“Deputy Spider-Man will get that rascally varmint.”

What a stinker of a game and a waste of some very solid design work. The stellar character movement of Spider-Man: Web of Shadows makes for pretty good core gameplay, but the bland combat, repetitive side quests, endless collecting, and excessive cutscenes really hamper the game. Stripped of its unnecessary elements, there’s unfortunately not much to do, evidenced when I ran through the game a second time to get an alternate ending—you have to make Red Suit (good) or Black Suit (bad) choices throughout the game—and found myself facing off with the final boss after only a few hours. A thorough disappointment, not least because it’s more than a decade old and still fetches $30 for a used copy—a dollar amount that would usually indicate a hidden gem.

The thing that really irks me is that the team at Shaba Games clearly put a lot of time and effort into refining the movement of Spider-Man. Generally, controlling the character in a purely non-combative fashion is fun and immersive. Swinging around the city, scaling walls, changing directions rapidly—it’s all pretty smooth, and I think they deserve a thumbs up for their efforts in that area. Elsewhere, the game is less successful. The various combat tricks, while numerous enough and visually nifty, ultimately boil down to mashing the same few buttons over and over without a real care for timing or sequence. It feels like they spent like 80% of their time and budget on achieving the smooth swinging and zipping, leaving the player with a smooth character but a clunky game.

The enemies are varied and attack in different ways, but the combat interactions are poorly designed. Aside from friendly AI damage (police forces will shamelessly riddle you with bullets), almost all perceptible attacks from enemies will completely disrupt your movements. Whether this is a flaw or not is debatable, but it makes for a frustrating experience when almost all of the boss fights in the game pit you against a high-health character and a dozen or so minions whose slightest touch will knock you back multiple feet and completely destroy any kind of flow. Especially annoying were the second encounter with Black Cat—which takes place on a tiny rooftop that simply can’t accommodate the expansive movements of the combat—and the final boss battle. In the latter, you face off with a mutated hydra form of Venom, with four long-necked heads snapping at you as you try to avoid the myriad generic enemies below. I was routinely nagged by these enemies and achieved victory through persistence rather than elegantly mastering the game’s final challenge.

Exacerbating the combat issues is an absurd auto-lock feature that routinely zeroes the player in on a generic enemy rather than the one you actually want to attack. This ability is interesting at first—you can sense enemies through walls and trigger “hidden symbiotes”—but it is atrociously implemented into actual combat. I preferred not to use it because it didn’t work very well at locking me onto my intended target, but it routinely auto-locked without me even pressing the button to do so, causing me to use special moves (draining a limited meter) on enemies that could have been felled by a paltry press of a single button. Mercifully, the player’s health is nearly infinite, and you heal after a few brief moments of avoiding further damage. In every case that I encountered low health, I was able to simply swing around for a few minutes and come back at full health.

But aside from the auto-lock feature, the camera was an all-around killer in this game. When you’re swinging in between buildings or flipping upside down or climbing up and down walls, the camera needs to behave intuitively. It emphatically does not. I regularly found myself zipping way off of my intended course due to a jerky camera movement and a split-second commitment to a linear movement (e.g. I’d try to launch myself vertically up the side of a building, only to find myself flung out horizontally into open space because the camera had jerked around just before I committed). Another weird quirk is that when you find yourself near a wall, you can cling to it; when you do, if you press upward to intuitively begin climbing upward, the camera will instantly flip 180 degrees and you’ll find yourself climbing downward. Why though? It remains a confounding mystery. None of these issues break the game but they make it much slower which dampens much of the excitement.

With all these flaws you would expect something of value from the storyline. Perhaps it’s my sensibilities (I am perpetually unenthused by comic book storylines in other mediums), but the story just felt bland. But that’s probably not fair to my sensibilities or to the game. I think the story had the markings of something interesting, but it is presented in completely banal fashion. Way too often, cutscenes are peppered with quicktime events, often causing a repeat of a two minute scene because the player actually wanted to watch the dang thing instead of trying to time button presses like some screwed up version of Guitar Hero. Other times, thirty seconds of gameplay will be rewarded with a generic, unskippable cutscene that takes you out of the flow of the game and provides nothing of value to the experience. The Black Suit/Red Suit choices don’t really change the game in any meaningful way and you can use whichever one you want throughout most of the game (switching between them by clicking a joystick) so the choices felt very immaterial. And though a glance at the theme’s and imagery may intrigue you, the presentation of the story is just one fumble after another. It’s completely devoid of context and steps over decades-old lines of the character’s code. For instance, Mary Jane refers to Spider-Man as Peter in front of other people; Spider-Man chucks people off of skyscrapers without remorse; he doesn’t even take off his dang mask to canoodle with Black Cat.

Aside from the main story missions, there are way too many “do this X times” type of quests that inflate the playtime but don’t add anything to the game—rescue brainless civilians who can’t run from point A to point B; defeat hordes of certain enemy types, many of which simply fail to spawn for long periods of time; collect 2000 Spidey-symbols to upgrade your suit. Crackdown, infamous for its 800 collectible orbs, is probably one of the best comparisons for Web of Shadows. While Web of Shadows may be a pretty decent Spider-Man game, that speaks more to a lack of good Spider-Man games than to its relative quality compared to other games that did not rely on a popular character for their sales. Another good comp is Just Cause 2, a game that features a grappling hook and high-flying acrobatics, but is much more engaging and straight up fun than Web of Shadows.

The fundamental problem with the game is that if it had known when to quit, and removed the repetitious side-quests and excessive tutorials and cutscenes, there wouldn’t be much of a game left. To put it bluntly, the only thing they got kind of right was Spider-Man in a sandbox. Zipping around the city collecting the floating symbols with the game muted and some classic rock playing is at least tolerable (if not exactly my idea of fun) and where the game most closely matches the appeal of something like Crackdown. But everything that was assembled on top of that sandbox environment largely falls flat, and as a result, the game as a whole is a letdown.