Archived Review: Spider-Man: Web of Shadows

Originally published September, 2010.

Spider-Man has never really had a stellar game to blow it out of mediocrity and make gamers and fans rise up out of their chairs in cheers and applause. Much like how Batman suffered until the glorious release of Arkham Asylum, the web-slinger just hasn’t really caught a break. The first game that really sold well and was regarded as the best in years was Spider-Man 2 for the last generation of consoles. It was good, but it drew a great deal of inspiration from the movie when the comic lovers were left shrugging their shoulders. If you read my brief commentary on the history of Spider-Man in games, you saw how the lineage progressed and my opinion on the matter. But rather than talk about the ones considered the best, or the ones considered the worst, I want to talk about one that faded into the ether even though it had some qualities worth attention. Web of Shadows was given some low scores in reviews for valid reasons, but it had some good to counterbalance the bad. This seems like a worthy reason for a Late Bird Review. So I’d like to discuss the good, bad, and everything else about this faded memory.

Story

Before I start talking about story specifically, there is one main thing about how the game is designed that affects everything: there are multiple good and bad endings. The endings are dependent on the choices you make and some of the plot progression depends on how people perceive your actions. This is not a new idea; however the distinct quality in the good versus the bad side of the story is crystal clear. The dark side of everything in terms of gameplay, story, and presentation is better. There have been some people who only played one side and their opinion of the game was completely dependent on which side they chose. With this in mind, let’s continue onto the story itself.

The Spider-Man games have never had the most involving storylines in the past and that is still true here. The exception to the rule was Ultimate Spider-Man for having a story that fit so well that some of the game’s story was integrated into the comic series. By the time of the Ultimate game, the comics had only reached a certain point in the storyline, which made the game feel like it was taking the story further. In Web of Shadows, the story may not be quite of the same caliber, but it does feel like something that could happen in the Spider-Man universe. In fact, in the right hands it might make a decent miniseries.

Spider-Man: Web of Shadows starts off immediately with a battle between Spider-Man and Venom in the streets ofNew York. Mary Jane gets injured during the quarrel and Spider-Man gets some of the symbiote on him, allowing him to don the dark suit within the first few minutes of the game. Venom escapes and when the encounter ends players are introduced to the possibility that characters are going to be annoying. Mary Jane starts nagging Peter (she actually says “Peter” when he’s wearing his costume in front of countless people, including the paramedics helping her) about the dark suit and how he can’t wear it. But that’s what players want to do isn’t it? That’s kind of the draw of this game. So already I’m at odds with one of the main love interests of Peter Parker within the first few minutes.

Regardless of how the redhead feels, the main plot of the story takes a little while to get started. Players are first introduced to gameplay mechanics about fighting, swinging, and the various allies available to Spider-Man through beating up some random gang members and doing somewhat boring missions for Luke Cage. In fact there is a fair amount of time spent on introducing allies and villains who will appear later in the game before the main plotline is revealed. This includes fighting the Vulture, Electro, and some cronies of the Kingpin.

When the plot is finally revealed, the story starts picking up. Venom has decided to start spreading the symbiote around the city and infecting the general populous. It doesn’t take long before people start transforming into monsters and you are trapped in Manhattan, thwarting off hundreds of bloodthirsty NY citizens that all look like hideous alien creatures; conceptually, this is a terrific concept for a sandbox style Spider-Man game. One of my favorite personal challenges of the Grand Theft Auto series was putting in the codes to make the general public armed and crazy for causing chaos. With everyone after you, it made the game pretty interesting and exciting. The only problem was getting away safely. With this style in Web of Shadows, players wouldn’t have to worry about standing alone at a street corner for very long. Creatures would start crawling out and attacking within moments and should you tire of combat, go back to swinging through the city.

The story does a good job at showing a progression of panic as theislandofManhattangoes into lockdown once everyone realizes there’s a pandemic of alien oil mind control. Chaos erupts everywhere and in the wake of all this terror and destruction, Spider-Man has to start choosing allies, even some unlikely ones. Depending on your alignment and the choices you’ve made, your allies in this struggle can be some of the villains you’ve already bested. It sets up well for the final chapters of the game. The desperation of the survivors and the despair of the heroes in this demolished city come through in some satisfying ways. It all makes for an epic finale where the heroes barely make it after some heavy losses pull together for one last stand. In some ways the game accomplishes this, but it still could have been much better.

With the fact that there is a progression towards light/dark sides based on the choices you make along the way, there are four possible endings. And the rule mentioned earlier applies to the quality of the endings. The “good” endings are bland and unsatisfying as though we were never really meant to see them. However, the “bad” endings were much more interesting and showed a great deal of effort and concentration by comparison. They still weren’t entirely original, but with the effort put into their production, you can see the preferred outcomes.

Gameplay

This is perhaps where Web of Shadows is the least hindered by negative qualities. Aside from the various glitch issues and repetitive missions, this was perhaps the Spider-Man game I had the most fun playing.

The city swinging is still fun and leaping off tall skyscrapers is still a blast. Upgrading your abilities is still present in this game and by the end of the story you will be flying through the city on his webs. It felt so go to go so fast through the city and randomly showing off by running along buildings before jumping off. Sometimes you could be going too fast for the game to keep up and I had it freeze on me trying to load the buildings. This is, of course, not a good thing but still somewhat amusing.

