Some things never change. Poor pasty-faced putz Peter Parker the photographer is once again beset with numerous personal problems (mostly work and bird-related) while his uber-cool alter-ego Spider-Man is having trouble with a city full of crimes and misdemeanours. Added to the day-to-day muggings, car jackings and bank jobs, Spidey also has to put up with return visits to Manhattan for a few old “friends” like Black Cat, Rhino and Shocker. These days in order to chill out a bit he can also do tasks as mundane as delivering pizzas and rescuing kiddies’ lost balloons. Pizzas? Car-Jackings? - Yep, just about everyone who played the previous Spider-Man game said “yeah it’s good, but how cool would it be if you could get down to street level and roam around, GTA-style…?” So Treyarch went away, and made it possible…
Having defeated the Green Goblin previously, Peter Parker/Spider-Man is having a really tough time. He is late for everything; he can’t hold on to a job, he neglects his friends and all because of his double life. Meanwhile, a brilliant scientist (Doctor Otto Octavius) is developing a new process to generate energy – this of course turns out to be a disaster in the making, and during a demonstration there is a terrible accident in which Dr. Octavius gets transformed into "Doctor Octopus" (aka, "Doc Ock"), a multi-tentacled robotic troublemaker with a grudge against Spider-Man.
The Manhattan in the previous game was quite big, but was also rather limited in the way it confined you to the rooftops, but Spider-Man 2 might as well be called “Spider-Man Unleashed” – because there’s nowhere (NOWHERE) on Manhattan that you can’t go now. Here’s a couple of examples: The highest spot (the top of the antenna on the Empire State Building) gives you an amazing view from one end of the island to the other, and it really feels like you’re thousands of feet (1,453 feet, 8 9/16 inches or 443.2 metres to be exact) in the air. You can even see the traffic going about its business down on the streets, and if there’s a crime in progress (highlighted by a green or purple icon) you can leap down and swing into action. The satisfaction when you jump on top of a gang of crooks' car, smash the heck out of it and then beat the crap out of them is brilliant - exaggerated ragdoll physics and all... it’s one of the coolest things I’ve done in a game for some time. Or you can hitch a ride on a helicopter or two and web-sling your way to the top of the Statue of Liberty.
Treyarch accurately placed many other well-known buildings, landmarks and locations too, including; Times Square, Roosevelt Island, Central Park and even, poignantly enough, what is now known as Ground Zero - although strangely the famous Brooklyn Bridge is nowhere to be seen.
The game also has the most remarkable 3D map – press the back button and you’ll get a sort of satellite view, with four levels of zoom, and a key gives you the position of almost everything you’ll need to find, you can even see the teeny-weeny cars way below. There are hint icons dotted everywhere on the map, and Bruce Campbell is the familiar voice of the “tour guide”.
Everything moves with a solid and smooth frame rate but as with the previous game the camera is prone to “spazzing”. You can lock on to enemies with a press of “down” on the D-Pad, which obviously helps to keep focused on them, but can also cause real problems if you get too far away from them – so you need to be ready to toggle it on and off. Obviously with all this new freedom Spider-Man’s web-slinging isn't as simple as before, you have to actually have something to "sling" the web to now, meaning that you can’t just swing anywhere you want to, and this makes for some frustrating detours around buildings when you're chasing bad guys. Fortunately Spidey can now charge up jumps and leap huge distances, meaning sometimes it’s quicker to attach to the wall of a building (press ‘B’) and then leap, web-zip or wall-run over the top. Catch villains in your web and, once you’ve earned all the coolest tricks, you can do all kinds of superhero stuff to them; combo punches and kicks, or humiliatingly string them up to a lamppost or traffic light. Spidey also has his limited but rechargeable “Spider Senses” (it’s like blurry Max Payne bullet time) that slow everything down and give him the edge on the bad guys – very handy indeed, particularly against some of the boss characters. But heck, the new Spider-Man has way too many tricks and moves up his Lycra sleeves to describe them all here.
Joyfully, once you’ve beaten the game, there's still a lot to do, and GTA-style total freedom if you don't want to complete missions – you can just hunt for secrets or try and do all the challenges (basically getting to a certain point, or point-to-point races). Although there’s no vehicle driving, just like GTA and Vice City you can find yourself fully intending to head off and complete the next mission only to find that an hour later, you’re at the other end of the island and have completely forgotten what you’re supposed to be doing – what I’m trying to say is that web-slinging and exploring in Spider-Man 2 is a LOT of fun.
The game isn’t without its problems though; whilst Spider-Man is superbly animated, it’s almost like the game is running too fast at times, and you’d almost like things to slow down a bit and thus be more controllable (and this is probably where the idea of Spider-bullet time came from). The rapid movements are as much of a hindrance as a help, particularly when battling the boss characters – this review would have been up days ago if I hadn’t insisted on beating Doc Ock before I wrote it. And one final complaint; out of his smart costume, Peter Parker is also one butt-ugly dude. Whilst the game might have the real voices, it certainly doesn’t have the real faces - I’ll bet that movie Spider-Man, Tobey Maguire, is absolutely delighted with the way he looks in-game (Kirsten Dunst ain’t too hot either). But they’re just gripes – the game is an awful lot of fun, and has hidden depths – trust me, perfecting your combat and web-slinging techniques could become as addictive as lap time challenges in PGR2…
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