dev. Treyarch
Now available on Xbox, GameCube, and PlayStation 2.
Attention bottle-cap collectors of the world: The new Spider-Man 2 movie-tie-in video game is your cup of tepid tea. Boldly eschewing thrills, the game's designers have instead embraced an experience that bears a sad resemblance to that of little girls on the schoolyard accumulating shiny stickers of horses or sk8rbois.
To be sure, Treyarch has invested plenty of resources in re-creating all of Manhattan, from the sidewalks to the skyscrapers. It's impressive to see the size of the darn thing, and there's a modicum of entertainment to be had in swinging through the steel canyons of the city shooting webs as you go. You get to be Spider-Man, albeit a pretty clumsy and plummet-prone version.
But then there's the question: What do you do in that vast expanse of Manhattan, especially now that Cats has finally closed? The answer is simple: You travel around the city collecting things. You can, for example, scale the tallest skyscrapers and collect Skyscraper Tokens. There are 150 of these functionless doohickeys all across Manhattan. Perhaps you prefer aquatics: 130 Buoy Tokens sit on floating buoys ringing the island, each of which can only be obtained by solving a frustrating jumping puzzle. Elsewhere, 75 Secret Tokens, 37 Hideout Tokens, and 213 Hint Markers await your copious leisure hours and boundless thirst for stone-faced drudgery. Each gives you points, which you can spend on improving your super powers. Hint Markers also give you brief voiceovers by B-movie actor Bruce Campbell, who sasses off with vaguely helpful gameplay advice.
If you collect enough of a given kind of thing, you earn special titles such as--I kid you not--Employee of the Month, Lover Not a Fighter, Tentacle Wrangler, and Anger Manager. Getting all the Skyscraper Tokens earns you the title Towering Explorer, for example, whilst finding all the Hint Markers labels you a Knowledge Seeker. You get bonus points for earning these titles, and perhaps inevitably there are 40 of the damn things for you to collect. You can also collect some things that require actual gameplay. For instance, 150 Challenge Markers litter the city, each of which triggers a race or other timed challenge of some kind. If you beat one, you are asked to do it again even faster--that's double the gameplay with half the development cost! There are also Mary Jane missions, which are not, in fact, pot deliveries; photo missions, where you take pictures for the Daily Bugle; and Pizza Delivery missions, where you--oh for fuck's sake, never mind.
Beating up criminals is dull. There are 12 basic combat moves you can make, plus 26 more you can buy. But all you really need are Jump and Punch, since flailing away blindly at those two buttons gets you out of most jams. Combat flows weirdly, too, with a freeze-frame every time you execute a move. It's like fighting with Colorforms. And yes, there's the obligatory bullet-time.
Swinging around the city is dull and frustrating, despite the presence of 21 movement upgrades for you to purchase. You're always chasing cars and trying desperately to land on them from above, an exercise in misery that occurs about every 10 minutes. And nothing blows the Spider-Man mystique like constantly crashing into buildings and falling hundreds of stories to go splat on the pavement.
Really, the massive wave of shit just keeps spreading with this game. In their desperate effort to emulate the dumber aspects of the Grand Theft Auto series, the designers have made a game that is all width and no depth. There is a story here, in which you do Spider-Mannish things like fight super-villains, ultimately squaring off against Doc Ock. They even roped poor Tobey Maguire, Kirsten Dunst, and Alfred Molina in for voice sessions. But the main game is just not fun. The repetitive street-crime missions do nothing but annoy, and the story missions are hobbled by crap graphics, crap sound, and crap gameplay. Had the designers not spent their time meticulously reconstructing Manhattan, or placing their 755 functionless doohickeys, they might have spent more time making the core experience of Spider-Man 2 entertaining. Instead, they are relying on the bottle-cap collectors of the world to rise up with one voice and demand this exercise in tedium. The rest of us should have better things to do with our time.
