For those who played either of the last couple of Spider-Man games, Ultimate Spider-Man features a couple of key gameplay differences. For one, the combat is less clunky. Spider-Man attacks with simple, effective combos that don't require much more than a few bits of button mashing. You can still combine Spidey's webs into the fray, but there's less you can actually do with that. Venom's attacks are similarly simple, though they rely more on whips of his tendrils and powerful killing moves, unlike Spider-Man's quick and nimble maneuvers. Venom also has to deal with an ever-draining life force, requiring him to occasionally feed on enemies and helpless passersby. It's pretty brutal, since you can basically feed on and kill any man, woman, or child that happens into the brute's path. It also makes the Venom sequences a lot easier, since most areas give him plenty of people with which to quench his thirst. Spider-Man's portions often lack health power-ups, which makes them a touch more challenging--and sometimes, frustrating.
The methodology for getting around New York has also been simplified, though with mixed results. Spider-Man's webswinging mechanic requires a lot less effort on your part this time around. You can't shoot multiple webs anymore; you're effectively limited to single, standard-swinging webs, as well as a web-boost shot that lets you leap great distances. Venom throws all that webswinging by the wayside, opting to just leap hundreds of feet in the air and occasionally use his tendrils to cover distances quickly, not unlike in the web boost. While all of that's well and good, jumping and swinging around the city just isn't as interesting as it's been in the past. The simplification of the webswing mechanic also seems to have slowed the overall feel of your swinging, and it's just not all that thrilling to swing around the city--which is pretty much the opposite of the case in the past games. Admittedly, it is neat to jump around with Venom, since he does handle differently from Spidey, but there aren't many Venom sequences in the game. Incidentally, regardless of which character you're playing as, you're going to want to use a good dual analog gamepad for this game. Keyboard and mouse controls are too unwieldy for both combat and webswinging.
The city of New York has also been scaled down here, but that's not a detriment. Though there's less area to cover, the areas themselves look a lot better. That's thanks mostly to the game's entirely new art style, which uses a unique cel-shading concept to give every character and set piece a brightly colorful and sharp look. The character models are so sharp looking, in fact, that they look like they've leapt off a comic page--though perhaps that's because the game goes to painstaking lengths to try to emulate the comic book's style, creating multiple cutscenes that frame their shots within the boxes of a comic. All this gives Ultimate Spider-Man a wonderful sense of style that the previous two games lacked. Admittedly, there are still a few problems. The camera can get very uppity, especially in tight spaces, and the PC version suffers from a bad frame rate in a lot of spots, especially when you're webswinging. Turning down effects makes no difference, nor does the resolution. Parts of this game simply don't run well.
Ultimate Spider-Man features no celebrity voice acting, but that's not a problem. The actors who portray the characters do excellent work lending realistic and sometimes appropriately goofy spins to these modernized versions of classic characters. The dialogue is mostly quite sharp, getting Spidey's snarky tone down pat and dealing out a fair number of amusing one-liners. The only failing of the dialogue is that in-game, Spider-Man's wisecracks often repeat ad nauseam and get old quickly. The rest of the audio features plenty of thwacks, whaps, and biffs, as well as a fairly subdued soundtrack that seems to come in and out at random intervals--not because it's broken or anything, but it just isn't quite as well edited as it could have been.
Ultimate Spider-Man is a better game than Treyarch's previous efforts, but it still relies too heavily on the novelty of swinging around the city and beating up the same bad guys over and over again--a novelty made less so by the simplification of both mechanics. It's especially distressing that the developer was clearly able to put together a solid story and some great boss fights, yet was unable to cull together enough of them to make a great game. Serious webheads will get something positive out of Ultimate Spider-Man, but they should do so with one of the console versions, as the PC version of the game isn't the ideal one.
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