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Spider-Man 3

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ESRB: Animated Blood,Language - Mild,Violence
Publisher: Activision
Genre(s): Action
Home Page: http://www.sm3thegame.com

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By: Jarno Kokko May 14, 2007

High tech gone bad

Nice character detail and impressive draw distance are the trademarks of Spider-Man 3's graphics engine.

If you take a close look at the visuals of Spider-Man 3, you notice that the engine is fairly advanced. When everything is maxed out, all characters and vehicles cast true shadows and the buildings also cast shadows that affect the lighting of everything on the streets. In the afternoon, the building shadows together with the long streets of New York create very atmospheric scenery. Things look impressive as you swing across the shadowed and lit areas, zooming past huge skyscrapers. The draw distance and the sheer number of polygons being pushed is, at times, very impressive.

But... there are problems. Shadows cast by characters and vehicles appear very crude and pixellated in most places. Additionally, if you bring down the Surface Quality setting from High, shadows start to act wonky. At Medium, people cast shadows on buildings but not on the sidewalk or the street, and at low almost all surfaces are missing shadows. So, unless you run at the maximum settings, you are going to see weird effects related to shadows and most likely want to turn them completely off.

Oddly, shadows work fine on some specific surfaces, such as here with Spidey climbing up a wall.

... but in most cases we get a pixellated mess like this. Note that the shadow is cast only on the building side and it's cut off from the sidewalk (due to Medium settings).

Regardless of the settings, there is also an inexcusable amount of Z-conflicts in the game art. Z-conflicts occur when parts of two objects occupy the same space, and the scene drawn flickers as the game engine is unable to decipher which set of polygons should be drawn on top. Such small graphical glitches can be seen from time to time in many games - artists have to painstakingly fix such glitches as they are found. In the case of Spider-Man 3, it's obvious that the time ran out, and there are numerous places where you can see polygons flickering back and forth - most commonly in the cutscenes and during some of the cinematic action sequences.

There are also some notable dips in the frame rate and some noticeable cases where scenery pops into view. The Central Park is the most obvious place - once you have its sea of trees in your view, frame rate is easily cut in half. Setting City Detail to medium or high cures the most obvious pop-up problems as the draw distance is longer, but it doesn't cure the problem completely. Shading is also bit of a hit and miss - it seems that in some cinematic sequences the characters are shaded fairly well, while in other places it seems that shaders are missing or the results look odd. These issues are fairly minor in all but when you stack it all together, what comes to mind is an overall lack of final polish.