Spider-Man 3

Movie games have a bad reputation of being products of tight deadlines and a lack of polish as the license is used to sell the game instead of the game selling itself. However, every once in a while a game pops up which begs to differ. Chronicles of Riddick is perhaps the greatest example of this. So is Spider-man 3 for the Wii another Riddick, or a game which lives up to the aforementioned reputation?

Unfortunately, it's the latter. Spider-man 3 appeared to be a game which would have me wooping in front of my TV; I mean, the game allowed you to shoot and swing webs with the Wii controller! If that isn't the epitome of cool, or at least something close-to, I don't what is. And cool it proves to be... for five minutes, until the villainy of the game sets in and you can't help but curse at or mourn for the game which had the potential to quite simply rock the proverbial socks.

Instead, Spider-man 3 is a disappointment on all fronts: it's boring, hard to look at, and dreadful to control.

Obviously, this is based on the movie which just stacked up $347million USD over the weekend; but even so, you'd be easily forgiven for thinking you were playing a game based on some other Spidey story. At the best of times the game's storyline is vague, and at its worst it's simply not there. Though certain liberties must be taken when translating a film into a game it's hard to understand why central themes of the movie fail to appear throughout. One thing I was happy to see however was the exclusion of the emo-fringed Parker and his unforgettable-for-all-the-wrong-reasons dance scene.

Spider-man 3 is essentially Grand Theft Auto in New York, where instead of killing good chaps you're laying the beat down on young ruffians who would dare to disturb the law. It's simple stuff, and would've passed off as novel about 5 years ago. But this is 2007, the next-gen is now, and gamers expect something more. What's worse is that the game follows a similar mould of the Spider-man 2 game, which was actually really good, but instead of improving upon it, it takes five steps backwards! How such a thing happened no man will ever come to answer reasonably.

And if the lacklustre story wasn't enough to deter you from this game, the combat system will. Swinging the controller from left to right means Spidey will punch an enemy... or the air in frustration! 40% of the time Spidey will miss or the Wii won't respond quick enough to your flailing of the controller. This is the stuff frustration is made of. Eventually, you'll be able to add special moves and combos to your repetoire but they become so tiresome and uncessary (as enemies fall within a couple of punches) that you'll not ever bother to use them.

A key difference between this and the PS3 and 360 versions is not only that it's less of a game, but also in its use of the 'black suit'. When the suit comes into play it becomes a battle between exploiting its power and it consuming Parker's honourability. Sounds like a brilliant feature in theory, but in reality it's perhaps the most annoying gameplay mechanic I've encountered since using the SIXAXIS controller to steer a vehicle in Motorstorm.

The more damage you deal wearing the suit fills up a meter at the bottom of the screen. This meter depicts how the suit is beginning to take over and feed off you. If you wear the suit for too long, you're toast. What a bummer! So you'll need to take it off in a timely fashion... which is where the mini-game comes in. In order to remove the suit you must engage in a finger-DDR button pressing mini-game which gets longer and longer every time you use the suit.

My advice: don't use the suit. Ever.

I don't expect games on the Wii to look too good - that is, in comparison to its next-gen counterparts - but at the same time I don't expect them to look awful. Spider-man 3 generally looks pretty ugly and sometimes... sometimes it hits rock-bottom on the awful-meter and proceeds to bust a hole in the ground.

Vicarious Visions really dropped the ball here, or perhaps dropped the graphics engine on its head as a small child. New York, one of the busiest cities in the world, has barely any pedestrians, the buildings are less detailed than Duplo blocks, and when you swing high into the sky everything loses its texture skin. Were the Wii version of Spider-man 3 you buy on shelves promoted as alpha code at a premium price you'd be able to excuse this, but this is the final build of a full-priced game... It's almost robbery! Quick! Someone call Spider-man to exact some justice! Oh, wait, he'll probably just as soon as punch my face in error than Vicarious Visions'. Damn those controls.

Spider-Man 3 on the Wii is the sum of developer tardiness combined with an imposing and impossible deadline. When a fun superhero like Spider-man is trapped in a game which is a chore to play it makes you realise just how wrong this universe really is.