Spider-man 3 for the Wii
The best part of the game comes about half-way through. Your Spidey has leveled up a couple of times, so you've bought a fun assortment of power ups. This adds variety and strategy to the beat-em-up missions. You can use your webbing to blind opponents, to lift them up and smash them down, and to swing them into other combatants. Spider-man is Spider-man -- these encounters with random thugs on the street should be more amusing than challenging for him, anyway.
The worst part of the game is everything else. If anything, swinging through the streets of New York City is too realistic. Far too often my Spider-man was swinging into traffic and sides of buildings. Intersections were particularly frustrating, because it was impossible to determine where your web would hit. More likely than not, you would make a turn at an intersection. In the end, I gave up swinging for zipping, which doesn't feel much like Spider-man, but was far faster for getting around.
Sadly, you spend a lot of time getting from place to place in Spider-man 3. Getting around can be fun. In Godfather: Blackhand, stealing a decent car and making high-speed turns was a blast (most of the time). In Spider-man 3, getting around is a chore. First, the game seems to delight in making you cross the city for successive missions. Perhaps hardcore fanboys delight in having realistic locations for the Daily Bugle and Doc Connors' lab, but I was bored stiff crossing the city.
If only for the distraction, I ended up stopping to do crime patrols or perform missions between points in the main story line. This was a mistake. The crime patrols are tedious at best and mind-numbingly bad at worst.
There are a scant few missions on the patrols. You're always rescuing a hostage professor, throwing a bomb into the air, or gathering incriminating evidence against a local gang. It's not uncommon to stop a mugging and have that crime victim tell you that a professor has been kidnapped. You rescue the professor only to find that he looks and sounds the same as the first person you saved. It feels astonishingly cheap.
The worst missions require you to save innocents from a dangerous situation. These missions are far too easy. The lack of difficulty is compounded by the fact that you can't just lift the innocent by-stander over the barrier to safety. Instead, you have to carry each person around the block to safety. This requires more web-zipping, which is particularly annoying in Central Park.
I've saved the worst for last. The final boss battle with Venom is stultifying. First you have to defeat Sandman. Like all the boss battles leading up to the end, it's an exercise in repetition. Get the giant lizard to run into for dynamos. Lure the vampire into the light to weaken him -- over and over again. Dodge ghosts for 40 seconds, put on the black suit and attack, just so you can repeat the process a few more times. With Sandman, you dodge attacks, then run to a spot and hit A. Whoopee! I'm hitting A!
After defeating Sandman you face off with Venom. The Venom battle is notable because all the fun of the multiple attacks and power-ups has been removed.. Web attacks don't work against Venom, so you can't lasso him. You can't use mounted attacks against him, either. So it's weak punch, strong punch until he's defeated. Utterly joyless.
The final fight with Venom really cemented in my memory how sloppy the controls were and how frustrating the camera was. The final battle was difficult because Venom attacks from off camera. Plus, Venom doesn't have to deal with the control scheme that doesn't work very well. Light punch-light punch-light punch-strong punch shouldn't be a hard combination to pull off, but it is.
Finally, the voice acting is good -- but there's not nearly enough variety. I wanted to strangle Topher Grace as Venom because he kept repeating himself through the final battle. It reminded me of turning on the radio in 1992 where Smells Like Teen Spirit was on every station, all the time.
