*Sigh* Movie Licenced games are NEVER a good bet. It's a mantra you'll hear over and over when looking within the videogame industry. Of course, there are those RARE exceptions: Escape from Butcher Bay, well actually that's all that comes to mind. Spiderman is different somehow, none of the videogames were particularly stellar, but none of them completely sucked, either. Kind of like the films.
Spiderman 3 (The Movie) is not great. It tries to do way to many things at once, never handles the pacing correctly and makes extremely bad choices of behavior for the actors (Emo Parker, anyone). On a whole, the actually film is definitely not as strong and well put together as the previous two. As for the game.....well let's just say that it shared the same qualities of the film. The game is a Wii exclusive of sorts. Developed by a separate team than the 360/ps3 games, it's main focus is the controls. which is good and bad. Anyone supporting the gameplay side of the "Gameplay over Graphics" argument better take a deep breath and a hard look at Spiderman 3. While the control isn't horrible, it's not great either. Movements are inaccurately performed by the motion sensors, the on foot segments are kind of clunky but nothing that makes the game impossible to play for patient people. As for the way it looks....EW. If someone took a PS2 game, shit on it and only cleaned it off half way, you'd have Spiderman 3. There are some amazing graphics and engine problems with this game: Unfinished environments, massive pop in and the most disturbing, Disappearing textures. Sure, web swinging is great, but cruise too high and all of the textures in the city completely disappear. The framerate is never constant and often results in some really choppy gameply. It's not all bad though, the Wii version dos have some advantages...if you can call them that. The Wii version includes voice acting from the cast of the film well as exclusive missions and storylines not available in other versions along with some surprisingly deep RPG skill tree elements. You can also wear the black suit pretty much whenever you want in the Wii version. There's not much here unless you're a die hard fan of the series and don't mind the major graphical flaws. In conclusion, this game was rushed and it shows. I guess i can give the same recommendation for the film and the game: Only wort a rental.

Posted in: on Saturday, May 5, 2007 at at 6:29 PM