When you play a game with the name Spider-Man on it, you can expect a few things: A guy swinging through the air on strand of webbing, a group of baddies who want to smash him into spider paste, and hopefully a nice smattering of action. Of course, this is in contrast to the expectations for movie games, for which there are just two expectations: suckage and boredom. Fortunately, the Xbox 360 version of Spider-Man 3 meets or exceeds the expectations of a Spider-Man game, and while it isn’t the best game I’ve ever played, it’s certainly better than most movie based games I’ve played.

To begin with, this game should be really good, because this now Treyarchs’ fourth go round at developing a title featuring everyone’s favorite webslinger. Plus, the developers had the advantage of coding for the 360 for the first time, which gave them lots of horsepower to let Spidey harness. And harness it they did.

The single most impressive part of this game is the cityscape itself. There are a lot of single player games that try to provide an immersive sandbox environment and fail. Spider-Man 3 is literally the best single-player environment I’ve ever seen. It outclasses all of the other sandboxes, in part because the realism included in the layout, but also because of the way it is utilized. One of the biggest parts of this is how Spidey swings on his webs. The buildings are used properly in determining whether or not he has anything to attach to, and if not, he falls. I remember far too many Spider-Man games where Spidey is just swinging through the air with not a building in sight.

In this game, getting yourself from Point A to Point B is rarely boring. As you progress through the game and learn when best to throw a new web, your character advances in swinging skill, and becomes capable of higher speeds. It’s a lot of fun, just to move through the city as fast as you possibly can, and the physics model of the character as he’s buffeted with the high winds from swinging shows a strong attention to detail. When you spend a large percentage of the game watching Spidey swinging through the air, it’s important that they got this right.

Of course, swinging isn’t the only thing Spidey does. It wouldn’t be a Spider-Man game if there weren’t a lot of flying fists and gravity defying combat combinations. The combat system in the game is pretty simple to start, but builds in the complexity of what moves you can pull off as you complete sections of the game, or simply rack up the number of opponents you beat down. One of the interesting features of the combat system is the Matrix-like time slowing option you can bring into play simply by holding down the left bumper. Time slows, and you can dodge an enemies attack, or use it to throw a lot of attacks in a short time. This works great in short bursts against weaker enemies, but against the major bosses, it can become really mind-numbing as you have to use this mode almost constantly to really make any headway. Overall, the combat system works nicely, and incorporates the now commonplace button timing mechanism (as made famous by God of War, and long before that Dragon’s Lair), in some scenes to allow cut scenes to be interwoven with combat or movement actions.
The plot in most movie games tends to follow the movie almost verbatim, which if you haven’t seen a movie (as I hadn’t when I first played the game), can be a bit of a let down. Fortunately, while the game captures many of the elements of the movie, including the primary villains, and the overall story arch, but you also get a lot of extras. ...