Spider-Man 2 (Xbox):
Spider-Man 2! A long standing classic for video game enthusiasts everywhere is unsurprisingly a very good game. After playing the previous movie game it’s honestly kind of astonishing how much of a leap in quality there is here. Like Spider-Man 1 isn’t atrocious or anything, but 2 in comparison is massively higher quality in every way it could be.
The controls are a real step up from basically any Spider-Man game before it. They’re all very responsive and satisfying. You aren’t constantly grappling with sticking to walls you don’t want to be on and not sticking to walls you do want to be on, Though that actually feels like it might be a lot more to do with the play environment being a lot more open. You spend most of the game out in the expanse of New York swinging around between buildings and beating down mooks on the streets instead of being in cramped buildings like a lot of previous entries.
Speaking of which the web swinging and combat in this one are pretty great. The web swinging is the biggest thing most people will tell you about this game and for good reason. Instead of the method previous games used where you just kinda blindly ascend into the sky your web actually has to physically connect to an object and your momentum carries you through instead of just automatically going forward. It’s kinda tricky to get a handle on it and I admittedly never got too good at it, but when you get in the motions it feels great, dare I say the phrase “it makes you feel like Spider-Man”. To the other side of the gameplay the punching ain’t too bad either. Feels really good to land hits and enemies go flying off as ragdolls. you can fling em around with webs or uppercut them into the sky and refuse to let them fall even after defeating them, it has a very wacky rhythm to it. I will say though as you get farther in it gets a bit stale and repetitive mashing the same moves at enemies over and over, but it doesn’t drag the game down much.
This does however bring me into my handful of gripes though. the game isn’t perfect by any means and did grind my gears a few times. Basically all the stuff involving Mysterio was frustrating. There’s a part where you have to scale the statue of liberty on these weird floating platforms and I just kept falling over and over again. Also both times you have to shut down Doc Ock’s reactor are very annoying cause the energy wave it shoots out is really hard to read and extends out way farther than it looks like it would. The ragdolling also backfires on you a lot cause when enemies knock you over it’s really frustrating having to wait until they let you get back up. I can definitely see these as just being skill issue problems, but something that isn’t is the progression system. This isn’t a huge deal, but the hero points caps for chapter completion. It’s pretty blatant padding and makes the little quests from the citizens start to feel like a huge chore. After the 15th time you do the one where robbers are holding up and armored car and then you have to chase their escape vehicle it starts to become a lot less fun.
Ultimately this doesn’t really effect the final opinion which brings me to the tier list.
I don’t expect to get a lot of top tier entries, but this one obviously makes the cut. As for how it stacks against the other current S rank game I can’t really say. They’re 2 very different games trying to do very different things so it doesn’t seem reasonable to compare them. So that’s really all I got on this one. I’m still working on Ultimate Spider-Man DS, but I’ll have that done soon.
Also I’m somehow still not done with Spider-Man 2 I’ve got at least one more of those to go. I guess I could also do the PC version of Spider-Man 2, but I really don’t want to. If you send me an abandonware link to it though I will resent that and take it as a personal attack, but I might also play it.
