Gamer Galaxy: “Spider-Man 3″

“Spider-Man 3″

Activision

Nintendo Wii

(Out Of 5)

“Spider-Man 3″ for the Wii is a risky proposition for gamers. It isn’t as pretty as the other versions and is highly dependent on the Wii’s motion-sensing controls.

The good news is that the controls work like a dream. The bad news is that little else in the game does.

Familiar to those who played “Spider-Man 2,” the latest movie tie-in combines the thrill of superheroics with the free-roaming qualities of such titles as “Grand Theft Auto.”

Players are free to swing about through a fully modeled Manhattan and Roosevelt Island. (Conspicuously absent is a key New York landmark ““ the Statue of Liberty.)

Outside of the surprisingly brief main story line, players can swing about and tackle randomly generated street crimes. For a more structured experience, players can patrol specific areas of Manhattan to take the island back from the four gangs plaguing it and put it back into the hands of the NYPD.

The Wii’s motion controls make swinging between skyscrapers and pummeling thugs as easy and enjoyable as they’ve ever been. Gone are the difficult-to-remember button combos. They’re replaced by intuitive flicks of the wrist that bring Spidey’s acrobatics to life with ease.

Like Peter Parker in the film, players must also struggle with the tempting power of the black suit. The Wii version lets players switch freely between the two, leaving it up to them to balance the additional power with the risk of failing missions if worn for too long.

Unfortunately, it would seem Spider-Man is just too quick for the rest of the game to keep up. While a visual improvement over “Spider-Man 2,” the frame rate often suffers from choppiness and slowdown. Spidey no longer saves blurry-faced pedestrians, but now faces buildings that turn into textureless blocks.

Minor bugs abound, and the game shows a definite lack of polish, no doubt due to the pressure of timing the release to coincide with the film. Distracting load times tax players’ patience and break up the flow between even the most basic of crime-fighting tasks.

While decently enjoyable in its own right, the glaringly absent features that worked so well three years ago are sorely missed. The lack of side missions and hidden collectibles to search for severely diminishes the replay value.

In the end, well-designed controls manage to barely salvage the gameplay experience for a mediocre follow-up to what was the high standard for movie-based video games.

It’s sad to admit that the novelty of being Spider-Man can only last for so long. Then again, like the movie, this game makes it apparent that it isn’t always fun to be Spider-Man.

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