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Rating: - Not Half Bad If You Have The Right Expectations
First of all, I want to say all these bad reviews for this game are fair. Activision produced this game with the obvious intention of making it seem like it was the "real" Web of Shadows that was on other systems. They've done this before. I was burned on the Spider-man 2 game that was supposed to be a ground breaking sandbox style web slinging game according to all the reviews. So I pick it up for the PC and it turns out that is the one system where they did a completly different type of game done for little kids and not done well at all. It was very disappointing. I'm still ticked.

When I first saw this game, with the "Amazing Allies Edition" on the front, major red flags went up for me. The art work still looked like the other systems, but given past experience I wasn't buying it. Doing a little research, I found game footage online and knew what I was getting into. That is the key thing to remember, this game is entirely about your expectations. It is not a top of the line PS2 title by any means, but that doesn't mean it isn't enjoyable.

Web of Shadows (PS2) is a pretty decent retro-style beat 'em up experience. It is along the lines of Maximum Carnage for the old Sega Genesis. The problem is you have to play it for a while to realize that. One of the biggest hurdles is that the hit detection is just plain bad. If you are too close to an enemy you can punch right through them. It's sloppy, but it's consistently sloppy, so after some play time you can at least adjust for it. You also need to be able to adjust to the wide jumps Spider-man makes. He leaps around wildly, which is sometimes helpful and I suppose is realistic, but he can be hard to control.

I was quite impressed with the two suits. They actually did manage to do a pretty decent difference in the fighting style between the two. Normally, you'd think the black suit is just stronger and there's little reason for the red, but I found myself actually favoring the red in many situations. The red style utilizes the immobilizing powers of your webbing and combines it with some lightning fast moves. With some practice you can juggle guys somewhat and pound the living @$#@ out of them. Your black style is more about raw power and ends it's punching combo with a series of symbiote spikes that can launch enemies in the air. It's also used for smashing through walls, floors, etc.

The bosses were pretty easy on normal mode. I personally had fun with most of them. They can be a tad cheap, but at least if you lose you just restart at the beginning of the boss battle with out useless replaying from another checkpoint. I found them and most of the characters in general to be well modeled. There was a good amount of care given to some of the backgrounds, so that was a plus too.

The checkpoint system in the game is pretty good. I didn't like that I couldn't save anywhere, but the auto-saves were spaced really well and I never had any problems with that. It would have been nice to be able to save a couple different progresses, but not a deal breaker.

The voice of Spidey is OK as are most of the others, however there's an overall lack of voice acting and no space considerations (as the game only uses 1.4 Gigs of the DVD) to account for that. You end up reading a lot of text that you'd think they could have just had a programmer or the pizza delivery guy off the street just read it for a couple bucks.

There are also some inexplicable slow down issues where things will sort of stutter a bit like the game is trying to load more data while you fight. This really is unacceptable and can throw you off when it happens. The people on staff in charge of that and the hit detection should both be embarrassed to have their names on this project. Both areas show a lack of care in crafting and testing this game.

All things being said, everything about this software screams "bargain priced" software. There is a good game buried here, but with a lot of glitches and unpolished bits that function as a major a hindrance. It is unconscionable that they were charging $30-$40 for this game brand new. It's worth at most $20 new and maybe $15 used, but if you go in with your eyes wide open and know what you're getting into, you may just enjoy yourself.

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