Spider-Man 2

Accidentally bitten by a radioactive spider, Peter Parker woke up to a life that was too opposite of his own. Transformed from the most popular nerd at school into a loner, a vigilante, and a hero, Spider-Man was born. It's another day in the life of Peter's alter ego and his own, the man whose identity wears two masks. Doctor Otto Octavius, a scientist of peace and love, is about to undergo a transition of his own on this very day. Invited to witness the raw energy of a man-made sun fused into a new form of electricity, Peter attempts to shut down the machine when Otto's experiment goes awry. This happy tale then turns into a nightmare for the creature Dr. Octopus is to become. With Otto's wife now dead and Spider-Man to blame, the metallic tentacles that have been ingrained into his backside by freak occurrence, are now the tools he'll use in his goal to destroy Spider-Man, and the world along with him.

Spider-Man has cornered the video game market with his mega-popular movie franchise. He's got this arena all tangled up in his web. There's no where you can run. There's no where you can hide. Spider-Man can go anywhere he wants. Now he's spinning across an entire city: New York City. Beyond borders that were available if limited to in Activision's last run with the webslinger, Treyarch (the developer) has returned toаrelive the magic that made the first next-generation Spider-Man action game so successful. This time, instead of sticking to a format that primarily consists of indoor sweeps, the Spider is out the window and into the open. Swinging from building to building, Spider-Man's out and about, literally battling the entirety of New York rather than a small chunk of it. But what this means isn't exactly what I'm saying. If New York is predictable thugs and a little bit of super villains thrown in to mask redundancy, it seems someone's cutting too many shortcuts.

Bigger doesn't always necessarily mean better. Spider-Man 2 has taken the Grand Theft Auto gameplay formula and has molded that into its own citywide universe. The problem: Spider-Man 2 isn't as open-ended a game as it should be, and is repetitive too often too soon. In his new New York City, Spider-Man isn't constricted to navigating the insides of buildings any longer. He's able to swing openly and freely above New York's alleyways and street life, ranging from top to bottom. Each street is littered with moving vehicles and pedestrians going about their business. These people also provide Spider-Man with a whopping percentage of required tasks to complete. Divided into lists, every level in Spider-Man 2 breathes an average of 2-3 chores Spider-Man must tend to before he is to pass onto the following chapter (with 15 story-based ones in all, and two point-collect-a-thons that follow). Ninety percent of the time, those goals consist of achieving a set amount of Hero Points (starting from 2,000-4,000). Hero Points are the rewards achieved by surpassing any of Spider-Man's singular activities. Like currency, they're earned and spent on enhanced abilities for Spider-Man to apply to combat or otherwise. But now we're back to the dilemma...because the underlying differences between the game's goals are so noticeably few.

By swinging and spinning your webbing around New York's heights, Spider-Man's mini-map will locate multiple colored markers. White icons are associated with priority targets you aren't in need of arriving yet, but will eventually (like getting to Peter's apartment); blue are those destinations of the highest urgency; purple are random mission occurrences you may or may not proceed to (when a child's balloon is floating away, or a gang of hooligans is beating up on a person, for instance); red are enemies; and green acts as the main dispensers of employment. Ask these people what they want, and they'll break out into a routine scenario you'll catch onto very soon. A car could be jacked and you'll need to swing after it, stop it, and defeat the thief; thugs could be robbing a money truck, which has you sometimes finishing them off, or them and a car with more prey inside; a police vehicle may be chasing another car you'll again need to damage and take out whoever's behind the wheel; a man could be falling off a building you'll need to climb up to and rescue; a ship could be sinking, where you'll have to bring each person aboard all ashore individually; a person may be injured, and you'll need to get him to the hospital on time; a shootout between cops and criminals will occur, and naturally it's up to you to defeat them; a gang of hooligans could be waiting in ambush, with more of you beating up them; or in much later parts of the game Mysterio's robotic forces will be attacking people -- and you've got to clean up their mess. As you can see, Spider-Man's scenarios vary only slightly. The game wouldn't be such a damper if collecting Hero Points wasn't necessitated in almost every scenario. With too much car chasing, or goto places to complete almost exactly the same menial objectives as you did in the other few mission types, gaining more Hero Points becomes redundantly boorish.

