Spiderman 2 PS2 Review

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If someone came up too you and said “Hi, would you like to play a game where you attach webs to buildings?”, it might give you the wrong impression of one of the most amazingly fun games of the year. Travel as Peter Parker and as the one the only Spiderman in the sequel to Spiderman 1. To find out how much the game compares to the film, read below.

Graphics

Of course without good graphics a game would be nothing these days. When swinging around the city you often find you have very confusing view though. To make the game more realistic, when you are falling through the air at 200 miles per hour the whole screen blurs because of the extreme wind amount. This actually makes it quite hard to see where you are going and the problem is that it also happens when you are swinging too fast and suddenly you find you are about to crash into a wall.

Despite this the graphics are generally very good, however, some parts in the videos let it down. Such as when Mary Jane’s face bones seem to stick out horribly, as if her face is deformed. Everyone else looks fine, it’s just the prettiest actress in the film who looks the ugliest in the game, weird or what?!

Gameplay

Now in reviews they always make it sound better than it is. I was in Game and they had one of those “Play it before you buy it” machines, so I thought ‘Hey, why not? It is free after all.’, and I began to play, until we had to leave. I originally thought ‘Wow, this game’s amazing! You could buy it just to web swing, because of the amazing new abilities.’, and so I bought it. Within the first hour of playing it I had already started the missions because I was bored of web slinging.

While I am on the topic of the missions let me just say, ‘EASY PEASY LEMON SQUEEZY’. This has to be one of, if not the, easiest game I have ever played in my life, or so I thought. I played the whole game right to the final boss in less than 6 hours. I then found that the game had a near invincible boss, preceded by a completely simple build up.

Off of the subject of incredibly poor missions and back on to having fun in the city. This game offers some great new features, like the ability to walk around in the streets, and to choose when you want to do missions. The problem is that I find it makes the game just like a special Spiderman make of Grand Theft Auto, and personally I’m not a huge fan of GTA. I may have been more pleased with Spiderman 2 if you could beat the civilians up. When punching the citizens it is actually quite a good laugh when you watch them dodge 10 times faster than the bad guys ever could.

Another new part of the game is the new fighting techniques, which come in very useful when you need to web 4 people up and throw them all into the air, while managing to smash them to bits with your punches. Not only can you now throw them into the air, you can also web them closer and smash them into walls to the side of them and it doesn’t cost any web like the first one. Also with fighting, you have a little more freedom now, because you can walk around the streets rather than falling off of a building into some strange orange clouds, which happen to be lower than buildings.

The reason using special webbing techniques don’t use up your web meter is because they have gotten rid of the web meter now. Instead, you have a Spider Reflexes (SR) technique. SR is very useful because it makes you faster than the bad guys. You can see attacks coming from a mile off and you get a whole bullet time feel. It is let down by the fact everyone glows a strange white colour making it hard to see and also that you only have about 5 seconds of SR. However, it can be easily replenished by doing air tricks which can be purchased from the shop.

The previously mentioned shop is where you buy combos to add to your fighting techniques. To buy things from the shop you must earn hero points, which are earned from completing missions whether they are petty crime, or missions for part of the storyline. Combos can range from punching people in certain ways to increasing your web speed. The money sign on the map represents the shop.

Yes, the game also has a very easy to understand map now which is very easy to understand. It will teach you about it in the game, how to use it and what means what on the map. When you go off of the map screen it sort of folds down. Hard to explain, but the simple version is that it makes it really easy to tell which way you need to go to find your destination. Just one last note is that I don’t like the fact they removed the inside building missions, which I found fun.

Sound

It is nice to have the actual character voices in the game rather than some fake person speaking. The mission sound gets old quickly though, but luckily you can just get rid of it if you don’t like it with the sound tools.

Lifespan

Well I know this doesn’t sound right, but if you do ever beat the final boss then I can almost guarantee you will not want to play the game again. This is because of the fact it is so boring and easy until the final boss. Like I said, in the gameplay section the web swinging gets very boring extremely quickly, and unless you purchase all the speed upgrades it is going to take you about half an hour to get round the whole city anyway.

Overall

If you liked Spiderman 1 then you will probably like this game more than I did. Buy it if you want, but don’t be surprised if you find it is one of the worst releases of the year.

5 out of 10