop muggers or retrieve stray balloons for whiny children. Each time he finishes one of these tasks, he's rewarded with Hero Points. These points can be exchanged at shops throughout the city for additional swinging speed, new combos, beefed-up abilities, or a recharged health meter. If you get tired of one good deed after another, Spider-Man can snag additional loot by snapping shots for the Daily Bugle, delivering pizzas, or participating in speed and skill-based challenges. Like Grand Theft Auto before it, the open-endedness of Spider-Man 2 is a huge part of the appeal. Even when I had several tasks I needed to finish to advance to the next chapter, I found myself more interesting in swinging around aimlessly because that alone is so much fun.
For my first couple of evenings with Spider-Man 2, I was completely smitten. It's such a blast being able to zip around a sprawling city at incomprehensibly high speeds without being bogged down by load times or annoying objectives getting in the way. The luster wore off a bit after that point, though, but I'll start with the gushing praise. A lot of superhero games are fairly interchangable, with the license as the only thing really differentiating them. What Spider-Man 2 does exceptionally well, what alone makes this game at least an essential rental, is the fact that you are Spider-Man. A wide assortment of abilities are incorporated into the controls. There's the usual kicking and punching, of course, and they can be incorporated into combos or used to throttle enemies mid-air. Spider-Man's webbing is even more advantageous (!) than ever this time around, allowing him to yank thugs towards him with a webline, use a web to quickly pull himself towards a wall, blind or disarm robbers, dangle thieves from a lamp post, or launch a concussive webbing blast, just to rattle off a handful. To aid his navigation throughout the city, Spidey can also dash on the streets or sprint up walls, and his ability to latch onto any surface is wholly intact. Spider-Man can also rely on his Spider-Sense to warn him of gunfire or other assorted attacks, and a successful dodge is one of the ways to charge up his spider reflexes. In Spider-Reflex mode, the game slows down to bullet-time speed to really dish out a lot of damage at once. Delving into a full list of everything Spider-Man can do would double the length of this review, but it's impressively diverse. Even better, the excellent controls make it a breeze to pull off. Where the game really excels is the web swinging. There are two different options -- easy swinging, which takes the challenge (and the fun) out of the process, and the normal swinging that offers much more flexibility with the added expense of a learning curve. Normal swinging does take a short while to really get a firm grasp on, but when it's mastered, the game takes on a whole new life. One new change is that Spider-Man can't latch his webs onto a cloud or some indeterminate, unseen object floating miles above the city. No, his webline has to connect to a building or something similarly substantial, and it's just a flat-out thrill to plummet from a skyscraper, latch a web onto a building moments before colliding into the pavement, use that inertia to propel Spidey high up in the air, and soar across Manhattan. It's easy to forget that there is an underlying story and just fling myself across the Big Apple with no goals or direction in mind.
I can't even imagine how much time, cost, and effort went into fleshing out this miniature Manhattan, implementing Spider-Man's vast array of powers, and tweaking the control scheme to perfection. Apparently that sizeable task gobbled enough resources that there wasn't enough left for Treyarch to build much of a game around it. Although the major points of the movie's plotline are incorporated into Spider-Man 2, the story still seems kind of thin, and the story mode is short enough to easily tear through with a weekend rental. It took me nine hours and change to rip through its fifteen chapters, and I historically take considerably longer than average to finish a game. Like the Grand Theft Auto games, Spider-Man 2 doesn't end just because the meat of the game is finished, but it's still surprisingly brief. I'd rather play an incredible game that takes ten hours to beat than a twenty hour game that's riddled with filler, but I unfortunately can't lump Spider-Man 2 into the former category. It's almost mind-numbingly repetitive. Passerbys on the sidewalk only have a few different mission types to dole out, and although they're rotated reasonably well and are fairly short (you can expect to finish any of these goals in 20 - 90 seconds), there are only so many carjackings I can thwart before really wanting to move onto something else. Side quests like delivering pizzas -- one of the most infectiously fun aspects of the game -- help liven things up, but I kept craving something new, something different. I didn't find myself painfully bored accomplishing the same few side tasks incessantly, but the replay value still takes a serious hit as a result. Aside from what you can buy in the Spidey Stores, there aren't any unlockables. I finished the story mode with a hair under 50% completion, and although I could continue playing the game to beef up that percentage, all I could gain are more 'acquired' labels next to a long list of different rewards. Swinging around is enough fun that I can see myself frequently giving the game a spin for ten or fifteen minutes a pop, but Spider-Man 2 doesn't offer anything compelling enough to make me want to do more beyond that.
