Spider-Man 2 Review

A whole city to explore...

New York City is rendered very accurately - not in a way akin to The Getaway, where everything was everywhere it should be - but modelled in an accurate-but-modified-to-suit-the-game way, with buildings being suitably climbable and the larger landmarks (the Chrysler Building, Ground Zero, Lady Liberty) present and correct. Put simply - it's massive. A mini-map is always at the bottom of the screen, helping to navigate areas in detail, with helpful markers showing distance and height in relation to the player, and a large map of the entire city is available at the push of a button, highlighting all available areas of interest - shops, challenges, mission waypoints and suchlike. The system helps the player to save themselves from frustrating levels of disorientation, and stops the city being as daunting as it could have been.

The faults don't just lie in the graphics

The player is first introduced to the game with a flyby of the city, and this is where one of the most glaring faults of the game first kicks up a stench - the graphics are shoddy. Now this is understandable, with the massive scale of the city and the number of cars and people needing to be rendered in real time, but there are a great number of graphical issues in the game that come across as unfinished or rushed. Hideous popup in the near distance, repetitive NPC models, lacking facial animation of any kind except for in certain cut scenes (giving characters a robot-zombie of doom look about them) and the less said about the Peter Parker model the better: he has - to be fair - around two whole frames of animation, and though the player spends little time as Spidey's alter-ego, it is a little disconcerting that such an elegant and acrobatic superhero looks and moves like he's made out of melted Lego when not in his costume. Though the look of the game is generally acceptable, the unfinished air about things puts a dampener on proceedings - while it isn't on the levels of some other shoddy releases, it is still improper, even if a game does have to be released to tie in with the cinema release.

Of all three versions, the Xbox version comes out on top, with a generally sharper look, smoother frame rate and better draw-distance. While the Playstation 2 version has the slight lead over the GameCube on draw-distance, the GameCube has more detailed textures, especially in the distance. The most obvious difference is seen when you use your Spider Reflexes. On the Xbox and Playstation 2 everything will distort and bloom, almost appearing like you have set the contrast on your television too high. The GameCube version doesn't pull this off as well, and settles for a marginally distorted image.