Spider-Man has seen many videogame incarnations throughout his lifetime. Unfortunately few of these games have let you actually feel like you in the web-slinger’s tights. Spider-Man for the Dreamcast was the best one game I can think of, and even it was fundamentally flawed. Ultimate Spider-Man falls to the same vices that held its predecessors from greatness, but it almost makes up for its shortcomings with sheer style.

Ultimate Spider-Man is a Marvel comic that tells the Spider-Man story from the beginning. Everything is slightly changed, and updated to make Spidey fit into Marvel’s new Ultimate Universe. Many things are different, but most of the players are the same. Ultimate Spider-Man the game, as you probably already guessed, is based upon the Ultimate Spider-Man comics.

I want to start off with the reasons why I liked this game. First off, I’m a huge Spider-Man fan. So the slick cell-shaded graphics really made it feel like I was playing a comic book. And to really drive its comic book origins home, some impressive comic book style cut-scenes were added to bring things together. The cut-scenes look straight out of a comic, and then shift straight into the action. The presentation was top-notch, and gave things a polished feel from the beginning.

Also this time around you get to play as one of Spider-Man’s greatest enemies, Venom. When playing as Venom you can really feel his strength coming through. He has his draw-backs, but those draw-backs help balance his immense power. I was surprised to find out that Venom doesn’t web-swing his way around New York City in the Ultimate comics as he does in the traditional comics, but at least it makes playing as him feel a little different than playing as Spidey.

Venom isn’t the only familiar face you’re going to run into while you are on your adventure. You will run into many familiar faces. And these cameos are sure to bring a smile to any real Marvel fan.

Unfortunately the game just doesn’t play as well as it should. The controls felt awkward, and the camera didn’t help much. It wasn’t uncommon for me to send Spidey jumping in the complete wrong direction at exactly the wrong moment. Also I never felt comfortable with the hand to hand combat, so I spent a lot of time jumping around shooting my web-balls to slow my enemies down.

Also many of the enemies required some special action to take them completely out of the fight. For example, low level street thugs would keep getting up no matter how bad you pummeled them until you webbed them to the ground. This felt unnecessary and at times became frustrating.

There were some great boss battles in the game. They combined puzzles and action to get the job done. This was a nice touch, it got a little frustrating trying over and over to get the steps just right to knock Rhino into the wet cement, but it did add a level of strategy to the game that would have been otherwise lacking. Unfortunately there was far too many chase scenes in the game. The first one or two were pretty interesting, but after that it just felt like the game designers ran out of ideas.

As I mentioned previously, you get to play as Spider-Man and Venom. Spider-Man plays pretty much how you would expect him to. You web-swing your way around New York City and punch a few bad guys. Venom on the other hand plays a little different than I was expecting. He plays very much like the Incredible Hulk from the Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction. You can easily leap a building in a single bound and you have some pretty decent physical attacks. But why punch when you can use your tentacles? Or when you can feed on your enemies? Also Venom had to constantly feed on his foes or he would die, this added a level of urgency to his missions. My biggest let down about having two characters was that you would play a couple of levels as Spider-Man then get a quick level with Venom. I would have liked to have had the option to switch between characters at any time.

The game had a decent story that centered on Venom, and you got to see the story from both Peter Parker (Spider-Man) and Eddie Brock’s (Venom) perspectives. But again things felt a little rushed. There was this whole Dr. Doom side story that seemed to have been cut from the game (or just not enough time to add it). It felt awkward, and once I unlocked some storyboards with Dr. Doom in them I knew that we didn’t get the whole story, which was over way too soon.

Speaking of storyboards, there were a good amount of unlockables, from extra costumes to character bios. The main ways you unlocked things were from either finding things lying around New York or by progressing through the story. Mainly you got your standard unlockables, but it still added a couple of hours of gameplay.

You pretty much get the same experience no matter which console you’re playing on. The character models are pretty good, but the city doesn’t always look as polished as you might expect. On the other hand, you may want to skip this one for the PC. It felt like a quick and direct port of the console versions.

I really wanted to like Ultimate Spider-Man more than I did. Most of the time the controls and the camera felt clumsy, and the story felt half told. But it definitely earned a couple of extra points for presentation. I also enjoy a game that lets you roam the city between missions, and you definitely get to here. Unfortunately the hero events were not anything that would keep your attention, and once you saved enough people to move on to the next chapter, you probably would go straight there. I would suggest that any Spider-Man or comic book fan give this one a shot, but there may not be enough substance to have you coming back for seconds.