Suits, Combat, Boss Fights
Spider-Man video games have had an interesting history and have bridged over twenty years of consoles, dating back to the Atari 2600. I’ve played several of these Spider-Man games over the years, most recently Spider-Man: Friend Or Foe, a decent but incredibly repetitive two player brawler. Web of Shadows, despite some flaws, is in my opinion the best Spider-Man game to date and one of the better comic book games out there.
Web of Shadows begins with the town of New York over run by Symbiote infected citizens. The forces of SHIELD and several other Marvel allies that you meet throughout the game have their hands full. After this brief intro, Spider-Man narrates a cutscene that takes us back four days prior to this catastrophic event, and it’s here that players begin their journey.
Before elaborating more on the story, I’d like to first talk about some of the gameplay mechanics in Web of Shadows. What is arguably the most unique and biggest selling point of this Spider-Man game is its combat system. Combat on the ground, on walls, and in air has been streamlined and refined beyond any previous Spider-Man game. The aerial combat impressed me the most, and it’s what made fighting Vulture such an amazing boss battle, more on that later.
Your combat options not only change with what mode you’re in (ground, wall, or air), but also what suit you’re currently wearing. Players can switch between the red and black suits simply by pressing L3. I found that sometimes I would switch suits inadvertently if I was just rotating or pushing the left stick hard, but such accidental changes were rare enough and never caused any problem. Knowing your moves in each suit is a good idea, but not necessarily vitally important. For example, when I had a lot of Symbiotes to clear, using my black suit’s ground combo that allowed me to use tendrils like the Blades of Chaos from God of War, was most effective. However, I could have also used the red suit’s fast punching combo, so one isn’t necessarily better than the other; players will undoubtedly find combos that work for them.
Each suit’s available arsenal of combos and abilities can be upgraded by assigning upgrade points in between missions. Upgrade points are earned by completing objectives, both optional and mandatory, as well as stringing together ground, wall, and air moves. By the end of the game, I was able to unlock nearly every ability for both suits, which was nice, but at the same time could detract a bit from the replay value. Upgrades come in the form of adding more range or damage or extra moves to ground, wall, and air combos. Usually, players will just need to press square repeatedly, although for best effect with some timing, to achieve a satisfying and effective combo for either suit in any situation. The red suit also has the ability to shoot bursts of web that can incapacitate enemies, while the black suit utilizes tendrils to reach out and grab enemies (or pull Spider-Man towards them, depending on the enemy).
Both suits have the ability to chain together air combat maneuvers too in another neat and well done aspect of the combat system. When you press triangle near an enemy, the game speed slows down and Spider-Man will shoot out some web or a tendril (depending on the suit you’re wearing) to connect to the enemy. At this point, one of a few things can happen: the enemy may break the hold, in which case you need to press X to bail out of the maneuver or risk getting hit, or Spider-Man will sail towards them and be able to execute a hit based on which face button you push (excluding X). Regardless of what happens, the game speed then returns to normal. In many cases, you can string together these aerial attacks against airborne enemies or bosses.
Speaking of bosses, I think the boss fights, or at least most of them, are one of the best parts about the game. I really enjoyed the two battles with Vulture that took place almost entirely in the skies above New York. Part of what made this boss fight so amazing is how it was so easy to keep Spider-Man in air, bouncing from one foe to another while working his way towards Vulture, and in some cases, fighting Vulture one on one. Flying high above New York with a really pretty background and with the camera showing all matter of views was just really fun and cool. While those two boss fights were definitely the best, the others were also well done in that they fit well with the story, were challenging yet at the same time gave you more than enough opportunity to complete them without even dying. It’s a delicate balance when a game can provide a very satisfying and actually rather long boss fight that’s challenging and yet very fun, while also making it entirely possible that the player doesn’t die even once during said fight. Web of Shadows did a great job in making their boss fights a lot of fun, challenging, but also very doable the first time you encounter them, and I can definitely appreciate that.
Saving New York
So with Web of Shadows we have this slick new combat system that makes fighting the Symbiotes (and other foes you encounter) more streamlined and enjoyable than ever. These suits and their upgradeable abilities keep things further interesting, but there area few other elements to Web of Shadows that deserve mentioning.
