It's probably fair to say Activision and Treyarch's Spider-Man 2 is the best superhero video game we've seen, but this hasn't exactly been a genre wall crawling with primo examples of super-powered gaming goodness.
In fact, the best superhero game up to this point was probably 2002's Spider-Man: The Movie, and while Spider-Man 2 is better than that game in many respects, it also can't quite live up to its own ambitious goals.
Like so many other movie-to-game adaptations, Spider-Man 2 takes scenes and situations from the recently released blockbuster film and builds a game on top of those, never really sticking that closely to the structure of the movie. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, because it allows the game to introduce a whole host of other villains from the Spidey universe, including Rhino, Mysterio and the Shocker.
The voice talents of Tobey Maguire as Spidey, Kirsten Dunst as Mary Jane Watson and Alfred Molina as Doc Ock are well used, but the nobodies they hired to voice other roles from the film end up sounding that much worse next to the real actors, particularly the dude playing J. Jonah Jameson. Parker! Get me central casting on the line!
The game holds your hand through the initial stages of showing you the ropes - or, in this case, the webs - then gradually lets you loose to do your own thing. Easily the most impressive thing about Spider-Man 2 is the actual web-swinging, because you can literally go almost anywhere on the isle of Manhattan, from the sidewalk outside a Times Square theatre to the top of the Empire State Building.
While the story mode will task you with missions like fighting Doc Ock, taking pictures for the Daily Bugle, racing across the city and so on, you're free to break away from the story-based missions at any time and see what else New York has to offer a proud but penniless superhero.
This non-linear structure means you can spend hours just swinging around New York, thwarting petty crime, collecting tokens, delivering pizzas, competing in races, rescuing civilians ... it's the first superhero game where you actually feel like you're playing the role of the hero, roaming the city you've sworn to protect. The hero points you earn from fighting crime and completing missions can be spent on useful upgrades for your fisticuff and web-slinging skills.
In that sense, the comparisons to the recent Grand Theft Auto games are sort of accurate - when you get tired of doing the missions that move the story forward, you're free to just explore La Grande Pomme and do as you please. But Spidey 2 is no GTA3. Other than the simple joy of swinging through the concrete canyons (and it really is a lot of fun), there aren't many ways to interact with this virtual NYC.
Plus, the petty crime/rescue missions quickly become repetitive ... just how many construction workers can dangle from a building ledge in a day anyway? How many armoured cars can this same gang of thugs hold up? (In one case the bandits actually did something different by escaping in a helicopter, which was sort of fun. Except that Spidey can't do anything to a helicopter except stick a web line to it and dangle along for the ride until it lands.)
Graphically the game is a really mixed bag. Spidey himself animates well, hand-to-hand (or hand-to-web) combat looks cool and the game ticks along very smoothly no matter how much of the city is visible on the screen at once.
But the civilian character models are laughably butt-ugly, and there are only a handful of them in use. I lost count of how many times Pointy-Boobed Tie-Wearing African-American Woman stopped me to help her deal with muggers/getaway drivers/dangling construction workers over the course of the game. The fact the civilian characters' mouths don't move when they talk doesn't help the realism either.
Oh, and PC gamers take note: For reasons that only Activision can explain, the PC version of the game is an entirely different experience, with simplified web-slinging, simplified combat, no ability to roam the city at will and fight crime, a different roster of villains, different missions ... it's basically an entirely different and dumbed-down version of the game, and, frankly, it bites. While it might be fun for casual gamers, it's definitely not anywhere equal to the slicker Spidey experience found on the consoles.
Spider-Man 2 grabbed me by the webs and drew me in at first, but after playing it for several hours the bloom came off the rose, and I found myself noticing the repetitiveness more than I did the odd interesting mission or story development. If you've got lots of time to kill, the game does offer literally hundreds of little things to find and do, but even swinging around New York becomes tiresome after a while.
It's a given there will be a Spider-Man 3 movie and corresponding game on the next generation of consoles, and if Activision can take the good things from this title and simply give them a little more purpose and polish, it could truly be a stellar superhero experience.
For the time being, Spider-Man 2 is good, solid fun, but takes second place in the sequel department to the movie that inspired it.
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BOTTOMLINE
While Spider-Man 2 truly puts you in the webbed booties of the wall-crawler and boasts a ton of freedom to do what you want, there's not enough variety to keep things fresh from start to finish. Still, fans of the web-head's previous games will find much to love in this solid sequel.
