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Additionally, on June 15, 2008, fourteen potential Spider-Man titles were announced, ranging from Spider-Man: Agile Warrior (a Wii-exclusive game which uses the Wii Balance Board to control Spider-Man) to Spider-Man: Webslinger (a game which claims to take full advantage of Spider-Man's web-slinging powers), as well as many more.

October 22, 2008 - Early last year, I stated that Spider-Man 2 was one of my favorite PlayStation 2 games of all time. Think about that for a second -- all time. Now, I'm not telling you that it's a better game than God of War, Shadow of the Colossus, or any of the other hundreds of great games Sony's console brought us; what I'm saying is that Spider-Man 2 was one of my favorite games to play. Even after I had bested Doc Ock, I could swing around New York and stop crimes, gather collectables, and take in the city that never sleeps. At the time, I thought the game had laid out the perfect blueprint of what a superhero game should be, and I believed that Activision got it and would expand the idea when the next generation of systems came around.

As Spider-Man 3 and Spider-Man: Friend or Foe proved, that didn't happen. Rather than tweak and expand a formula that was fun but flawed, Activision let the webhead slip into worse and worse titles. Now, Spider-Man: Web of Shadows is upon us, and while it's no where near the slap in the face that Spider-Man: Friend or Foe was, it's got nothing on Spider-Man 2 either.

Web of Shadows is a nifty idea on paper. Rather than being based on a movie or specific comic book arc, Spider-Man: Web of Shadows creates a completely unique tale set in the comic book world. During a rather routine battle with Venom, the symbiote we all know and love fractures and part of it leaps to Spider-Man, once again endowing him with the black suit and all the strength and evilness that comes with it. The main portion of the goo sticks with Eddie Brock and the Venom alliance, but it turns out that the suit is creating symbiote-spitting pods that are infecting the civilians of New York. Soon, the city is filled with folks who are scaling buildings, kicking ass, and trying to eat Spidey's brains. S.H.I.E.L.D. shows up, quarantines the city, and basically freaks out as all hell breaks loose.

Your job is to take Spider-Man from before the infection, through the dark times, and to one of several endings. At times, this journey can be an enjoyable ride. First off, swinging through the city is as fun as ever. Holding R2 will throw out a web and attach to a building in whatever direction you're pointing at, while tapping R2 casts out a web-zip that allows Spidey to shoot through the air in a solitary direction. You can modify your swing to go faster, double jump in the air, run along building sides, and do just about everything else a spider can. All of these swing mechanics and wall-crawling capers meld together with Web of Shadows' new combat system.

By tapping L2, you activate Spider-Man's spider-sense, a device that highlights enemies and locks onto them. Once locked on, you can -- theoretically -- leap into the air, swing from your webs, and so on without fear of losing your man. I found that sometimes lock-on would let go of my target for seemingly no reason, but when this works, it's actually super helpful because Web of Shadows is big on linking together attacks in long combo chains. Up in the right corner, the game is actually tracking the number of hits you've pulled off in succession (don't be surprised to see it pushing 100 more than a few times), and these ginormous combos are thanks to this lock-on system. See, if there's a group of bad guys, I lock on to one of them, take him out, and leap into the air, the lock-on system should jump to the next baddie; but if it doesn't, I can flick the right analog stick to choose my next opponent.


It might not sound like much, but Spider-Man's attacks can be pretty cool and devastating in Web of Shadows. As you play the game and pull off mandatory story missions and optional side quests, such as defeating a certain number of enemies, you're going to be awarded experience points. These points can then be exchanged for a number of special moves for each spider-suit -- 65 for the red and blues and 56 for the black duds -- that are spread out among ground, air, wall, web and other various attacks, and you can collect Spider-tokens throughout the game to upgrade your health bar and swing speed. Now, most of these combat upgrades are just building on moves that are already established such as adding in a final stomp to a punching combo, but some are pretty frickin' cool and brutal. One of the symbiote combos has Spider-Man wail on the bad guys with his extremities a few times before unleashing a flurry of extended symbiote whips that lash out and toss the opponents into the air before slamming them back down and crushing their bodies.