Using those points is the fun part, though. Then you can make the experience of driving over the same tasks less alike when new tactics are added to Spidey's belt. Spider-Man is no longer able to do what he's been able to do in the past Spidey games. No...now he can do so much more. String up bad guys to a lamp post? Check. Sprint along the sides of walls while swinging? You got it. Spin a web at multiple targets to twirl them around in circles? Oh yeah. Even slingshot Spidey into the air straight from that ending scene in the first movie? Done. You can quite literally do whatever a Spider-Man can with a hefty move supply to spend Hero Points on. The further you'll progress into the game, the further these options will expand and help Spider-Man to grow into a chiseled warrior. It's also surprisingly easy, after about half an hour, to adapt to Treyarch's new "realistic" Spidey swinging. After starting the game and choosing either an automatic or manual (manual being better, since it isn't as limited) direction in which to take control of Spidey's full range of abilities, you'll find out that if no buildings are around, you can't swing through the air. Learning how to pilot Spider-Man around corners of the city, dodging and countering enemies with combos (whenever Spidey's aura flashes, you can avoid attacks), and even sprinting along buildings will all feel naturally in due time. All for the best too when facing the "real" missions. Although sparring against only a few villains one or two times (or in Mysterio's case, none at all, technically) is more fruitful than the mundane lesser tasks, which is the case, there still isn't as much to be found in these parts either.

Up against Mysterio especially, the game feels strangely out of place as both Spider-Man and Mysterio must race to pick up and place criminals' Mysterio has set free back into energized containment bins. Afterward, Spider-Man endures an unendearing and silly maze challenge. Get to all airborne checkpoints without being spotted up to three times, and you won't be shot by Mysterio's laser gun. Later on, Mysterio has Spider-Man rescuing reporters from flying robots, and even further down the line he leads him to his fun house hideout where Spider-Man must battle and defeat clowns and clones (of Spider-Man). It's all too cheesy, really. It's also disappointing, as Mysterio-related missions appear even more so than Doc Ock's do -- where you'll only get to combat him in each of the three movie segments. Rhino and Shocker also fill in for lesser stooges with their usually predictable arrangements, in addition to Black Cat, who fortunately has a recurring cameo that sensibly ties into the storyline.

Breathtaking is a word I wouldn't use lightly. Still, it's a word I don't need. Unlike the stunning work of art that the Spider-Man 2 movies have brought to moviegoers, Spider-Man 2 the game belittles through comparison. Definitely not close to the tackiest stature of visual grade, it's just that like the gameplay, the graphics aren't so much advanced to where they need to be in a sense when there's even more to see. A lot more. The first Spider-Man movie game took us into enemy warehouses, past Oscorp Industry's hi-tech security, and in other cases between the sides of outside buildings and on their rooftops. Here, there are far fewer moments when Spider-Man will actually visit interiors. Exteriors are the new, and in the new is where a lot of stuff is really the same as the levels don't change from one setting to another as much as you might think. Spider-Man has the whole city at his fingertips, so the city itself is where most of the action takes place. But then, all you're really going to be staring at for most of the time is the city. Spider-Man 2 triumphs on the visual front, if only that it doesn't totally sharpen the redefined bigness a game in this position this calls for.

A seamlessly linked together New York makes for Spidey's playground. There are tall skyscrapers to climb up and swan dive off of. There are dozens of moving vehicles all obeying traffic around the city streets. There are crowds of people walking these blocks. There are lamp posts and billboards. There are distinctive locations, from Central Park's tree-covered landscape up to the tippy top of the Empire State Building, New York's tallest building, that you can visit (and in the Empire State Building's case, watch Spider-Man drop off its top for the longest reach in all its fast-zooming glory). It's astonishing how you can web anywhere in this city really, but again there's that feeling of continuity in sameness. Based architecture and low-level texturing designs contribute to this point. New York City isn't fictional. It's real. Spider-Man 2 shows it for what it is, however not in full. While there are real-life locations of the city in the city, the New York here forgets about the fortitude. Black and blue windows with solid white squiggles gloss panes on both buildings and vehicles. Tiny grains filter the grayed pavement of the streets. Doors, amongst other things, are painted right onto building sides to save time modeling. What I'm trying to point out is that Spider-Man 2 covers the fundamentals for crafting a broad city you won't mind stewing in. Though, even the most adequate of meals are better served with the finest ingredients in the kitchen.

