Spider-Man: Web of Shadows (PS3)
Besides his iconic red and blue spandex, Spider-Man’s most popular costume has to be the black Symbiote suit not only for its sleek look but the story-telling potential it brings with it. With the core theme of the hero being that with great power comes great responsibility, the alien creature that makes up the costume serves as an excellent moral test for Marvel’s main superhero. Suppressing his inhibitions, the Symbiote suit can turn the heroic and friendly Peter Parker into an angrier and more violent vigilante if he chooses to embrace its powerful abilities too much, many stories covering the sentient costume focusing on the rejection of this power. However, the video game medium allows for this to be explored in a new manner, Spider-Man: Web of Shadows allowing the player to decide if they’ll reject the power or embrace it, feeling the consequences of whichever route they choose.
Spider-Man: Web of Shadows kicks off when a skirmish with the hulking brute Venom who has become one with Spider-Man’s old symbiote suit implants a new one into him, Peter Parker not able to fully reject it but able to swap between his regular costume and the black one at will. At first this fight with Venom seems to be an odd one-off situation, Spider-Man going about his regular duties trying to help the citizens of New York City and using either his webshooters and super strength to do so or embracing this suit’s ability for more powerful strikes and tendril-like limbs. The symbiote in him begins to draw out violent impulses, but as criminal activity seems to rise, Spider-Man begins to fear he needs that power boost to be able to handle the growing danger, only to learn soon that symbiotes are attaching themselves to people all around the city and beginning a push to take over the whole of Manhattan.
During the efforts to push back against the Symbiote invasion, Spider-Man will sometimes find his morality tested, the player in charge of whether or not he goes for the option more in line with his usual heroic side or embracing the tougher and often more selfish form of justice that the black suit urges Peter towards. At times this decision can be a true moral question, one of the earliest being when Spider-Man is working with street level hero Luke Cage to try and end a gang war and the player needs to decide between attempting a peace talk or putting both groups down with force. Sometimes Spider-Man will be able to choose whether to collaborate with a villain he just defeated or send them off to be locked up, the game actually featuring a system where the moral alignment of Spider-Man will influence the characters he can call in for back-up even during story missions. A Spider-Man on the side of good will be able to call in both recognizable and lesser known Marvel Comics heroes, Wolverine and Moon Knight not willing to help Peter Parker if he starts straying into more violent methods. However, embracing the black suit’s influence can mean Spider-Man’s villains are now on hand to help instead, Electro and the Vulture happy to swoop in and fight back enemies provided they believe you’ve changed away from your usual heroics. These allies actually being helpful during the game’s missions definitely makes this aspect of the moral decisions more interesting even if the story will still have you following virtually the same mission path just with different cutscenes based on certain choices, and you can even start to see the influence of your actions in how citizens and the police will react to you at different points in the game.
However, one thing holding this moral decision system back is how it’s presented to the player. When an important choice appears, the game tells you to pick a path and shows the red suit and black suit. This makes going for a good or evil ending easier, but sometimes the cutscene preceding the choice doesn’t really give you any clue what Spider-Man is deciding on. You might have just beaten a boss character and without context you need to pick your path, and while some of the more important ones do try to give you an idea what you’re choosing it does weaken any potential depth to the system when you aren’t even sure what you’re picking between. You don’t need to pick between a full run of good or evil choices and during regular play certain actions like helping citizens or causing collateral damage during a fight can earn you points for certain sides of the morality meter, but the lack of clarity means you won’t often be tempted by the alternate path from the one you’re already on.