Still, if it sounds like I'm lauding the combat, I guess this is a good enough place as any to tell you why I'm not crazy about this Spider-Man title. See, as cool as these attacks can look, they're just button mashing. When I needed to steamroll the bad guys, I just tapped Square-Triangle-Square-Triangle-Square-Triangle. Sometimes it was that tendril attack I just described, and sometimes it was just Spider-Man wigging out and cleaning clocks. It didn't matter to me, because it got the job done; and there are a lot of jobs to get done.

See, Spider-Man: Web of Shadows is redundant and repetitive. Infuriatingly redundant and repetitive. In the beginning, Luke Cage will teach you a move, have you do it a certain number of times to him, send you out to do it to a certain number of villains, and then have you do it all over again when you come back to learn a different move. The same "go do this" thing happens when you meet Wolverine, Black Cat, Moon Knight, and everyone else in the game. Seemingly, every mandatory mission has you assisting X number of S.H.I.E.L.D. evacs, stopping X number of symbiotes, or attacking X number of whatever. It gets old. Fast. Only making this process worse is the fact that you'll be attacking these enemies in the same way over and over. You'll leap into the air, throw out a web, pull yourself to the bad guy, and unleash an attack. Occasionally, the bad guy will block the incoming attack, you'll jump to evade, and then begin the web-based attack again. Still, that rarely happens because every boss, enemy, and mission is a push over in this game with one default difficulty.

With no Spider-Man movie on the 2007 calendar, but a highly recognizable and lucrative icon character available under its licensing deal with Marvel for game duty, Activision surely saw the opportunity to bring a Spidey game out “in an off year.” The result is Spider-Man: Friend or Foe, a game that has an interesting plot twist, but little in the way of gameplay features to indicate the publisher and developer Next Level Games were looking to create a fresh, highly challenging contest.

The game’s story revolves around a series of meteor strikes around the world, and a subsequent rise in criminal activity. This increase in nefarious pursuits comes not only from Spider-Man’s normal cast of adversaries—such as Dr. Octopus and Green Goblin—but also from “phantoms” that are made from the same symbiote material that formed Venom. And with Spidey’s foes using the meteor remnants to increase their evil powers, there’s only one person that can stop them and save the world.

Okay, maybe two people.

In the single-player component, before you enter the fray, you start by choosing a sidekick. After you first start the game, that’s limited to a couple of selections, but in the course of completing the levels in each city, you gradually add to your roster of potential helpers by finding other superheroes. However, the twist is that, once you defeat one, you can also recruit that bad guys to help the cause—after all, Green Goblin and his ilk won’t have any place to play if Earth is taken over by phantoms.

There’s an RPG element to Spider-Man: Friend or Foe in that you can upgrade Spidey’s abilities as well as those of the sidekicks. As you progress through levels, you earn “tech tokens” that you can then use after a level to boost stats and attributes, such as Spider-Man’s web attacks and all characters’ health and toughness skills. A more powerful fighting force is a more capable, efficient fighting force.

The combat is simply controlled: the X Button kicks and punches; the B Button does a grab (on an item or enemy) or a throw, if the item/enemy is already in your grasp; and the A Button to jump. Holding down the Y Button enables you to switch your control between Spidey and his sidekick. Movement is also easy via the left stick, though, sadly, the right stick isn’t used to rotate and zoom the camera. The fixed perspective is somewhat claustrophobic, and the lack of camera adjustment is one of the more annoying aspects of the game—aside from being a feature that few games of this kind skip these days.

Each level is also strewn with various objects that are beneficial to break. You can not only pull in more tokens, but also health recharges and power-ups that you can trigger by pushing in a direction on the D-Pad. For instance, if you have at least one green gem, you can give Spidey temporary invincibility. The most powerful feature is a joint attack that is unleashed by combining Spider-Man’s and his sidekick’s skills, and it brings not only a major amount of damage, but also a fun cutscene that shows the preparation for the super attack.

And to round out the pickups you can get in a level, there are special icons scattered around that benefit you in different ways. Grabbing a DNA helix enables you to unlock content in the “rewards terminal.” A “keystone” opens a special door leading to a secret level—which, when cleared of baddies, unlocks it as an arena you can use in Versus Mode. The entry screen to each level shows you the counter of how many helixes, keystones and special arenas are offered there, so it’s easy to see where you need to return and play over to find a missing pickup.