User blog:Hawkeye2701/Review4U: Spider-Man: Web of Shadows

Alrighty, it took a while, but having completed at least one path of Web of Shadows, it's time for a Review courtesy of ADour. For anyone who wants to know, I went into this as a big Black Cat fan and knowing sweet F-A about Moon Knight. So anyone expecting me to laud either him or Mary Jane, might wanna hold onto something.

Dawn of the Symbiotes
We open onto what is easily the best opening to a Marvel Game I have ever encountered. Spider Man walking through a war of Man vs. Symbiote in New York to Classical Music. There is no two ways about it, this is epic, dramatic as all hell stuff.

After playing through a short prologue where Petey tracks down Luke Cage and Mary Jane where she promptly chews him out for using the Black Suit, we then backtrack.

The game itself starts pretty much with a fight between Peter and Venom where part of Venom flies off and reconnects with Peter, changing him to his black suit. Venom promptly retreats. Mary Jane, who was injured in the exchange gets taken to Hospital and while Peter waits for word, gangs start a shoot out in the street. Moving into our first side quest, Peter helps Luke Cage settle the gang violence in the city. At a parley between the two gangs, numerous tech warriors show up to take out the leaders. Getting your first moral choice, I decided to do the heroic thing and save everyone. It's then that we're put on the trail of the Kingpin.

Heading out, Peter soon encounters our Femme Fatale, Black Cat and everybody's favourite lunatic, Moon Knight. After a brief fight with the former, you get another decision to make. Disappointing Adour I'm sure, I chose the hottie in the skin tight cat suit... Black Cat, just to be clear which one I'm talking about.

Fighting against Kingpin's Tech Warriors, the trail eventually leads to Adrian Toomes, the Vulture. Fighting Toomes, I took him down and chose the good path again, leaving him for the Police. It's then that things start getting creepy when ordinary citizens run up walls like wild animals and attack (I wonder what this could mean?) A bunch of cops witness Spidey throw civilians off a rooftop and start shooting and Spider-Man, the People's Menace J. Jonah Jameson always warned about is back on the scene.

As things progress, the Symbiotes spread across the city, with Wolverine and S.H.I.E.L.D. now getting involved. After a particularly tricky fight with Electro over S.H.I.E.L.D.'s quarantine procedure, Peter (With slight prompting from the Kingpin), goes to bust the Tinkerer out of prison so that he can create a means to separate the Symbiotes from their hosts without harming them. Catching a ride with Moon Knight, I busted him out with some help from Rhino, though I didn't cut the guy a break, last thing I wanted was to fight a Symbiote Rhino later.

Anyway, making it to the top of the Prison, Black Widow, Kingpin and Toomes all appear on the scene to lay claim to Tinkerer. Siding with Shield, Peter returns to Manhattan to find the city is now full on Land of the Dead, with shambling Symbiotes in the streets and Shield's base of operations being held up in the grounds of Stark Tower.

Now effectively Black Widow's B*tch, Peter is sent to save civilians, beat up symbiotes and everything else in between before finally being sent to make an alliance with Kingpin. Together, the efforts to suppress the monsters and save the people start paying off until the time comes to Evacuate Manhattan to the Helicarrier floating above. Working with Wolverine, Peter draws the Symbiotes to the Church, only for Logan to get swarmed, prompting a fight with a now Symbiote Wolverine (One of the hardest fights in the game if you ask me). After dealing with that (As a good guy once more) The story has pretty much caught up with the opening, leading Peter to track down and battle a now Symbiote Black Cat. Battling her on a Rooftop, he is soon joined by shotgun wielding Mary Jane (Who clearly took a level in Badass for this game) Winning the fight, he relinquishes the injured Felicia to Shield care (If you chose to be a good guy)

The time comes to set off the Anti-Symbiote Bomb, but this is somewhat hampered by the now Symbiote Vulture (God damn it Toomes! Is there anyone NOT a Symbiote in this game?!) Going to the Empire State building, Peter beats down Toomes a second time, sparing him yet again (As I'm awesome like that) At this point the majority decisions kick in, if you've been a hero or a villain for the most part deciding whether or not Peter sets off the bomb. So for me, the city was then purified of all Symbiotes.

This is of course, not the end. An alert goes out from the Helicarrier, now overrun with Symbiotes as Venom snuck aboard. Getting another lift from Moon Knight, Peter arrives on Deck to see every hero he befriended to this point fighting Symbiotes (Which is AWESOME) After planting bombs in order to take down the helicarrier, Peter confronts a now giant gestalt Venom made of multiple Symbiotes. Fighting off the giant, Peter finds his tactics ineffective and tries playing to Eddie Brock. Bringing out the original, he convinces Brock to fight back. Fighting against the Symbiote influence, he pulls himself down into one of the Helicarrier's turbines, killing himself and causing the ship to crash, taking out the remainder of the symbiotes once and for all. The story ends with Peter narrating to himself before being interrupted by Mary Jane, the two taking off into the sunset and all that jazz.

