Spider-Man: Web of Shadows starts off promising with nice visuals, interesting combat, a decent web swinging mechanic, and a cool story. And for the first couple of hours, Web of Shadows is pretty darn fun. But then it all starts to go downhill. The missions and combat become repetitive. Glitches and issues start popping up. And swinging around New York just isn’t fun anymore. Find out all of the details on the highs and lows of Spider-Man: Web of Shadows right here in our full review.
Quick Hits
- Title: Spider-Man: Web of Shadows
- Publisher: Activision
- Developer: Treyarch
- ESRB Rating: “T” for Teen
- Genre: Action
- Pros: Swinging around is crazy fun; solid controls; Black Cat
- Cons: Second half of the game sucks; camera issues; framerate issues; tedious, repetitive missions
Spider-Man: Web of Shadows starts in medias res with New York infested with symbiotes, S.H.I.E.L.D. forces trying to keep the peace, and Spider-Man confronting Venom. It is a very impressive way to start the game, and really hooks you. Then the real game starts as you flash back to see what led up to the events you just saw. You start out helping Luke Cage take care of some gang violence or saving some citizens from harm, but then the alien symbiotes start showing up and everything goes to Hell. You meet up with the Vulture, Shocker, and Rhino as well as friendlies such as Black Cat, Wolverine, and Moon Knight who, after having to rough most of them up, join you as allies that you can call into battle.
The first half of the game where you are battling street thugs and then eventually get into some cool boss fights, is actually very fun. The second half (which, really, is more like two-thirds …) kind of grinds the fun train to a halt. Alien symbiotes in several different forms are literally everywhere. Police and S.H.I.E.L.D. forces are fighting them, citizens are trying to flee, there are fires and explosions and alien pods and terrible stuff everywhere and the framerate starts to chug along and even just swinging around stops being fun.
Gameplay
Activision
You are constantly fighting and the mission design degrades into the same repetitive pattern in the latter half of the game, and the flaws in the gameplay start showing through. You can switch at will between black and red-suit Spider-Man, and each one has different moves. The main difference is that black-suit can pick up cars and throw them while red-suit can’t. Their combos are visually different, but functionally the same. While having two move sets to use and all of that sounds interesting, combat usually boils down to using the same couple of moves (tap X button until Spidey does a flurry of punches or press Y to do a nifty air attack) because your other moves are either ineffective or your enemies straight up counter them. Combat just becomes repetitive after a while. Likewise, the mission design quickly becomes more annoying than fun as the game likes to throw waves of enemies at you and your objective is to destroy them all. The problem is that you always have to face at least one wave too many which just starts to get annoying and predictable. Other missions have you protecting a convoy of typically worthless NPCs, helping people escape from rooftops, and another group of boss fights. But none of it is all that fun. It is a total grind with repetitive missions and repetitive combat and just when you think the game should be about over you are sent off on another rescue mission. The game takes 8-10 hours to beat, and about 6 of those hours suck.
Graphics and Sound
Graphically, Spider-Man: Web of Shadows is a decent looking game. Spider-Man is very well animated, and swinging around as well as combat looks very good. The city looks pretty good, and is absolutely huge. Unfortunately, the camera and the framerate struggle to keep up with the action and cause plenty of problems. At the beginning of the game, the framerate is stable, but when S.H.I.E.L.D. and the symbiotes are all duking it out in the streets and Manhattan is burning, the framerate chugs along and looks awful. The camera will also occasionally flip out and not correct itself. Climbing up the side of a building makes the camera wildly flip up and down when your each the top as if it is confused. These problems are just terrible.
The sound is okay for the most part. The dialogue isn’t anything special, but you can’t really expect too much from the source material. The music is fairly good throughout.
Bottom Line
Activision
All in all, Spider-Man: Web of Shadows is a pretty disappointing game that, with a few tweaks, could have been rather good. As it stands, though, repetitive combat, repetitive missions, a terrible camera, an unstable framerate, and a surprisingly poor second half make it pretty hard to enjoy it. The story is sort of interesting, but drags on and on and on until you just get tired of the whole experience. One aspect of the game that almost saves it is the 1000+ icons spread around the city Crackdown-style, but there are so many of them you kind of get bored of looking (and easily finding them) as well. That is the main problem with Web of Shadows – it can’t decide how much is too much. If the missions and enemies and collectibles were scaled back by about half, the game would have been better off. I can’t recommend it for a purchase, but the achievements are pretty easy so Gamerscore junkies should give it a rental. Anyone else is better off playing something better.
