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Spider-Man 3

When a huge blockbuster movie comes out, there is always a good chance that someone has ambitions to push out a game based on it to capitalize on the publicity of the movie premiere. The Hollywood guys have perfected the art of scheduling and major movie release dates are often publicly known over a year in advance - missing a set date for any production-related reason is almost unheard of. Not so in the video game industry; sometimes the game is quietly shuffled off to coincide with the DVD release of the movie (or the inevitable sequel), but too often we get half-baked rush jobs that barely make their deadline to be in the stores in time for the movie premiere. A prime example of the second type would be... Spider-Man 3

Treyarch has pretty much perfected the basic gameplay for their Spider-Man series and the earlier games have generally been considered either good or great. Open-ended swinging around the city defending the citizens from anything ranging from supervillains to petty thugs is a working framework for a game.

In Spider-Man 3 the formula has not really been touched. You have a storyline loosely based on the events from the third movie. The main story-related missions involve Sandman, New Goblin and Venom, but there is a ton of other stuff as well to pad out a game that still feels bit a short and "disposable". While you can choose which mission you want to tackle next, major events are tied to completion of certain mission lines, and in that regard there isn't much replayability. While most missions are generic fistfights against thugs, there is a good mix of other things - disarming bombs, shadowing cars and helicopters with the odd supervillain tossed in to mix things. You can also dip to the life of Peter Parker and get tasks from the Daily Bugle to get some photos. The camera mode is also used for evidence-gathering in some missions.

Quick, say "cheese!", so we can get to the part where you get all beaten up.

Scouting out NYC for the next mission.

To spice up the mission-based gameplay, Spidey can also catch minor crime-fighting tasks "on the fly" - while swinging around you might hear a police siren or a cry for help, with the the option of intervening and catching the crooks. There is a fairly limited selection of these "common crime" cases, but they do bring life to an otherwise too sterile city. NYC is modeled in detail, but there is a distinct lack of proper ambient sounds and visual atmosphere-creating "fluff" details - the city looks good when you swing from skyscraper to skyscraper, but at the street level the illusion of a real city is doesn't work so well.

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