Spider-Man 2

Incredibly fun. I finished the story mode and spent almost an hour continuing to explore the city.

Not only is this the best film-based video game on the GameCube today, but it's one of the best comic-based video games ever. Even after you complete the main quest, you'll still spend hours finding every little thing or just swinging around and listening to the amazing voice that is Bruce.

The goal of any superhero game is to make you feel like the hero, and by that standard, Spider-Man 2 is unrivaled. That it also happens to be a fantastic action game is icing on the cake, a true treat for both fans of the webslinger and general gamers alike.

The end result though is a very playable method of swinging through the city yet at the same time looking flashy and a lot like the way it was done in the movie. You can imagine the final few seconds of the first movie to get an idea of what you can expect, except you'll actually be doing it.

Between the massive boss encounters and hours of swinging around Manhattan, you're in for at least a week of play.

All the best bits you'll see in commercials for the game -- bits likely to make viewers think, "Wow, that looks cool, I gotta have it!" -- aren't merely climactic moments of one-off boss battles... they represent the vast bulk of the gameplay experience.

It's the best Super-hero game I've played.

A little more depth would have made it a classic, but it's still a must for Spidey fans, or anyone else after a big, brash citywide blast.

If you just forget the missions and go around beating thugs senseless, you can have hours of fun.

It's very possible to spend a good deal of time swinging around the city, responding to citizens in need, stopping random crimes, attempting some of the 150 challenges and collecting some of the nearly 400 tokens of various kinds scattered throughout the city.

While Spider-Man 2 has some issues, nearly everything is outweighed by the fantastic web-slinging and the huge city environment.

Yeah, some of the missions are a tad on the repetitive side, and the voice acting can be pretty lame, but no game has made me feel as close to playing the comic as this one.

Spider-Man 2 is not perfect, but it's innovative, with some of the quickest and most fluid movement since "Ninja Gaiden."

Like a breath of fresh air in the GCN's action lineup. Sure, the fighting can be a little mash-happy at times, and the textures can be a little blurry, and the variety of random tasks can be repetitive...but the first time you leap off the top of the Empire State Building, pull off some aerial tricks while plummeting 90 stories down at high speed, sling yourself via webline around some lampposts, and hurtle into the back of an enemy to begin a merciless web-juggle combo, you'll experience a rush unlike most anything you've felt while playing on the six-sided system.

Not without its flaws but this is the best super-hero game we've seen and is unlikely to be matched for some time. [NGC]

If the name of the game is immersion, fun and a connection with the environment, Spidey wins the prize in my book. [Aug 2004, p.52]

Now we want Batman, Superman, Punisher and all the other masked musclemen to follow suit! Please.

Even though parts of it get tiresome, the incredible physics and free-roam system will keep you interested.

But there are still niggles that stop the game for reaching the height of a classic. The repetition and the frustrating boss battles are the worst offenders. Despite this, Spider-Man 2 is heartily recommended.

Without doubt extremely enjoyable for fans, simply because controlling Spider-Man has never been executed so well. There are problems with the main game, there's problems with its presentation; however we still find ourselves loading up the game just to swing around New York again.

For those who do play frequently, Spider-Man 2 comes across as a game that was rushed to market as soon as the developers perfected the one thing that mattered most. As it turns out, however, that one thing is just one small part of a big picture. Great web-slinging does not equal great fun.

So it's short; Steve Wonder could probably rock the combat engine like nobody's business. [Aug 2004, p.97]

Special attention was paid to capturing the athletic tumbling abilities that Spider-Man exhibited in both the comic books and the movies, and it shows. The incredibly agile moves that a player can pull off with Spidey are astounding.

The missions can get repetitive, but there are hundreds of them to take care of. The story mirrors that of the movie, yet it adds in a lot of twists and turns without feeling stilted.

Even though the game does not support multi-player, and takes 10 hours to complete, you can still find a great deal of replayabillity in locating the hundreds of hidden items throughout the map.

Choose to ignore the plot and the side missions if you like; the hidden races, the token hunts and the tremendous feeling to be had from simply exploring, swinging and crawling about the city are more than enough to justify purchase.

Some of the missions can get repetitive and a few minor problems rear their heads, but you'll have too much fun to really notice!

If there's a complaint about the game, it's that the random heroic episodes and some of the story-based activities are similar, making web-slinging seem mundane at times. [Sept 2004, p.114]

Character animation is excellent from Spidey from the various wall clinging poses to the realistic body movements when in swing mode.

There are a lot of things I hate about the Spider-Man 2 game. The movie-based missions are horrible, the graphical quality is wildly inconsistent, and the game is infested with bugs and glitches. Yet the game's primary strengths are enough to make it enjoyable in spite of its shortcomings.

The lack of real longevity as a result of this and the chronically unvarying things to do, combine with a curious mixture of shoddy and great graphics to create an odd concoction. It's so much fun swinging around and beating up baddies, but so painful to see the same situations again and again.

While Spider-Man 2 truly puts you in the webbed booties of the wall-crawler and boasts a ton of freedom to do what you want, there's not enough variety to keep things fresh from start to finish.

But the game design doesn't take full advantage of the huge city, so instead you'll usually end up repeating the same half-dozen or so tasks over and over again, with some unique challenges thankfully sprinkled in to keep things moving.

Combat is not as cleanly executed as it should be...Secondly, the game was obviously too short.

As much fun as swinging around the city and helping random people is, Spider-Man 2 could have been an absolutely amazing title had the developers spent a little more time crafting better missions and crimes to stop and actually giving the enemy some AI instead of patterns to repeat.

I give developer Treyarch credit for its ambitious GTA-style playground game design, but the errands Spider-Man sends you on are repetitive and dull. Combat is part of the problem; you can buy all sorts of fancy moves and combos, but why bother when button-mashing works just as well? [Sept 2004, p.98]

For every great feature in the game it's a downside. Upgrading skills is nice, but not when it takes 30 repetitive street missions to buy the next Swing Speed. But most of all the length of the game is the biggest disappointment. A swift 8 hours of your time you can have it beat.

Spider-Man 2 presents players with a city ripe for action and exploration, but once you swing down out of the clouds and take a closer look at the grubby streets and roads strewn with vehicles, you'll find little to pique your interest. [Sept 2004, p.100]

Spider-Man 2 emerges as not only a movie licence that eschews the 'fast-buck' approach, but as an enjoyable game in its own right – which is chiefly a testament to just how compelling it is to have superpowers and a vast city in which to show them off. [Sept 2004, p.118]