Sam Raimi's Spider-Man 2 revolves around a single villain, but Treyarch tossed a few appearances by other costumed characters into the game..."few" being the operative word. The Black Cat is a constant presence throughout, even moreso than lead villain Dr. Octopus. Most of her appearances require Spider-Man to chase after her throughout the city, something that has to be done no fewer than five times. Hardly anything changes other than the path she takes in each chapter. Even the vaguely jazzy music that accompanies each of those chases remains the same. Although Otto Octavious is a staple of the game's cinematics starting early on, he doesn't rear his head as Dr. Octopus until the game's final few chapters. His appearances are rather short, and each strikingly similar direct encounter involves Spider-Man trying to take him out in precisely the same way. It felt like I spent more time pitted against Mysterio than the primary villain of the movie this game is based on. The developers seemed to have a blast with the character, mining all sorts of vintage sci-fi cliches and even tossing a theremin in the sound mix every time he appears on-screen. Although chunks of the primary Mysterio level are frustrating, the only particularly difficult part of an otherwise very easy game, the ultimate payoff is equal parts brilliant and hysterical. The only other supervillains in the game are The Rhino and The Shocker. The Rhino appears just once early on and is laughably easy to take down. The Shocker rears his electrified head a few times, twice in-costume and once without, and none of those encounters are particularly memorable. Since the game is teeming with muggers and standard issue thugs scattered throughout the city, it would've been interesting to have some supervillains randomly wreaking havoc too. To have so few villains and such repetitive encounters with them is a real letdown.
Treyarch has laid the groundwork for an incredible followup. The control scheme is powerful and virtually flawless, and I love the open-endedness of the game. For instance, the game gives a clear suggestion on how to tackle Doc Ock -- dodge his tentacles and then web them to the ground. I had a hard time pulling that off, so I opted to use my Spider-Reflexes and pummel him with uppercuts and charged punches. There's no single path to do anything, and if I felt like latching onto three different helicopters to make my way to a particular destination, I can give it a shot and probably be successful. But as brilliantly implemented as some of these features are, the short length of the game and sheer repetition cause it to stumble. It's a near-essential rental, but its shortcomings make Spider-Man 2 difficult to suggest shelling out fifty bucks to buy.
Graphics:
There are no load times or stutters as Spider-Man swings across Manhattan, and the draw distance is incredibly expansive. There is a cost, of course, and that's in comparatively lackluster graphics. The models aren't incredibly detailed, particularly the PSX-grade passerbys on the street who dole out additional tasks without moving their lips. Even some of the main characters in the movie are unrecognizable. I'd have never known that was supposed to be Mary-Jane Watson or Harry Osbourne if the game hadn't expressly said so. Still, the trade-off is worth it -- Spider-Man 2 benefits greatly from its speed and accessibility, and a graphical polish would've just weighed it down. Even though the models don't boast high polygon counts or detailed textures, they're animated well, with Spidey's wall-crawling and Doc Ock's seemingly sentient robotic tentacles being particularly eye-catching. The frame rate remains rocksteady for the most part, with the only slowdown I spotted occurring during the second battle against The Shocker. This isn't the type of game to whip out and show what this generation of consoles is capable of accomplishing graphically, but the visuals complement the gameplay well enough.
As is the Xbox standard, Spider-Man 2 includes a progressive scan mode, but there aren't options for high-definition or widescreen gaming.
Audio:
The voice acting is pretty wretched. Even though Tobey Maguire, Kirsten Dunst, and Alfred Molina provided the voices for their characters, only Molina manages to come through with any degree of skill. Tobey Maguire sounds like he's reading disinterestedly from a stack of notecards, and Kirsten Dunst's voice is as undistinguished as her character's scarcely-recognizable 3D model. The same few lines tend to be muttered unrelentingly, particularly near the end of the final chapter. After the eight quadrillionth "look out!" from Mary Jane, I started to question whether or not she was actually worth saving. Harry Osbourne's voice is even worse, sounding absolutely nothing like actor James Franco, and for the stock New Yorkers, Treyarch really might want to consider ponying out enough cash to hire real voice actors instead of dragging friends, family, and employees into the recording booth. At least Bruce Campbell is back for the tutorials and is snarkier than ever. The Dolby Digital 5.1 audio adds some directionality when navigating around the city, and it's neat to hear a voice pan across different speakers as Spidey sprints by. The surrounds aren't used at all in the cinematics, even when a decrepit warehouse tumbles down around our hero. It's a decent sounding game, but I get the impression it was designed more with plain stereo in mind, and the shoddy voice acting knocks the overall score down a couple notches.
Conclusion:
Spider-Man 2 has the foundation of a phenomenal game, but the small handful of supervillains, having to pore through the same few types of missions incessantly, and its short length leave it better suited to a rental. I highly recommend checking out the game, just for the exceptionally well-implemented experience of soaring through Manhattan on a webline if nothing else, but I'd suggest holding off on a purchase until the price tapers off into the $29.99 range.