Ultimate Spider-Man Preview

When it comes to actual story missions to drive the plot, they are initiated by the various beacons you can find throughout the city. This causes things to become more streamlined and linear, but that’s just the way it was done. Each mission that you undertake will carry a number of unique tasks. This can include saving citizens (no, really?), stopping criminals (you’re kidding?!) as well as various scripted sequences and boss fights! In an Activision demo, they showed off a mission where you take Spidey to save a bunch of helpless people from a burning building, and then afterwards, fighting Rhino! But rescuing certain citizens may actually take a little work. It may take a matter of careful button mashing, but it could be considered a sort of “mini-game so to speak. If done right, Spidey will lift a heavy object like a car to rescue the citizen in trouble!

Now this Spider-Man game couldn’t be called a Spider-Man game without some street brawling could it? Heck no, and this game is chock full of it! Inbetween all the saving of helpless people, you will be able to enjoy physically torturing the likes of various gang members and thugs! Then just like in the other Spidey games, a wide array of fighting tactics is available to you! US actually rewards you for being creative with your battle tactics this time around, so encourage yourself to change up how you torture those nasty villains! Doing so will earn you a very nice damage bonus, which may seem to be just an extra at first, but later on down the road you’ll realize just how important those are! This time around Activision is doing their best to ensure there’s a balance of what Spidey can do in battle. Whether that’s with punching and kicking, web tactics or aerial maneuvers, it’s all in there! Also, instead of having to earn or purchase your newest moves, you actually learn of them in a gradual format as the adventure progresses.

Boss fights shouldn’t be entirely uninteresting this time around either. Many new elements will be required to get through these, not just your traditional “beat the living crap out of them with your fists” to win. Take your first major boss, Rhino, for example. This isn’t the ordinary Rhino we’re used to seeing. Oh no, this time around he has even MORE excessive layers of armor to cover up that insanely violent temper of his, so punching it isn’t exactly too smart. In order to take this big fella down, you have to operate a nearby wrecking ball and have it smash into his back! OUCH! This will knock a panel on Rhino’s back loose, exposing his tender weak spot. This is your cue to jump right on him and start POUNDING until you can’t pound anymore! After a while of making him angry (hey, getting hit with a bloody wrecking ball would do that to ANYONE), he eventually starts charging at you! Avoiding this attack will cause him to smash into the sides of nearby buildings, stunning him. Oh yes, yet another opportunity to jump him and take him down!

In other such boss fight, you find yourself as Venom taking on the dreaded Electro! In order to succeed in this fight, the environment is once again crucial to your tactics! Ironically enough, the two of you are actually fighting for the “respectable right” to go after and kill Spider-Man, who happens to actually be unconscious nearby! So you want to kill Spidey and so does Electro. Well, in order to get what you want, you have to remove who is in your way! At the beginning you can use Venom’s tentacle attack to damage him, but Electro eventually grows tired of that. This causes him to really boost up his “power” by entering a substantially hardcore “electrical phase” that renders him virtually invulnerable. But what on the streets of Manhattan can make electricity go “buzz, buzz?” That’s right, WATER! You will have to bust open nearby fire hydrants to hurt him any further, but of course the buzzard utilizes nearby electric street signs to regain his health, how cheap! Eventually he begins teleporting all over the place, and you just have to use the same routines to get him to just…..go away.

So to sum this all up, Ultimate Spider-Man is shaping up to be indeed the ultimate Spider-Man game to date! Of course the game isn’t without its choppy frame rate and graphical glitches so far, but a couple more months of tweaking should be more than enough time to fix those right up. Another beauty of this game is Activision is virtually promising to make it identical across all platforms! So that means no one will get something the other won’t, and the bonus features it has to offer will do something to please all comic book enthusiasts