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Review: Ultimate Spider-Man
- Title: Ultimate Spider-Man
- Developer: Treyarch
- Publisher: Activision
- System: Xbox (PS2, GC)
- Reviewer: Zonk
- Score: 7/10
The translation of the comic to the game is extremely faithful. While it's not necessary, having read the comic will give the player a deeper understanding of the characters and their motivations. The developers received permission to effectively extend the canon of the Ultimate line, going further in exploring the repercussions of Peter Parker's encounter with Eddie Brock and the Venom suit. The majority of the story revolves around Brock and Parker, with both characters being the controlled protagonist at various points in the game. Besides Venom, fans of the comic will have the opportunity to interact with the likes of Green Goblin, R.H.I.N.O, Shocker, Silver Sable, Beetle, and Carnage. All this fan service comes courtesy of a Bendis-penned script. Despite some of the gameplay shortcomings the plot of the game is top-notch, and will be a treat to anyone who is a fan of the series.
If you've played Spider-Man 2, you will be intimately familiar with the control scheme for Ultimate Spider-Man. Most of the additions to the controls are subtle tweaks to the combat system. This Spider-Man is much more bouncy than the Spidey of the previous game, leaping off of walls to strike at opponents. Movement for Peter is the same as it ever was, and the web-swinging is easily one of the most entertaining travel modes in any video game I've played. Control over the thwipping has been simplified, with fewer options available but a more intuitive experience the result. Venom is a very different animal, much bulkier and far stronger. Instead of swinging, Venom makes tremendous leaps in a style similar to the Hulk in Ultimate Destruction. Venom's attacks are extremely powerful, tossing cars at opponents and lashing out with tentacles. He has some neat wrestling style moves, but mashing the tentacle attack button is usually the most effective way to finish an opponent. In an interesting nod to continuity, Venom slowly loses health as the suit consumes Brock's strength. To counteract this and to heal up damage from fights, Venom can consume bystanders by drawing them into his suit and draining them dry. In essentially all ways the man in black is more suited to combat that his red-suited counterpart. Parker is much more entertaining to control than Brock, though. The slim form of Spider-Man has a level of grace and finesse that shows how much care the development team put into crafting the experience. My only real complaint is the lack of a quick method of scaling a building. Having played Hulk, where the big green can surge up the side of the building in giant leaps, Spider-Man's slow crawl was somewhat frustrating. Speaking of the Hulk, Venom reminded me of Banner's alter-ego in less than pleasant way. Venom handles like a flying Buick. Leaping is a very inexact form of travel, and the combat system isn't tuned for his powerful attacks.
Movement and combat are tested often in the linear confines of the game's progress. Unlike the more GTA-like Spider-Man 2, Ultimate requires the player to progress in various city-wide activities in order to gain access to new story mode missions. The two most common requirements are race medals and completion of combat tours. Races are just what you've come to expect from a game like this, and are similar to races you'll find in other super-hero titles. Combat tours require you to follow waypoints around the city, defeating baddies at each location until you've whupped a goodly number of whatever gang you're concentrating on. A certain number of completed races and tours are required in order to reach the next story mission, along with found tokens (unlockables like comic covers or hidden coins) and spontaneous city events (wounded citizens needing a lift to the hospital, muggings, and carjackings). These activities are nothing more than time killers, spacing out the interesting and fanboi satisfying story missions. The story missions are all different, and many combine several activities into a comic-book's length action piece. In one, you pursue a retreating Rhino in a form of race. Along the way you rescue trapped and wounded citizens, delivering them to safety. Finally, you and Rhino have it out in grand melee. Each story mission is accompanied by beautiful comic-panel action and entertaining dialogue. The busy-work races and combat tours are very frustrating, though, and comparatively speaking there are just too few story missions compared to the amount of time you'll spend racing around the city.
One way in which Ultimate Spider-Man is clearly superior to Spider-Man 2 is in its graphical presentation. I really enjoyed the cell-shaded look, making the deformed art style come to life on the television screen. The game looks terrific, with every character a detailed, fleshed out, and articulated 3-D representation of the comic book images. Just as impressive as the animated look is the presentation style. Comic-inspired panels are used heavily during cut scenes, with the characters literally leaping off the page. The effect is quite striking, and makes for a game that flaunts its comic book roots in a very satisfying fashion. I wish I could say the same for the audio environment. Musically, the game is very frustrating. Pieces alternate between generic-sounding electronic music and quite annoying "action" selections that distracted from my enjoyment of the game. Sound effects are fairly standard, your thwaps and smacks and thwips getting across movement and action well enough. The voice acting is relatively well done, thankfully, with Parker and Co. straying to this side of the comic book corny line. Bendis does excellent dialogue, and the cast imparts his words with feeling and emphasis. While it only makes sense that the game's visuals were more the focus than the audio, it would have been nice to enjoy a more full sensory experience while playing the title.
Ultimate Spider-Man is lots of fun. Graphically it's an improvement over the previous incarnations, and the refined controls and combination gameplay switch up the established formula. Despite lackluster racing elements, the freewheeling movement and bouncy combat combined with the engaging story missions makes for a number of entertaining moments. The brevity of the overall story is probably the most frustrating aspect of the game, with the quality of the voice acting and writing leaving the player wanting more than the title can provide. The only real way to satisfy the itch this game will cause is to read the books, which is in many ways the highest compliment the game can receive. If you're a fan of Marvel's universe you'll have a hard time not enjoying the fun this game can offer. Ultimate Spider-Man is well worth a rental, with the only folks likely not to find something worthwhile in this title the ones who spent their time in forums referring to Wind Waker as "Cellda".