The action in Spider-Man: Web of Shadows takes place in an open version of Manhattan where you’re able to travel where you please, but the open-world design has a few unusual caveats. The first is that you’ll never enter an interior area outside of cutscenes, but the city does undergo some changes as the plot advances and a few story missions do take place in unique outdoor locations like on a prison island or a flying helicarrier. Manhattan’s districts are at least diverse thanks to things like Central Park, Times Square, and areas that feature greater clusters of skyscrapers or smaller buildings, but there isn’t too much of an incentive for deviating from the story missions despite the freedom to do so. Around the town there are hundreds and hundreds of Spider Tokens you can grab, these easy enough to grab on your way somewhere or even in the middle of missions, but even though collecting certain amounts of them will upgrade your health and special meters they’re too abundant and simplistic to really serve as an engaging form of side content. Grabbing them as you come across them isn’t harmful to the experience though, and neither is mildly embracing the game’s side missions. Usually side missions will ask you to bust crimes or beat certain villain types as they operate around New York City, a minimap helping you find if any are nearby and the effort of taking them down adding up to experience points you can spend on new abilities. Engaging in short battles against different enemy types is a more interesting way of occupying your time between experiencing the main story, but all the side missions go a little too far with how much they expect of you. You might get a simple request of beating 25 criminals of a certain type, then 75, then 150 for the third side mission of that format, and the criminals defeated in previous side missions don’t count for the new tallies either. Luckily the actions taking during story missions do count towards these optional objectives and making them optional keeps these from being required slogs, but the incentive certainly doesn’t manage the scope of some of these quotas, especially since street crimes rarely feature more than a small handful of thugs to go towards these goals.
Those side missions will eventually become unavailable after missions that change the layout or situation in Manhattan, but keeping the actual payout for them simple means it’s easier to accept that you don’t need to complete them. However, Spider-Man: Web of Shadows does have an enjoyable combat and movement system that can make engaging with them as you explore the city more palatable. Swinging around Manhattan is responsive and reasonable, the player needing to time their web-swings to get more momentum or height and the game only really fudging reasonable connection points for the web lines on occasion. It’s a smooth system with rules that restrict you properly but allows for quick navigation or even special use during combat as you land a satisfying web-swing kick that can launch even huge foes far down the street as your reward for setting up that maneuver properly. You have no limitations on your web use so you can fire it pretty often in a brawl, but actually encasing an enemy in enough silk to debilitate them requires a lot of web shots since you’ll basically be able to knock them out for free afterwards. You can use a strand of web to pull yourself towards an enemy or reel them in depending on their size, a big part of the combat and navigation involving this feature. Fighting in the air is made possible by this as you can always close the gap with your foe and knowing the right follow up moves can help you land a hearty combo or avoid a counter attack. A few missions will even have a time-limited situation where you actually need to rapidly zip between foes and take them out for battles that aren’t just about hurting everyone around you, but the game does roll out new enemy types over time so you go from gangsters to armored soldiers on gliders and in mechs to the more bestial Symbiotes. The Symbiotes in particular come in many flavors, from infected civilians who blend into crowds until they are ready to attack to ones who imitate abilities of Spider-Man foes like the electricity of Electro but use it in conjunction with other attacking symbiotes so they aren’t just a retread of the boss fights.
Admittedly, there is one form of combat in the game that doesn’t really work well, that being when Spider-Man is wall-crawling. His move set is entirely changed for this niche situation that is still present enough to become a bit of a weak link in the otherwise exciting battle system. Even having all the upgrades doesn’t remove its slight awkwardness as your moves now seem less flexible and variation in how the fight unfolds diminishes, although much of the problems come from the game in general struggling with wall-crawling. Bad camera angles, issues detecting if you should be connected to the wall, and the odd way characters won’t come unstuck from this fighting mode even when knocked to the actual ground makes it the weakest battle type and thankfully one the game doesn’t embrace too much. There are other technical issues and rough portions, one cutscene you could clearly see a second version of the Kingpin standing in the background, the game crashed a few times as I played it, and one part where you are guiding the villain Rhino around to break things doesn’t control the best, but most enemy conflicts embrace the core controls and the concepts tied to it. Electro for example will begin as a chase through the city that makes good use of its space and your solid web-swinging controls as you have to weave through his electricity safely to catch him, and while the game sometimes ropes in timed button presses during cutscene fights they’re not punishing and less common than real fights like trying to reach the Vulture by bouncing off of his underlings.