The Review
Alright, time for the rundown.


 * Story

Okay, the story is, fantastic. While I'm kinda curious what caused part of Venom to return to Spidey and how this then allowed Venom to multiply, ultimately the unanswered questions don't bother me that much. The choice system, unlike many games before it actually seems to effect the story in major ways and while the payoff to some of these comes later, it's definitely there, which makes a nice change to some of the ones where it only effects the ending and which people want to smash your head in. While I do love the opening, I do kind of feel it spoiled the later shock of the deranged citizens. If I didn't know they were being effected by Symbiotes, it would of added more mystery and perhaps been even creepier than it was, but that's a minor gripe at best. Unlike the Ultimate Spider-Man game I reviewed before, the heroes tat appear aren't just flash in the pan cameos, which is fantastic, and while they maybe could have done better to explain the absense of New York centred heroes like the Fantastic Four and Tony Stark, at least those that were there played a bigger role than just showing up to be seen. I was concerned at first that the whole thing felt very Prototype, but upon doing some research, I found out that Web of Shadows was Prototype before Prototype was, by about 6 months granted, but still. All in all, I enjoyed it and while there were some irritating parts, they weren't really story related.


 * Gameplay

As always, I will always prefer a free roaming Spider-Man game to a linear one and the web slinging is functional, though I must admit, the detail on buildings tends to result in me hitting the corners of uneven buildings. The wall crawling combat is quite good, if a bit limited, but being the first game I've played where you can effectively fight on vertical surfaces it's still impressive. My concern here is more that the game didn't deem it necessary to tell me how to cling to walls until halfway through Cage's section. The bosses, while tending to doubling up, it is usually between the normal and Symbiote versions of the enemy, which does its part in changing up the gameplay and once again comparing back to Ultimate Spider-Man, there is no annoying chase down of bosses and each of the Symbiote versions normally come with a mechanic their original didn't in order to make the fight more interesting. My biggest issues with the gameplay come with the side missions. After a point completing them becomes kind of superfluous and with the exception of improving the Flashbangs, I had built up a good 30 grand worth of points after having completed my skill trees. The ability to swap between black suit and regular spidey was appreciated, though I generally found there wasn't much need to swap if you found what you like, then again I find that preferable to being forced to wear one outfit for a given task, so that's not even an issue for most of the game. The camera had a few issues where it flicked between looking straight up or down, but that leveled out when you clicked R3. There were occasional glitches in the streets with civilians, agents or symbiotes. I don't know who to blame for these, but they were infrequent enough not to be a deal breaker.


 * Style

Really gotta give props to the designer of this game. Unlike the comic book style of Ultimate, Web of Shadows is laid out like a scale cityscape and it bloody well feels like it. I tried going from one end of Manhattan to the other and it took FOREVER!. The scale in many ways is astounding. As far as characters go, some are not that far removed from their comic variants, others are quite impressively different. I must say I love the Vulture's design, as wings made of swords are right up there as some of the coolest things I can think of, although his Symbiote variant was somewhat disappointing. Many of the Symbiote designs were also very good, showing a nice variety, and even I must admit I'm kind of disappointed not to have seen Symbiote Moon Knight in game. The most disappointing design in the game, if I can even call it a disappointment is probably the final Venom design as I feel it lacked the Oomph of some of the other bosses, but even then I thought it was great.


 * Characters

The characters in many areas are well developed. With the exception of Mary Jane and Tinkerer, you have ample opportunity to talk to and work alongside most of the cast. This game was worth it for hearing Luke Cage and Spider-Man debate fashion sense alone. There is no lack of classic Spidey banter and none of the characters feel stiff or wooden as they sometimes do in games like this. Seeing Mary Jane spend the majority of her screen time with a shotgun and actually having her attacking Symbiotes during the Black Cat Boss Fight was a highlight of this game. Honestly, if we could have had an MJ Symbiote fight, that would've made my Christmas.

The only problems I would maybe consider bringing up would be that sometimes I missed dialogue because it got cut off by a loading screen or was drowned out by sound effects or music, but even that sounds like it should probably be in some technical section and not a jab at the characters themselves.

Conclusion
In summary, this is probably the best Spider-Man game I've played in a long time. It's got some technical issues, such as the sound/cut off thing and the glitches, but in return it gives us no real drop in gameplay compared to other Spider-Man games I've enjoyed, has tried a lot of new stuff, coming well out of what I'm used to from Spidey Games and while it lacks a lot of the bonuses and extras of other Spider-Man titles, I gotta say, I don't particularly miss trawling New York for collectibles.

The side missions can be tedious and like I said, after a point, not even necessary, so maybe cutting back on those might have been better, but at least they tended to play into the story, normally including some nice bits of dialogue from the given mission toting NPC at the time.

All in all, not sure what else I can say, so from ADour, We are Hawkeye2701 and we're gonna go infect New York with this game. ;)