My only real complaint is the lack of a quick method of scaling a building.
L2+R2 when wall-crawling zips you up a building extremely fast.
As far as I know it isn't supposed to be R.H.I.N.O, but simply Rhino.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhino_(comics)
For starters, the character's attacks have been dramatically reduced. Gone is the dodge button. Now when your Spider-sense goes off, your choices are to do nothing or jump around wildly. Gone are the dozens of awesome combos, air tricks, and web moves. No you have a basic punch, a stronger attack, and a few very basic combinations of the two. You're reduced to mindless mashing. Oh, you can web enemies, too, but they only holds them in place for a few seconds. Swinging them around your head, swinging enemies into each other for extra damage, shooting web-balls... all of that is vanished to the ether and a much smaller fraction remains. Even the random city events are few and far between. In Spider-Man 2, there could easily be two events on one block. In Ultimate Spider-Man, finding one is almost as improbable as finding one of the illogically place hidden tokens.
Thanks to the lack of moves, completing challenge races, beating up thugs, and finding tokens have almost zero benefit. Sometimes they're required to move the story forward, but it's not like you get points or anything for them, because even if you did there're no upgrades to be had. Even though the tokens unlock "secrets", they are nothing more than character portraits and comic book covers. It's the equivalent of throwing commercials and trailers onto a DVD and proclaiming that it's "packed with extras!". There's no substance to it. The tokens themselves are populated almost completely contrary to what you'd expect from a game with, well, hidden tokens. The tallest buildings in the city? There's nothing up there for you. Just keep moving along-- why would you even want to climb that building in the first place? Instead, you better check the footbridge in the park. Or the alley by the library. Or one of dozens of locations where nothing interesting or related to the story can be found.
But playing Venom should be fun, right? I mean, the commercials give a pretty clear impression of the dichotomy between playing a villain and playing a hero. "Which will you be?" the ads proclaim, invoking thoughts of influence from blockbusters such as Knights of the Old Republic or even Fable. Unfortunately, the commercials are entirely misleading. The game decides when you play as Venom or Spider-Man, and what you can do with them. It switches you to Venom every few sequences, but the missions are much shorter and much more linear. And for all the fluff surrounding the Venom character, his attacks do no more damage than Spider-Man's, and his inability to web-swing makes his movements more limited. Yeah, his super-jump is cool at first, but I'd take swinging any day. When a game has as many follow/chase/race missions as Ultimate Spider-Man, you really need a little horizontal locomotion. Venom can throw objects, which sounds useful, unless you want to throw it at anything specific. If you want to just watch a slow animation of something being upended, then it's truly awesome, but don't try anything foolish like aiming. All of these shortcomings make playing as Venom feel tacked-on and gimmicky.
The camera is a bit of a problem, which is not to be unexpected. It swings around wildly when you get near, say, the side of a building you're jumping for and climbing on, and tends to want to swing around the opposite direction of, say, what you actually want to see. However, that's pretty standard fare for a 3D game. At there's a convenient camera lock-on for those crazy battle sequences, right? Wrong again. The camera lock-on is largely theoretical. It never seems to work and if does, there's no confirmation or indication that you've locked on to an enemy.
Spider-Man 2 was quite the surprise when i
1) Ultimate Spider-Man (VG) does not build on the "framework" of Spider-Man 2 (VG). It was in development before the latter even reached beta. They used some ideas from last year's game but it's a different team.
2) The plotline of "canon" Spider-Man goes back to Amazing Fantasy, not "Amazing Stories." Amazing Fantasy issue 15 for the even more anal out there.
3) Ultimate Spider-Man (the comic book) was created before the movies, let alone any "popular response" to them.
4) Mentioning Brian Michael Bendis (the writer of Ultimate Spider-Man) without mentioning Mark Bagley (the peniciller of Ultimate Spider-Man and another consultant on this videogame) is a crime against humanity, especially since the "distinctive" art style is mentioned.
Personally, splintering is a bad way to describe the Ultimate line. In a lot of ways, it is almost the opposite. They have taken all of the 'splinters' of the original Marvel universe and coalesced them into a single, cohesive whole. Some things have changed, some have not, but all in all, a much more readable and understandable version of the characters and relationships.
From http://db.gamefaqs.com/console/ps2/file/ultimate_s pider_man_boss_enemy.txt
R.H.I.N.O stands for "Robotism Heuristic Intelligence Navigable Operative".
The R.H.I.N.O is a battle armor created by Alex O'Hirn, a geeky scientist. At first, it was just a robot, which got it's keister kicked by Iron Man. Alex O'Hirn decided to make it a suit, which he than used for himself. In the 616 Universe, Alex O'Hirn was a thug stuck in a Rhino suit which gave him immense strength. So you can see the huge difference between the 616 and the Ultimate Universe.
Once you pass all the story missions you can "Switch Heros" and wander the city as Venom, and in that mode gameplay is switched to a style similar to Grand Theft Auto where you build up points and local cops and military try to stop you. Worth the time of playing though all the lame race missions.