Spider Man 3

May 4, 2007 - When Spidey puts on the symbiote -- that's the black suit for those of you who don't speak geek -- Peter Parker goes from a wisecracking hero to a skull-cracking jerk. His testosterone levels spike; he gets meaner and more aggressive. Activision and Treyarch nailed the darker concept with Spider-Man 3 the game because when I picked up the 360 controller, I lost myself to rage. In a flash, the well-to-do dork who sleeps with a Superman comforter was gone, and I became a tweaked-out, curse-word-spewing maniac who pounded on his desk and screamed to the heavens as I was screwed over by cheap bosses and badly-designed interiors. At one point, I drew back my arm to hurl the controller into my beloved TV screen and caught a reflection of myself. This anger. This rage. What had I become?

Just like Pete's decent into darkness, Spider-Man 3 goes south so slowly that it's hard to notice at first. The game opens up with Bruce Campbell acting as our familiar narrator and walking Spidey through his new-found controls. Ol' web-head can now web zip with one button; his Spider-Sense turns the screen black and white while displaying enemies in red, allies in green and objectives in yellow; and Spider-Reflexes allow the wall-crawler to slow time and counter attacks with a single button press. You get the basics down while saving some folks from a fire, and you're let loose in New York.



Lovers' spat over the streets of Manhattan.
At first, it's breathtaking. Activision says the city is 2.5 times bigger than the one in Spider-Man 2, and as the sun bathes the towering buildings in light and you somersault into different sections of the sprawling metropolis without any load times, it's easy to get swept away in the visual upgrade. You throw a web -- it comes out lax, hits something and goes taut in Spidey's hand -- and set off to bring justice to the city, which is no small task in the sandbox environment.

There are 42 missions in Spider-Man 3 that draw from the movie (Sandman, New Goblin, etc.), the comics (Scorpion, Kraven, so on) and the videogame's original content (three gangs are running amok in New York). Drop in random events such as hurt cops and gang fights that pop up as you swing around the city, races, skydiving challenges, 75 gang tokens, 35 secret tokens, 30 skyscraper tokens and 30 subway tokens, and you've got a lot for the web-head to tackle.



Spidey in black suit. He's so dark and mysterious!
Let's get the good out of the way first -- swinging through the city and taking care of random crimes, arguably the best parts of Spider-Man 2, are arguably the best parts in this game. The swinging is well animated and pointing your analog stick left or right will direct Spider-Man as to where to shoot his webbing, while the random crimes are more in-depth this time around. Sure, you have to stop an out-of-control driver every now and again, but sometimes you'll get to follow a speeding police car to a crime scene. Even better is the fact that the pop-up crimes aren't just there to be there this time around -- they play into Spidey's Crime Fighting Index. See, New York is broken up into different gang zones. These zones are visible on the in-game map as well as tracked on Spidey's stat menu. It's up to you to patrol these areas, bust bad guys and watch the zones turn from angry, gang-controlled neon to peaceful, Spidey-influenced green. The better you do, the more upgrades you get for your health and reflexes.

If the same handful of crimes in the last Spider-Man game kept you happy, the expanded roster of events -- Activision said there's three times as many events in Spider-Man 3 -- will keep you playing, but please don't take that as a ringing endorsement. Like any supervillan in Peter's life, this title's got problems.