The fighting was also rather good, in my opinion. In previous Spider-Man games, I didn’t feel like there was a balance to the number of abilities and their overall usefulness. In Spider-Man 2, the sheer capacity of abilities at your disposal was a little overwhelming. There were far too many moves to learn that wouldn’t even prove useful or all that fancy for showing off. However, Ultimate Spider-Man lacked a great deal of variety in the combat and made many encounters feel long and boring by comparison. With Web of Shadows, it seemed like the developers got a good sense of how many moves the hero really needed, as well as how good he needed to look while doing them. And though there were some moves that were unnecessary or sometimes forgettable, the roster was not nearly as overwhelming. Not to mention that even though he looked good pulling off all his tricks in both forms, the moves of the dark suit were frighteningly cool and just made him look like a badass (as he should in that outfit).

It was also fun being able to switch suits on the fly. Even in the middle of a combo, a simple press of a button could make the suit change. You could be pummeling opponents with your fists then let loose into a torrent of tentacles as the red is enveloped by the black. It was a great mechanic that added a satisfying level of depth to the combat. Of course, the opponents themselves weren’t exactly the most challenging, there were just a lot of them. This made for a sense of power with the expense of being a little tedious at times.

Where the gameplay stumbles is in the missions themselves. Like in previous Spider-Man games, in order to progress the story you have to act like a hero and do some heroic missions before the day is done. The missions themselves are rarely difficult, but can certainly be tedious. For a completionist gamer, doing all of these tasks may already be on the agenda, but for those looking to play through and just get through the story, some sidetracking is needed.

But even the main missions are hit or miss. There were some exciting great ones like hunting down a crazed Electro or fighting one of the main villains/heroes of the game. There was even one that took place outside the city that was somewhat entertaining with the Rhino. Some of the smaller ones like helping civilians evacuate from the city via air transport off the rooftops are fun; at least they are fun so long as they don’t go on for too long. Much of the problems with the missions lie with how many there are to do and how long they take. Some take far too long to complete while others are simply far too frequent and tedious to complete. If the missions had involved a little more variety, like leaving the island every once in a while or changing the gameplay around a little bit, the game would have been much more exciting.

Presentation

This is where the true groaning is. On one side of the coin, there is the really dark and creative visualization ofNew York Cityovercome by alien ooze and destruction with a hero becoming more and more like a villain. On the other side is the cheesy pathetic optimism and whining of the truly heroic side of the disaster—and the voice acting does not help.

The game itself is not visually mind-blowing. In fact, there are a lot of issues with its visual presentation. As mentioned before, buildings can pop-in when swinging through the city. The frame rate can also drop substantially with too many things happening on the screen. The developers wanted the player to go fast and fight countless enemies, but weren’t able to program it properly to handle those desired situations. As an attempt in remedying this they made many other parts of the city bland and lacking in detail. It obviously didn’t help enough to make the game run smoother only making the overall look uglier. Buildings far away are just grey blocks amongst a dreary sky. Street level, vehicles are just as bland as the buildings with very little variety to their models. The people are not great to look at either. In fact, most of the city becomes much more enjoyable to witness when it’s covered in Venom spores spewing out transformed civilians that look much better as evil underlings.

The main characters look alright though. Spider-Man is rather detailed with all his toned muscles well defined. His movement and shape stay consistently good regardless of if he’s swinging through the air or fighting mobs of enemies. Just the moves themselves look good while you’re doing them in either the regular or dark suit. Other characters that make their appearance like Luke Cage or Wolverine look good too. They don’t look quite as nice as Spider-Man, but still well enough to deserve a few in game close-ups.

Then there is the voice-acting. This game may very well have the most annoying Spider-Man to date. When you are playing the hero he does not stop whining and sounding truly pathetic. “Nails on a chalkboard” is a timeless idiom that accurately describes how he sounded throughout most of the game. Other characters weren’t as bad, but that didn’t save them from poor writing. There were some moments were the lines were inappropriate to the context of the situation or just too cheesy to chew on. There were some lines that seemed like they were meant to destroy characters as well. By the end of the game, I hated Mary Jane because she would not stop bitching and yelling at Peter about things that were either out of his control or obviously not his problem. I was so annoyed with her I wondered if her symbiote form would be just a screaming mouth on legs. It is sad that something like the voice acting makes the game almost unbearable.

And yet, it also can be extremely satisfying at times. Spider-Man is truly at his most annoying along the goodie-goodie path. But when a cut-scene comes along where he is in the dark suit and acting like it, he is a true badass with comebacks that seem aggressive and intimidating. I’m not sure if the voice actor thought it best to be as annoying as possible in one form so the other would seem that much different and cooler, but it certainly did the trick. Making all the evil decisions and sticking to the dark suit made all the dialogue more interesting and all the cut-scenes more exciting. Encounters and boss-battles were more interesting as well because it seemed like everyone had a grudge against Spider-Man. Even though the presentation is the lowest part of the game, it can also be the highest.

Conclusion

It’s sad that half of the game can be so awful to endure while the other so fun. Everything about being in the dark suit made me feel powerful and dangerous, while being in the red and blue I felt pathetic and shameful, simply because of how everything was presented. Had the game been released with only the dark side, I might have given this game a better grade. It still would not have been a great game with the various glitches and programming issues, but it wouldn’t have the other half weighing it down. Regardless of which suit, fighting and web-swinging were still fun. But horrible writing and voice acting of this Jekyll and Hyde of a game really bring down the value. Give it a rent and play the side that counts.