Ultimate Spiderman Review

All I can say is...wow this game really sucks. I remember actually liking it when I first got it despite remembering actually having thrown the controller at the wall because of the horribly disjointed fighting system, but even the cel shaded, car-busting, uncontrollable fury of Venom is a lot clunkier than I remember.

The main appeal of Ultimate Spiderman is that it takes the web-swinging system implemented in Spiderman 2: The Movie: The Game, and combines it with comic-book-like graphics and the ability to play part of the story as Venom. Unfortunately, the comic-book approach falls short during cutscenes where a complete lack of music and occasional unmatched voice-overs makes them painful to watch. My qualms with Venom aren't as bad. Instead of making him a web-swinger like Spidey, the developers gave him a Locomotion Jump, where he can jump whole buildings in a single leap. Now while the idea was good, the control over the jump itself was less than spectacular. I found it difficult to get moving horizontally and frequently found myself falling short of a building, sometimes not even moving anywhere because Venom got stuck on a fence 1/4th his size, and it would take a second for him to reach out and grab a building if I was desperately trying to move forward two inches to avoid falling down 50 floors.

In addition to the unpolished Venom jumping, the combat was royally subpar. I know that the series isn't exactly known for its quality fighting, but when you're told that your dodge consists of a blind leap out of the area you're standing in, and that you have to fight gangs of guys with guns, missile launchers, wrenches, swords, flamethrowers, shurikens, hadoukens, and the amazing ability to not get stunned and block every one of Spiderman's attacks with a 70% success rate while charging up their own super-attack, there is something fundamentally WRONG with the game. During the two and a half hour campaign, the combat isn't all that bad, but the flaws really show in the final fight and during combat tours...That's another thing, the campaign's friggin' short! Out of the two and a half hours, about 75% of that is going around doing random side quests or hoping that a spontaneous crime happens in Spidey's general vicinity to allow the next story event to occur. In addition, the story's not all that great; it's supposed to revolve around Venom trying to get back at the head of an evil conglomerate, but the game throws in a lot of random fights and strange quirks to try in vain to spice things up a bit.

MORTAL KOMBAAAAT!

Overall, this game wouldn't even qualify as a decent rental. All the good aspects of the game are present and accounted for in other recent Spiderman titles, and the five-minute long Venom gambits thrown into the fray throughout the campaign are practically one-button beat-em'-ups. The graphics were alright, so they'd get a 4 considering it's an Xbox generation game, but gameplay, music, and narration get a 2, 1, and 2.5 respectively. This game, ultimately a flop, gets a 2.4 out of 5.