The swinging is well animated and pointing your analog stick left or right will direct Spider-Man as to where to shoot his webbing, while the random crimes are more in-depth this time around. Let’s get the good out of the way first - swinging through the city and taking care of random crimes, arguably the best parts of Spider-Man 2, are arguably the best parts in this game. Drop in random events such as hurt cops and gang fights that pop up as you swing around the city, races, skydiving challenges, 75 gang tokens, 35 secret tokens, 30 skyscraper tokens and 30 subway tokens, and you’ve got a lot for the web-head to tackle. There are 42 missions in Spider-Man 3 that draw from the movie (Sandman, New Goblin, etc.), the comics (Scorpion, Kraven, so on) and the videogame’s original content (three gangs are running amok in New York). You throw a web - it comes out lax, hits something and goes taut in Spidey’s hand - and set off to bring justice to the city, which is no small task in the sandbox environment.

Activision says the city is 2.5 times bigger than the one in Spider-Man 2, and as the sun bathes the towering buildings in light and you somersault into different sections of the sprawling metropolis without any load times, it’s easy to get swept away in the visual upgrade.

Extremely new and big mapĪt first, it’s breathtaking. You get the basics down while saving some folks from a fire, and you’re let loose in New York. Ol’ web-head can now web zip with one button his Spider-Sense turns the screen black and white while displaying enemies in red, allies in green and objectives in yellow and Spider-Reflexes allow the wall-crawler to slow time and counter attacks with a single button press. The game opens up with Bruce Campbell acting as our familiar narrator and walking Spidey through his new-found controls. Just like Pete’s decent into darkness, Spider-Man 3 goes south so slowly that it’s hard to notice at first.

Spider-Man 3 instal