Joebo's Playstation PS3 Blog

Review Score: 4.5 out of 10

With the new Spider-man game, “Shattered Dimensions” coming to stores on September 7, let’s take a look back at the last Spider-man game that came before it. 2008′s “Spider-man: Web of Shadows” 

The Good:

Spider-man (for the most part) looks good . Looks more like the Spidey from the comic book (1970′s Romita style) than the movie one from other games.

The graphics in the city have look decent ”last gen” sort of look. They look good from far away, but lose some detail when you get too close.

Changing suits from the classic red and blue costume to the black ”Secret Wars” costume is kind of neat idea.

Web slinging is sort of fun, but it’s not 100% smooth during game play. 

The opening credits are presented in a really interesting way that I haven’t seen in a video game before. The game credits appear on billboards in Times Square as the camera follows Spider-man as he swings by leading you around to each credit. 

The Bad:

Where do I begin?
This game has the worst voice acting in the history of Spider-man video games. Spider-man sounds like a teenage version of the nerdy professor guy from the Simpsons. Really, really annoying….. I would have to say  this is the worst voice work in the character’s 48 years across video games, films, cartoons and t.v.  It’s really that bad. 

The other characters in the game sound just as terrible as Spidey. Luke Cage sounds like he is talking with a turd in his mouth. The Black Cat sounds really campy and so over the top, you think she’s a villian from the 1966 Batman television show.  It’s really painful to listen to these characters in this game, especially when the voice acting was done so much better in past Spider-man and Marvel games. Venom has the best sounding voice in this game out of all the characters, but that really isn’t saying much.

The web slinging is good, but is not 100% smooth. The wall crawling mechanics are so awful in this game. Nothing is very fluid and the camera is so jerky, that you lose your bearings if you’re on the side of a building. The camera feels all over the place. Wall crawling feels too fast and awkward. I honestly don’t know what happened here…. the Spider-man 1 & 2 movie games or even Spider-man (for the Dreamcast & N64) had way better wall crawling mechanics! Here’s the kicker…. The same company made those games, and then made this one. Go figure.

The combat incredibly sucks in this game. It’s punch, punch, kick, kick, web ball, web ball over and over again. The. A.I. is so dumb in this game, it’s just endless gang-banger after gang-banger, or stupid robots on goblin gliders, shooting at you, shooting at the cops, shooting at each other, over and over again. There are upgrades you can buy for special moves, but upgrading your moves doesn’t make any difference. The special moves are not fluid and way too clunky to enjoy doing. Although, air combat is something new, and at times can be fun, it is also extremely frustrating because of the terrible camera controls. 

Although, Spider-man (the character) graphically looks good. The rest of the characters look very blocky and just look very WRONG!!!! 
Venom for example, has a weird ”egg shaped” head.  Luke Cage looks like he walked out of an N64′s asshole. Mary Jane looks like a red headed troll women that would make Peter Parker grab a shovel, web sling down to the graveyard and dig up what’s left of Gwen Stacy’s remains… Don’t get me wrong, not that MJ looked amazing in other Spider-man video games, but Mary Jane in Web of Shadows looks well… just plain ugly in this game. The thing that kills me is, all the character graphics look like an early Xbox or PS2 game, and this was released for the PS3 and Xbox 360.

Overall, this game tries to be good, but fails. It is such an half ass effort on so many levels. It might be worth a rental but I would wait for the next Spider-man game to coming along. This game makes you hate Spider-man! It’s sad when my most favorite part of a Spider-man game is the opening game credits. Nuff’ said.