Spiderman 3 Review (Xbox 360)

Movie licensed games are typically horrible, and should be avoided at all costs. The precedent was set way back in 1982, when lengthy licensing negotiations left a single Atari programmer with just 5 weeks to conceive and develop the entire "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial" game. Despite being widely regarded as the worst game ever made, it sold 1.5 million copies - making it the eighth best selling game for the Atari 2600. For obvious reasons, countless movies have been turned into games since 1982, and a mere few gems like Goldeneye 007 and Star Wars Episode 1: Pod Racer have emerged from the noise. Did the developers of Spiderman 3 get enough development time to deliver a polished game in time for the movie? Our Games Editor has the full story.

As is all the rage these days, Spiderman 3 is a sandbox style game, which lets you explore the map and tackle the missions as you see fit. Apparently the gameplay takes place in a perfect recreation of the entire island of Manhattan - we don't have time to check, so we'll have to take their word for it. As you can probably imagine, Spiderman gets around the city by swinging from web to web - but surprisingly, Treyarch have really nailed the feel here, and as a result, moving around the map is always entertaining.

The game mechanics are a grab bag of things we've seen before - button-mashing combat, a "bullet-time"/focus/concentration mechanic allowing you to slow down time, the photography from Dead Rising, reflex (and patience) testing interactive cinematic sequences in the vein of Dragon's Lair and God of War - even dating side-quests make an appearance.

While we did say button-mashing combat, it's admittedly fairly deep button-mashing combat. There's parry maneuvers, and more combos than we managed to commit to memory. With practice, you can conjure up some impressive, gravity-defying 20+ hit combos, but unfortunately the game has plenty of difficult areas where you'll need to resort to the repetition of certain powerful attacks to advance.

With graphically impressive games like Gears of War and Lost Planet now being old news, we've come to have fairly high expectations from new titles. The graphics on offer here are passable, but nothing spectacular. We've come to realise that a consistent framerate has far more impact on the immersiveness of a game than eye candy ever will, so we hate to say that Spiderman 3 suffers from constant framerate issues - a great shame given a locked 30 frames per second could have been a major saving grace for the title.

Spiderman 3 is one of those acquired tastes. As far as movie-licensed games go, it doesn't fare too badly. There's an excellent game hidden beneath a visibly rushed veneer, and some shining moments sandwiched between some frustrating and forgettable others. A fairly lengthy campaign will take at least a weekend of solid play to conquer, and there's a bunch of side-quests to tackle should you be thirsty for more at that stage.

Die-hard Spiderman fans will certainly do well with the game (and they'll have to wait until Sony release the Spiderman 4 movie for anything better), but it's hard to tell whether our other readers will have the patience to endure with the good with the bad - but we can certainly tell it's worth them giving it a try.

Buy it, rent it or leave it? Rent it.