Spider-Man 2 (PlayStation 2)

Spider-Man 2 (PlayStation 2)

Gagan Gupta, Jul 24, 2004 0000 hrs IST

If somebody told you I was just another Grand Theft Auto Clone…Somebody Lied. I'm Spider-Man!

Excellent gameplay, The entire New York at your disposal, Best superhero game yet

Average visual and audio quality, Tough boss levels

Expert Rating :

Expert Review

Doing whatever a Spider can
Though the Spider-man 2 game is based on the Spider-Man 2 movie, the movie storyline is thrown completely in the background to remove any sense of linearity. You have to play a real superhero and scout the city for crimes in progress. All these small missions are given to you by regular citizens shouting for help, and sometimes you can just jump into a crime in progress. Some of the small missions given to you are - stopping a robbery, rescuing cops from a shootout, chase car thieves, retrieve stolen bags and purses from fleeing criminals, saving someone from falling off a building or a high structure and even taking someone seriously injured to the hospitals. These were just a few examples of the kind of missions you'll have to do as a superhero.

Of course, with each heroic action there's a reward - Hero Points. Hero points act as a sort of superhero currency that you can exchange for getting new moves and abilities that make the city cleaning job easier for you.

Besides these there are many other objectives that you'll need to complete in every chapter like Take pictures of the city for the daily bugle, meet Mary Jane at some place on a particular time, and many more like it. And then there's the one part without which any superhero game would be incomplete - Super-villain Boss Fights! Besides the obvious presence of Doc Ock as the final boss in the game, you will also face some familiar comic book villains like Rhino, Mysterio and the Shocker. You're not really alone in all these fights as you sometimes get Black Cat to help you out along the way. If all else fails you have your trusty spider-sense.

Spider-sense acts in two ways here - one which is on at all times to warn you about any incoming danger, like if someone's shooting at you or sneaking an attack on you, you'll see your spider-sense tingling in a white aura above your head. Hitting the dodge button at these times will give you an advantage over the enemies as you'll be able to dodge their attacks on time and leave them open for you to execute you're super-butt-kicking combo. The other spider sense acts more as a bullet-time that slows everything down around you giving you the advantage of speed over your enemies. You can execute some special attacks that only exclusive to this mode.

The controls of Spider-Man 2 have finally given us gamers the level of control we always wanted from this superhero. Web swinging itself is tremendously fun. Using a combination of the R2 (to swing), X (to jump) and L2 (for speed) you can just about do everything that you want Spider-man to do. You can run across walls then jump and spin when gravity starts taking its toll, you can fall off tall buildings and swing away just before you u smack the ground. You can push yourself off walls, do mid-air acrobats and everything else with these tight controls. Unlike the previous games, you can't just swing around from anywhere here. You nedd some building or a structure for attaching your webbing before you can swing - just the way its meant to be. This may seem like a limitation to inexperienced gamers, but this is how it is supposed to be. Besides Spidey can swing from just about anything that's solid, including overhead helicopters.

If there is something to complain about it’s the repetition level of the hero missions. You find yourself doing similar missions over and over again, which may be a quite annoying if you're low on patience. Personally I found these missions a great source of practice but yes I do wish there was a bit more variety. Besides that, the boss fights may be pretty tough to finish at one go, so there will be times when you'll need to redo these missions to get it right. But that's something that comes with boss fights; if they're easy to beat, how's it really a 'boss' fight?