Players are able to choose their path (good or evil) in Web of Shadows by behaving certain ways and frankly choosing one or the other at particular moments in the story. Using your black suit to pick up cars, destroying the city, refusing to rescue citizens, all of these give you points towards becoming evil. Saving citizens from harm’s way and completing missions that help restore New York give you points towards being good. Each boss fight gives you the chance to choose your path too, and eventually your decisions culminate during the event before the final boss fight. I can only assume that there is an alternate ending for going evil, although I’m not sure.
Spider-Man can also, as a whole, level up by collecting Spider icons spread throughout the expansive city of New York. These icons are fairly easy to spot, but you’ll have to collect several hundred to level up. When you level up, Spider-Man has more hit points, but honestly, after I collected my 300th icon, and I was a level six, I found it unnecessary to collect any more. As there are so many of these icons throughout the city, and you can often see a few of them at a time, it can be a real distraction to swing, climb, or run over to everyone of them that you see. At the same time, for the fanatic collector, this can add probably a few hours of gameplay to your adventure, although don’t expect any Trophies whatsoever on the PS3 version.
Spider-Man also has the ability to use his Spider-Sense to detect nearby enemies and friendlies. By simply pressing and holding L2, a wave of red ‘energy’ blasts out from Spider-Man and foes are highlighted in yellow or red, depending on their proximity, and friendlies (there aren’t many of these) will appear in blue. Things marked by the Spider-Sense will appear on your screen even if they are on top of or on the other side of buildings, which at first may seem disorienting, but it doesn’t take but a few moments to get the hang of it.
Speaking of friendlies, Spider-Man will encounter seven or so characters from the Marvel universe that he can call upon with the D-pad in most parts of the city. When you do so, your ally will appear and help you fight off whatever it is you’re fighting at the time (trying not to drop too many spoilers). There is a system for determining which allies can help you at a given time, I believe it depends on your overall Alignment, viewable from the Pause Menu, although if it’s not that it’s dependent on what suit you’re currently wearing. Special Attacks and Allies were actually two aspects of the game that I really didn’t use but once or twice, partially from forgetting or just thinking I would need them later, and also largely due to the game’s general ease of difficulty.
That said, the level of difficulty for Web of Shadows is pretty low, but that’s not to say it’s not challenging at times or too easy to be fun, or satisfying. For me, outside of dying a handful of times, the only periods where I had to replay a mission was when I either failed to save an escort, lost track of a enemy, or ran out of time. The good thing in any case about Web of Shadows is that the developers did a good job in splitting up the boss fights and missions so that should you fail or die, you won’t be set back much at all, if any.
The Darker Side
Up until this point I’ve really not had a whole lot bad to say about Web of Shadows, and overall that’s the case for the entire experience. In fact, my biggest complaint about the game would have to be that it just runs on a little too long, i.e., it gets very repetitious, but that’s a general complaint against most Marvel and even DC games (Justice League Heroes). On the same token, you could also argue that what you see in the first two or three hours is what you get for the entire ten or so hours of the game, but that’s of course not entirely true given the other combos you unlock and characters you encounter. However, suffice it to say then that there just seem to be a lot of arbitrary missions later on during the New York invasion that, I thought, dragged the game on a little more than it should have. These missions include things like “defeat 10 of this type of Symbiote and destroy ten of their hives.” In addition to these there are other optional objectives and goals you can shoot for (defeating 100, 200, 500, etc Symbiotes), but these missions just seemed unnecessary compared to other missions in the game that had you fighting a boss, breaking a character out of jail, or even disabling a security system at Fisk Industries. Additionally, while you do have two suits, you still only have a handful of practical moves to use during combat so you’ll see the same combat animations and enemies over and over; I think by game’s end I must have defeated at least two thousand enemies with the same basic moves. Still, the missions are padded with decent in game cutscenes that kept things moving along and the boss fights that popped up were more than enough to keep me going until the final showdown.
In terms of presentation, Web of Shadows isn’t bad at all. The variety of buildings and details thereof isn’t really anything to write home about, nor are the variety of characters (New York citizens, SHIELD agents, etc.). While somewhat light on detail, Web of Shadows maintains a slick framerate throughout, although I actually had a few short bouts of slowdown here and there. As far as audio, there is a good amount of voice acting for the Marvel characters, and the voice talent does a good enough job here, no complaints. The soundtrack left me a little disappointed though in that it was rather quiet or just absent for most of the game.
Overall, Spider-Man: Web of Shadows is a very fun single player beat’em. Had the developers slipped in a simple co-op mode somehow, that’d have been really cool, but even as is, it’s worth checking out.