orboro.net

Spider-Man: Web of Shadows

If you’re looking for a web slinging video game fix, Spider-Man: Web of Shadows might be what you’re looking for.  On my quest to find good games cheap, I ended up picking up Web of Shadows on Amazon used for $12 or so.  Being a Spider-Man fan and looking for a new game to play, I decided to give it a try.

Most of the Spider-Man games I’ve tried in the past were pretty pathetic really.  Usually just trying to leech off of the success of the Rami movies.  In fact I don’t remember a good Spider-Man since Sega Genesis.  So it was pretty surprising that Web of Shadows actually turned out to be pretty fun and well done in most areas.

First and most importantly in my opinion for a Spider-Man game – the web slinging is actually well done and interesting in this game.  That was the first thing that immediately caught my attention.  It’s pretty damn fun just swinging around in the city beating up criminals.  It’s very acrobatic and cinematic feeling and my favorite feature of the game.

Web of Shadows let you play the game with some moral choices affecting the game.  You can either use the black (symbiote) suit or the classic red (and blue) suit.  You also are prompted to make different decisions at certain points of the game and you can either choose the black (evil) response or the red (good) response.  I choose to play through the game as “good” although there were a few times when the choice was pretty hard to stick with.  I’m finding that my moral compass in these decisions doesn’t always match up with my intended play-through.

The combat is pretty damn good.  It’s very fast paced and the differences between the black suit and red suit are noticeable.  The red suit is more classic, fast, acrobatic style Spider-Man while the black suit is much more aggressive and powerful in it’s attacks.  Both suits have their uses in the game and while I liked the flashy moves of the red suit by about half way through I was favoring the black suit’s “get over here” move to much to really use the red suit anymore.

There are a lot of aerial, fighting above the skyline fights in the game that make things pretty fun to watch and play.  Overall, between the swinging and combat style of the game, it’s worth it alone.

The story starts off seeming decent but quickly gets drawn out and predictable.  Also, Mary Jane appears to be a complete hoe-bag now also.  Kind of strange.

There are some issues with the game.  Twice the game became unplayable for me.  One time in my wolverine fight, my Spider-Man just froze in place and no buttons would respond anymore.  I just had to wait for the bad guys to kill me off and reload my save.  The other time, Rhino got stuck in the wall and wouldn’t move.  Had to reset the game and reload my save point.  Besides these few bugs and the camera being pretty wonky at times I found the game to be good overall.

Worth picking up if you want some web slinging, fast paced fighting.  I’ll keep an eye on these developers for any other games I might want to pick up.