Spider-Man: Web of Shadows

Kombo’s Review Policy: Our reviews are written for you. Our goal is to write honest, to-the-point reviews that don’t waste your time. This is why we’ve split our reviews into four sections: What the Game’s About, What’s Hot, What’s Not and Final Word, so that you can easily find the information you want from our reviews.

What the Game’s About
Spider-Man: Web of Shadows is a sandbox type game set in the heart of New York City. The same space parasite Symbiote that created Venom is infecting the entire city, including Spider-Man. Using the power of the black suit and the classic red and blue suit, you have to stop the invasion and with the help of a bunch of other Marvel faces.

What’s Hot
Having free control of New York City is very liberating. Seeing some of the major sights and crime litter the city is like actually being there. Joking aside, it provides a huge playground for the web slinger to travel around the city without a care in the world. That is if super villains weren’t trying to destroy everything. You have command over the city and most importantly, look good doing it. The team in charge of the animations needs to take a bow for how graceful they mad Spider-Man look and feel. The poses in mid air are artfully done, something you’d see in a ballet rather than a video game.

Taking missions from other heroes is fun a two ways. The first way is because Spidey interacts with these people in different manners so it is funny to see the personalities collide. The second way is because some of them send you on some really cool missions. Moon Knight sends you on a particularly awesome missions involving planted information that was a diversion of a larger heist. You then have to sling webs as fast as you can to the court house and save it from high-tech thugs. There are other missions like that which will keep you on your toes and have you beg for more. After a few missions, you can either choose a good or bad outcome, which leads to the struggle of fighting with the black suit.

Web of Shadows gets its name because in the opening sequences of the game, you are re-infected with the Symbiote that gives you the black suit abilities. That suit plays like a powerful sledge hammer that can knock foes silly. To contrast that play style, the classic suit is more agile and you can pack more punches in a shorter amount of time. Switching on the fly between the suits gives you a huge array of moves to try and the upgrade system adds more abilities on top of that.

What’s Not
There more than a few shadowy parts on Web of Shadows. The first issue I’ll tackle is the camera. Because you can swing, fling, climb walls and run on the ground, the camera constantly changes to accommodate a best viewing angle. Often, the result is anything but optimal. The camera will “stick” in a position and any amount of self-adjusting you do with the right camera will not make it fix itself. You have to stand and wait until the camera resets to have a normal view. It is annoying when you are not in battles and it is infuriating when you are trying to fight even the weakest of villains. The combat system itself is uninspiring. While the two suits provide different styles, the button combinations are the same. You’ll be mashing the punch button endlessly even after you upgrade to cooler attacks. The weak fighting component is a widely missed opportunity.

During some of the missions, you’ll notice that a few of them still have some bugs that needed to be fixed. When I was doing tutorial training with Luke Cage, for example, I had to use a swinging kick to knock over a group of villains. Not only does it not start you in the wrong spot to hit the guys, even if you do hit them but go too far from the spot you knocked them over in, you’ll “fail” the mission and need to restart. I could feel my blood pressure rise after about 20 attempts of succeeding but ultimately failing. Another spot was when I was trying to deactivate The Kingpin’s tower defense.

The story of Web of Shadows is entirely new to the Spider-Man universe. If you play the game with the character voices turned off, it’ll read much better than it sounds. The problem is that the voice actors that do the heroes and villains ham it up in the most ridiculous ways possible. Spider-Man (Peter Parker)’s voice is so grating and whiney that interacting with other heroes is an almost painful experience. The others you interact with don’t fair any better. I think the story was decently done, just not well executed.

Final Word
Despite some of the more flagrant errors, I’m still slinging webs around New York City enjoying the thrill of being what boils down to an urban Tarzan. There are moments that make Web of Shadows feel like a comic book and there is a good forward movement all the way until the final act of the story. When the missions work, they are very interesting and even outstanding. When they don’t work, you want to punch a wall. The story with the good and evil paths are interesting to play the entire game but you’ll have a hard time forgiving some of the extremely obvious flaws.