Spider-Man: Web of Shadows (PS3)
Listen, bub...
10/29/2008 7:29 PM | 0 Comments | Page 1 of 3
What's Hot: The aerial sequences in particular make for dizzyingly spectacular fights where all sense of where the ground is goes out the window.
What's Not: The overly flippant dialogue and meandering, padded plot fritter away most of the dramatic potential of the core premise.
Ever since the Sam Raimi film kicked off the present-day comic book movie boom, it's become rote to recite the line from Amazing Fantasy #15 that forms the core of the Spider-Man mythos: "With great power there must also come -- great responsibility!" That Stan Lee sentence gets at the heart of why superheroes continue to reverberate so strongly throughout pop culture: The costumes, the powers and the secret identities all service metaphors that hit on aspects of the human condition.
From its disjointed, hallucinatory sequence in the opening scene, you can tell
Spider-Man: Web of Shadows is aiming for an epic sensibility. And the big idea lurking behind all the gameplay seems to be "How do we react when we're under siege?"
Both the Red and Black suits have devastating super moves. This makes us wonder if web fluid suddenly got a lot cheaper.
The idea of moral choice pops up in the very beginning of the game. During a fight with arch-enemy Venom, Spider-Man reacquires the black alien symbiote suit that harkened a darker turn for the character in the comics. The
in medias res structure of the prelude drops you right into the story and action, teasing the juicier bits of the plot to come. Later in the game, Venom pollinates innocent New Yorkers with the evil infection and breeds an invasion that threatens to overrun Manhattan. Spider-Man, now able to switch between Red and Black costumes, must team up with numerous guest stars from the Marvel universe.
The Red/Black mechanic adds a layer of complexity to the gameplay. Toggling between Red and Black extends combos, doubles your move set, and essentially gives you a whole other narrative to explore. As expected, the Black suit -- activated by clicking the left analog stick -- makes Spider-Man stronger and more vicious. Spidey can call allies to help in a battle, but their aid is conditional on his alignment. If you're too reckless while using the Black suit, allies like Moon Knight and Wolverine won't help you take out the threats you're facing.
Wolverine and Spidey reminisce about the time they had pie together at Aunt May's.
Dynamic shifts and a branching storyline lead you to multiple endings: How you interact with the game will open up ways for new characters to come into play, and characters (like the X-Men's Wolverine) will battle against and succumb to the symbiotes' evil takeovers. Unfortunately, the story seems mostly designed to service the Red/Black mechanic, and the clunkily implemented moral choices don't hold enough nuance to feel truly organic. At the end of each mission, you'll be asked to choose between a Red or Black option as to how to proceed. These decisive moments at the end of each chapter shift your alignment towards Red or Black suit paths. Who should fly you to Riker's Island to break out the Tinkerer so he can build a super-science solution to the symbiote siege, Vulture or Moon Knight?
"Does Spidey really have time to mull it over?" I asked myself during these instances. Theme gets subverted into narrative, narrative gets subverted into gameplay, and as a result, you never really feel like Spider-Man's truly tempted by the dark power of his symbiote suit. Gameplay gets valued over thematic punch.