When the wallcrawler isn't dishing up a glass of punch, he's styling. Spider-Man is, as always, the one who saves his own game from falling off the edge of the world. Truly, it shows. Treyarch has transformed Spider-Man's character from mild-mannered to immeasurably cool. Towering above all buildings, hopping from rooftop to rooftop, running quickly in vertical and horizontal directions, swinging and slinging with webbing, tying up bad guys and lobbing them forward and backward, jumping high and falling breezily, caressing the webline into a steady playground swinging motion, ducking and dodging bullets...all of these maneuvers made possible by Spidey's new and improved authentic web that sticks to objects instead of the sky, have Spider-Man's deployed animations never looking better. He'll gracefully sew New York up with his weblines, and in his costume that matches the ideal outfit straight from the film no less. It's too bad. The same thing can't be said about every other character within the game. Least not the pathetic vermin of New York, or in other words those irritating mission people. There's possibly an even smaller amount of New York inhabitants that actually relay mission info than the missions themselves. Not that it matters too much, because they're mostly all but about three or four people with pasted-on blocky faces that wildly flail their arms around when speaking. Watching the same scripted in-game scenes over and over with such poorly modeled and animated people gets overly exhausting much too quickly. Luckily important figures, such as Rhino, Black Cat, or particularly Doctor Octopus carry the movement and outer shell well of those you wouldn't mind sharing staring time with during the gameplay.

Last time actors' Tobey Maguire, Willem Dafoe, and even Bruce Campbell (to a lesser extent) did what few Hollywood faces have done for video games at the time. That being the act of lending their voice talent to the game that's based on their very own movie. Now that Spider-Man has done it, every other movie game's been doing it (well, in many cases) and even in those games that aren't about a movie (i.e., Grand Theft Auto: Vice City). Tobey returns this time as the man behind the mask. Along for the thrill ride is Alfred Molina as Doctor Octavius/Octopus and Kirsten Dunst as Mary Jane Watson. Bruce Campbell is even back as the voice of the witty guy who narrates the game's handy walkthrough stages (which has been taken into a much farther reach this time around). Everyone but these four are unimportant. Just kidding, guys. But in all seriousness, voice-overs used for the city tour are all poorly acted with not even much to say. Weak dialogues along these lines will be in short supply and growing in annoyance as Spider-Man treks across New York: "Spidey, you the man!" and in reply, "No, you the man!"; "Get a job!" and in reply, "If you only you knew."; or "Menace!" and "Learn to drive!" and "It's Spider-Man!". That's not the worst of it, though. These New Yorker-accentuated male and female spoken bits extend into blabbering the same old thing when expressing every goal in a single phrasing, and so will those who play as the people in trouble, cops contrasting the bad guys, or the bad guys contrasting back. Tobey's range of one-liners is vastly limited, and not he, nor Alfred Molina, and especially not Kirsten Dunst really pulls through with a performance you'll care to hear. In short: the tired deliveries from Spider-Man 2's cast pales greatly from what was founded up on the silver screen.

Bothersome dialogue is the culprit for the cork to be in Spider-Man 2's sounded out blueprints, while the half-visible musical score and subtle noises don't contribute enough to help the game from out of this rut. Silence is golden for sure, but in Spider-Man 2 Midas' touch may have gone a little too far. Fading in and out every once in a while, the mildly paced orchestrated rhythms of the game capture fitting themes for Spider-Man's wandering adventures. When encountering the opposition, the action lights up with heavier beats. Where or why the soundtracks bounces away to is a good question. Regular hitting, flying, jumping actions are always around, though -- even if the audio isn't as strongly influential or noteworthy. By traveling through the air really fast, like when dropping from huge heights, a strong wind noise picks up while Spider-Man plunges. Shooting out a web creates a suitable sticky effect. Bullets and explosions all relate to the devices that have created them. Hopping upward and sticking to scaleable walls makes for the rights to their commitments. Everything rings correctly -- just not supremely.