Most of the combat I’ve described so far applies to the red suit’s abilities and the game definitely leans towards these abilities as its baseline, but the black suit can be activated at almost any time instantly by pressing in the left control stick. The black suit shares a few moves, but its punches can have an explosive area of effect, its attacks can extend out long sweeping tendrils that can clear away groups, and it’s much easier to pull off devastating special moves with simple button presses in this costume. Both costumes can unlock special moves that are good for strong focused damaged on a target or wiping away a group of foes but the Symbiote suit has better options for integrating cost-free attacks like a short range powerful burst or controllable tentacle to bother foes from far away to give it more unique options. There is no inherent punishment for fighting in either mode so you can swap between attacking styles as you please, but the black suit can build up evil points quickly if you embrace some of its more careless maneuvers near citizens or even start chucking cars around. The Symbiote isn’t a complete upgrade either as its strong blows don’t link together as cleanly as the regular outfit, the player free to figure out which they prefer from a gameplay standpoint in a less committal way than the story’s black or white decision making.
THE VERDICT: Spider-Man: Web of Shadows has some big ideas it doesn’t handle the best, but even its shortcomings add some extra concepts to explore. The morality system doesn’t do the best at presenting its choices but picking a path grants you different allies without locking you out of the two satisfying battle styles the two suits provide. The openness of Manhattan benefits missions as they often integrate movement through it as part of the challenge, but the attempts to inject side content outside of the main story are very weak. Enjoyable combat and web-swinging with story missions that vary up the opposition make the heart of the experience worth playing through if you can stomach the technical issues, but for every deviation that keeps the core content fresh you get ones that drag the game down with poorly executed mechanics.
And so, I give Spider-Man: Web of Shadows for PlayStation 3…
An OKAY rating. Spider-Man: Web of Shadows has a lot of little things that can drag it down if you mire yourself in them. The side missions are poorly conceived but only provide experience points you can earn elsewhere and aren’t required for anything but upgrading abilities, a fair few of those skill ups easy enough to ignore if you do find yourself relying on economical spending to get to the better abilities. The moral choice system has a fair few flaws in its DNA but committing to a full good or bad run provides the better experience within this game’s design, the player better able to utilize interesting concepts like calling in the ally back-up associated with that path or seeing how Peter Parker behaves differently based on how much he embraces the Symbiote. Admittedly his voice actor is a bit weak but interacting with a wide variety of Marvel Comics characters gives the adventure a little more life as you learn their part to play in repelling the emerging Symbiote menace. Having an open world that you probably won’t want to spend too much time exploring is a bit of an odd design choice, but it benefits the mission design as you are able to take advantage of the movement freedom. The combat and navigation are some of the game’s best features as well, the two suits both fighting with the right amount of differences and similarities that you will have moments you will prefer one over the other but the basics you’d need to remain competent even against the toughest foes won’t be stripped for choosing one costume over the other. The instant swap definitely makes this a more dynamic system with more opportunities for fights where your own options are varied, and then with different boss fights concepts and a good amount of diversity in the regular enemy design you have fights that remain fresh and challenging up until that final boss.
It is a shame that Spider-Man: Web of Shadows has so much you need to brush aside to get to the good stuff though. Seeing a second Kingpin model in the background of a scene isn’t going to ruin the experience, the timed button presses during cutscenes are negligible since you’re not punished for failing them beyond needing to try again, and the bad wall-crawling fighting won’t crop up so much it ruins things. The moral choices tied to using the Symbiote suit are not as rich as they could have been, but the ideas that lead to the game’s current state end up producing a pretty good amount of enjoyable action and interaction with other heroes and villains. The outer layer surrounding that fun center definitely has some issues that shouldn’t be overlooked entirely though. I can’t tell a player to ignore so many of its failings just because when it’s executing its fundamentals like fighting and web-swinging it does so well, but a more tolerant gamer could probably overlook them and enjoy the game despite them. Had it better segregated the bad ideas from the good ones then you could at least find a clean path through all of the enjoyable content, but a lot of its promise was held back by muddled execution in more than a few areas. Spider-Man: Web of Shadows is still an acceptable Spider-Man game with some interesting ideas but one that feels like it asks for a lot of forgiveness for its failings as you try to experience its better moments.