Spider-Man 3 Review

Spider-Man 3 brings a range of solid visual effects into play, along with excellently animated character models and a decent representation of the city. Trouble is, it takes one helluva rig to see Spider-Man 3 in its full glory. We tested in on a top-end AMD-based rig and were treated to a very sluggish frame rate, despite the powerful GPU and 2GB of RAM. Believe it or not, the visual parameters weren't even maxed out (Maxed out?! I played the freaking thing on low visual settings and it STILL was choppy as hell. - 2Lions). Shadows and features like anti-aliasing were switched off. Besides which, certain parts of the game are teeming with bugs. While crawling on a typical NY building, Spidey sometimes gets jammed between the building's façade and thin air (!?!). What gives? It looks as though the programmers were on holiday that day or perhaps they were so pressed to make the movie deadline, they never got around to tweaking general character movement. Such moments of aggravation are more than frequent throughout the game.

The first Spider-Man game, if you can actually remember it, at least had fluent camera movement and solid controls.

As it turns out, although things did pick up slightly with the Ultimate Spider-Man, Stan Lee's popular character is, once again, left without a decent adaptation on the PC and consoles. Not necessarily because of the missions and the core gameplay, but mostly because the game is, technically, a flop.

So, the final verdict is self-evident. With all due respect to the creators, this game feels like it was rushed every step of the way (and I hear it's the same with the console versions). Pushing the developers to make the deadline, aligning it with the movie premiere, resulted in an intolerably lackluster gameplay frame if you will. If you cannot resist the temptation to web-swing through NYC, don't forget to bring a few tranquilizers to numb the inevitable pain from dealing with terrible frame rates, crappy camera and not exactly consistent single-player mission design.