Ultimate Spider-Man Review

Treyarch and Activision are back for round three with our friendly neighborhood Spider-Man and the results are pretty good. Set in the Ultimate universe rather than following the movies, this game features a new visual style as well as the ability of play as Spider-Man as well as Venom. For the most part, it is a solid game, but there are quite a few little issues that result in this only being the second best Spider-Man game yet (after 2004’s Spider-Man 2, of course).

Story

Ultimate Spider-Man is like a re-imagining of the Spider-Man storyline. Peter Parker is just a scrawny high school kid going through all of that horribleness teenagers go through. A brief cutscene shows him getting bit by a radioactive spider which gives him his spider powers and you’re off to swinging around the city. We also see at the beginning of the game Peter and his friend Eddie Brock discovering a bioengineered suit that their fathers had worked on years before. Brock decides to use the suit for himself and turns into the gruesome beast known as Venom. It is up to Spidey, of course, to stop his path of destruction and save New York. Along the way you will meet up with several other Marvel characters including Wolverine and the Human Torch and fight classic Spider-Man villains such as Carnage, Electro, and Green Goblin. What is most interesting about the story is that you get to play as both Spider-Man and Venom which is just plain awesome.

Gameplay

As far as gameplay goes, in the Spider-Man sections at least, Ultimate Spider-Man plays pretty similarly to Spider-Man 2. It is open-ended and you still get to explore every square inch of New York City, but there are a few key differences. First of all, combat has been streamlined and it is pretty easy to just button mash your way to victory. Secondly, swinging around the city is different because you can only use one web at a time which makes smoothly swinging around town a bit more of a challenge than in SM2. You have a web zip ability that quickly pulls you forward so using this in combination with a normal web swing is how you get around and it just isn’t quite as fun.

As Venom, the combat is a bit more brutal but every bit as simple. Instead of swinging around on a web, Venom can jump extremely high and far and can also use his tendrils just like Spidey’s web zip to move forward quickly. The downside to Venom is that your life bar is constantly drained by the suit so every so often you have to snack on someone which can be any man, woman, or child that stands in your way. The Venom sections are easily the most entertaining, but there are far too few of them and you spend most of your time as Spider-Man.

Continued on Page 2 ...