Rating: 4.3/5
Swing through New York as the eponymous webslinger Spiderman in Spiderman 2, a game very loosely based off the film of the same name. Loosely is key here as most of your time will be spent doing random (rather repetitive) missions around the city inbetween small story segments, from saving little girl's baloons to stopping muggings. Whilst the movie storyline is in here somewhere a lot more villains and situations are crammed into this game to add to the run time and give us more things to punch such as Black Cat and Rhino. Swinging is by far the best thing about this game. There is no other experience in gaming quite like swinging through New York as Spiderman and the level of control is rather insane. From zips and lines to jumps and crawls Spiderman is certainly not lacking in moves. In all honesty after a while it gets confusing and the generous upgrade system for both swinging and combat gets ignored in favour of the basic moves you started out with. Combat is perhaps the worst part of Spiderman 2 and has plagued the series all the way through to its more modern incarnatons. The camera that worked so well for swinging fails horribly when fighting and all variety becomes meaningless when button mashing is nearly always the best tactic. Fighting things in the air whilst swinging is by far the worst. The lock on system swings the camera round like a rodeo bull and you will find it hard to hit anything whilst it sits stationary in the air, let alone when it is moving. Overall Spiderman 2 is a very fun little game. It has so many issues you could rattle off but as soon as you start swinging thy just seem to leave you behind, floating next to the hundreth little girl's baloon.
You also need an emulator to run this game. To grab one quickly, please check out our GCN emulators section.