“Pete, pick up the pace” – Spider-Man 3

**Spider-Man 3** (Treyarch/Activision, Xbox 360, 2007)

Even as five different games based on new films topped the charts in 2007, Spider-Man 3 stands well apart from the others. It was the only one to be an anticipated sequel in its own right, rather than, at most, an appendage to a film which was. With the critical and commercial success of the game Spider-Man 2 to build on, success of Spider-Man 3 the game was if anything even more of a sure thing than the accompanying movie. Its four weeks at #1 in the charts was one week more than the film spent at the top of the box office (both were knocked off by the latest Pirates of the Caribbean).

This unusual territory for a movie game made for a different set of challenges for developers Treyarch, who were now also known by this point for a couple of the most recent Call of Duty games. They needed to build on what was already there while introducing something new and in keeping with the film. Of the two, they managed the first a lot more adeptly, and using webs to move around New York City remains a delight. There was no way for the game to recapture the Spider-Man 2 feeling of going from the streets to the roofs in a couple of well-placed swings for the first time, but it does have a more developed city befitting the new consoles, and includes bits like the subway that didn’t make it into the previous game.

Layered on top of that is a wide variety of different things to do. You can quickly go from photography to fulfilling Mary Jane’s dreams of getting high… then low… then high again, to jumping through the roofs of burning buildings, to tracking mutant footprints, to finding and defusing bombs. There’s also a lot of the default of moving between places and fighting, sometimes with aggravatingly artificial time limits or distances to keep. The combat, with its aerial moves and web-slinging combos, at least makes sure to feel uniquely Spider-Man, though its weightlessness can stray a little too far outside of the rules of physics for its own good.

The structure of an open-world game, with endless little bits of things to do, is great for providing a sense of freedom, but not necessarily so much for telling a story if not carefully managed. And in Spider-Man 3 that’s where the problem comes in, its vignettes adding up to less than the sum of the parts. Being broken up by quick time events and tiny snippets of story in which the film’s actors frequently sound disinterested doesn’t exactly help. Without enough new or so much of a sense of awe, breaking everything down smaller and smaller into little checklists makes the work of superheroics feel all too much like work. Perhaps it’s a fair fit for the films’ progression between 2 and 3 though. It’s still a game in which you get to be Spider-Man, just one in which that feels a bit less magical.