It was going to take something a little special to get me to put a plug back on my PS2 and as a “comic geek” Ultimate Spider-Man just happened to be that title. The game is set in Marvel’s “Ultimate” Universe, which sees classic characters being rebooted and given a new lease of life, but based around the old legend.
The first thing that you can not fail to notice when you start the game is just how good it looks. The Cel shading that has been so overused in the past feels right at home here giving the game real comic book feel. Even the story and cut scenes are presented as comic panels.
The second thing that many will notice is just how similar it all feels to the recent Spider-Man 2 game, although it allows Spidey to move even faster. The full free roaming New York City – do pretty much anything – go pretty much anywhere approach is here the same as it was there. The play area is even bigger than before (which was impressive enough) but it really is as if they have just “coloured in” the previous game - even the buildings have lost their reflective windows and also have that authentic hand-drawn look.
The biggest difference between the two is that this game takes ALL of its background from the comics and therefore has a much bigger rota of villains and supporting cast. Making the most out of this is the ability to play as Venom – one of comic’doms most popular anti-heroes. Where as with Spidey you go round doing good, as Venom you get to go around being bad. It’s a nice contrast and is done very well.
So far then we have a better looking, bigger version of a game which when reviewed scored an 8. The impatient out there will already have scrolled down and seen that this only gets a 7. The cause of this dropping a point is the annoying races that you now HAVE to participate in. For a game that tries to be so close to the comics, these sections just have no bearing on the game and feel like padding.
I have the first five USM Hardback Graphic novels and at no point do you have 20 pages of Spidey doing nothing more than swinging down a street only to smash into a wall every time he goes around a corner. The races in the game are controller breakingly bad. The camera is not tight enough to make them fun and it soon comes down to blind luck to get to your destination. If this was just used in one section of the game it would be a minor annoyance but they crop up far too frequently.
Also the game suffers from the one main downside of SM2 – there are too few side missions and those that there are, are just far too similar. A real shame when you consider all the potential characters the game has as well as having two playable (and considerably different) characters.
It’s rather strange that a game that is so full of comic loveliness features problems that will no doubt put the comic fans off quicker than anything else. I can’t help but feel Treyarch should have paid more money and obtained even more of the Ultimate characters to use. Whilst there is a nice ‘Good Vs. Evil’ contrast between Venom and Spidey, they still play very much the same. So is this Ultimate Spider Man? – Well hopefully not, what you have here isn’t a bad game at all, but by no means an essential purchase either, especially if you’ve already played Spider-Man 2.
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