ace3502's Full Review: SpiderMan Web of Shadows for Xbox 360
A good friend of mine got me into Xbox and had a game for me that he highly recommended. Spider-Man: Web Of Shadows was that game. He said the gameplay and graphics were fantastic and I had to try it, so he let me borrow his copy and was I ever blown away. I couldn’t put it down and ended up getting every achievement in the game because I just couldn’t put it down.
Overview Starting out, the game begins with a cut scene to a sulking Spider-Man walking slowly through a New York City battlefield with fighting and action going on all around him. Showing you the end result first, the game describes in vague detail how things got to be as bad as they are in this scene, and then brings you back to the beginning to show you how it all started. That is when you take over gameplay and begin the story. One great feature this game has that I haven’t seen before in any other Xbox games is the ability to choose your own path through the game. By this I mean it’s almost a choose your own adventure book where at certain points in the game you are presented with a choice to pick the red suit Spider-Man and do the good thing, or choose the black suit Spider-Man and do the evil task instead. Each choice affects the outcome of the dialogue in the game and you deal with different people as you go through depending on which paths you choose. There are four different endings to the game, which I would highly recommend seeing them all. In order to achieve each one, you have to make different choices of which suit to go with. Definitely a different approach to the game, instead of most which make you choose a good or bad side at the beginning and play the whole game through. Instead this lets you choose a different suit each time if you desire and see how it shapes the outcome of the game.
Gameplay – 9 / 10 The gameplay is a diverse mix of minor objectives and optional side missions building the storyline towards the major tasks you have to complete. The game is basically four parts that the player navigates through in order to stop Venom from taking over the world with his spawn. Depending upon which suit choices you make during the game, that dictates what company you keep as you near the end of the game. I liked the gameplay because it wasn’t always striving for the main goal and keep pushing ahead, instead it let you pick your path and gave you options. There are numerous (over 60) side missions you can do to help break up the game and give you some fun tasks to complete as you get your way deeper into the storyline. This quantity and diversity of mission choices helps engage the player and not bore them with one solid objective to strive for the whole game. It leaves it in the player’s hands. You can decide if and when you want to hurry up and do the main objectives and get to the end of the game, or if you want to break things up a bit and do a few side missions for some extra experience points.
You can upgrade your character by learning new moves and abilities for both the black and the red suit. Each time you kill an enemy or complete an objective you earn experience points. You put these experience points towards upgrades for your character and learn some pretty cool move combinations along the way. The more you upgrade, the stronger your character becomes and it is a necessity to have these upgrades later on in the game.
Another great factor in the game is the variety of villains and superheroes you encounter in your travels. Both good and bad, there are numerous characters that come out of the woodwork during your play and it’s really intriguing to see how the creators weaved and worked these characters into the storyline.
Graphics - 10 / 10 This is the bread and butter of the game. Wow did they do a great job. If you can imagine, they put the ENTIRE city of New York in the game, and yes you really can go end to end in Manhattan if you so choose. Using Spider-Man’s web to swing between buildings and over them, you can speedily explore the city and weave your way in and out of streets and alleys in what truly is an epic map. From the Empire State Building to Central Park, the map really does have the entire city of New York at your fingertips to swing and climb through. One test I have talked about in previous Xbox game reviews is the stomach dropping test. There are instances in some games where in jumping from a significant height, my stomach has actually dropped as if I was doing the action. I might be alone in this happening but I have to say it’s pretty crazy when it does. That being said, this game definitely achieves the stomach drop. There are so many buildings to climb up and jump off of, the graphics are so crisp and clean that its hard not to let yourself be immersed in the game.
The characters are also very well done, but in my opinion the city really eclipses anything else in the game. The characters are well developed and interact well. The cut scenes are great and filled with crisp clear detail that I only wish we could play with. I’m sure that kind of technology will come but just not right now.
Sound - 9 / 10 The sound was well done and almost movie like. Similar to the sounds I remember from the Spider-Man movies, the web slinging and shooting noises were very similar in the game. The soundtrack was a little lackluster and the music changed to the same fast pace tone during any fight or encounter with the enemy. There were a few select moments where I was a little less than impressed with it but overall they didn’t do a bad job. Sound for games like this can be really cheesy and childlike or they can be reasonable and somewhat realistic. Thankfully they went with the more realistic route in this game.
Achievements – 9 / 10 As I always do, a dedicated section to the achievements of the game for all of you who are gamer point fiends like I am. The game has 45 achievements for a total of 1000 gamer points. I think they did a great job of balancing the easy with the difficult. The easy ones weren’t all completely simple and the hard ones were not unattainable hard as some games have. I will tell you though, there is one which may make you cringe. It isn’t as bad as it sounds, I promise, but there are over 2000 collectibles in the entire city and two achievements revolve around that. One is get half of all the collectibles, and the other achievement is collect 2000. The good part about this though, albeit difficult, after you get 1000 of them, they appear on your radar so it is significantly easier to find them. Furthermore, there are more than 2000, there are actually 2160 I believe. So it’s not as if the creators made the exact number you need to find, they threw us a bone and gave us a few more to help out. Overall it was really fun to earn all of the achievements and I would definitely do it over again.
Downsides There aren’t too many down sides save a few small factors. One of which is the side missions towards the end of the game. I’m not positive on this, but I did do a lot of reading on it and it seems as if there may be a few glitches in the side missions for collecting samples from the enemies that you face. The only reason this is a problem is for those who are going for the 60 side mission achievement. If they didn’t do enough of the side missions earlier in the game and are relying on the last few to get the achievement, they will have a considerable amount of difficulty as I did and may end up having to do what I did which was get them on the next play through. This was a minor disturbance but annoying nonetheless.
One other minor thing was the screen having trouble keeping up with me as I swung through the city. Now this only happened a few times, but on occasion if I was swinging through the city, the buildings in the distance, which normally appear fluidly as you swing towards them, were appearing choppy and staggered, and actually froze the game once or twice. Not too sure if this was my disc or the game but this too was an annoyance.
Overall – 9.25 / 10 Without a doubt, I would recommend this as a pickup for any Xbox 360 gamer and especially for any X-Men or Marvel Comic fans. The graphics are phenomenal, the play through is fun and diverse, and the choose your own adventure aspect of it is engaging and unique.
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