Bruce Campbell is back as the narrator, and does a good job, like usual, getting you acquainted with the game's controls. Once he sets you free, you have the whole island of Manhattan as your playground. There are immediately different paths you can choose from. You can try your hand at the skydiving mini-games. You can swing around town with MJ. You can work on the main story line, or you can just seek out and squash criminals from local area gangs.

While this open-ended gameplay seems appealing, the execution of each of these mission types is sorely lacking. Skydiving has simple controls, almost too limiting. They want to you to fly through rings and land on pad somewhere in the city, but the task is terribly frustrating and not worth your time. The MJ missions, and just point to point web slinging with the added bonus of trying to pick up floating hearts around the city. You'll get plenty of web slinging in without these cheesy missions (I like it lower, swing lower!). And, while there are plenty of more action oriented missions along with fighting against the gangs, the combat system leaves a lot to be desired.

Much of the fighting is limited to standard X, X, X and X, Y, Y combos, but there's a new ability thrown in that let's you slow down time. With it you can automatically dodge attacks and initiate counter attacks. It must've seemed like a great idea, because you pretty much have to use it in all the tougher fights. It's kind of hard to describe what makes the fighting so disinteresting because on paper this is how you might describe God of War's combat system. But in execution, the two couldn't be farther apart.

The combat area bleeds over into the visuals as well. I know Spider-Man is supposed to be fast, but each combat move he makes not only initiates a speedy animation, it also shakes the screen from side to side (further emphasizing the speed??). In a multi-hit combo, the repeating motion is extremely annoying, and almost made me want to put the game away as early as the tutorial.

Spider-Man himself is pretty good looking, with a nice character model and authentic suit. Most everything else in the game looks pretty bad. Activision is still well behind the curve as far as 360 and PS3 graphics go. The city looks pretty good, with a nice draw distance, and I do like that if you can see something in the distance, you can actually get there. There's some pretty bad pop in on all systems, and the framerate is shaky. All other character models are pretty comical. The main cast does bear a striking resemblance to their human selves in still shots, but only in the face and not at all in motion. The city is not very alive, if you know what I mean. It looks like New York, but it doesn't feel anything like it.

All of these points get considerably worse on the Wii. The draw distance is shorter, and even what you can see will likely be void of any texture. Pop in is worse and all the models and of course decidedly last gen. The uninspired fighting is replicated by waggling the Wii remote instead of hitting a button, which is as much of a disaster here as it is in any other game. Also the promise of a more casual friendly control scheme continues to elude, as the controls for swinging through town are far more complicated with the Wii remote than just holding a trigger and steering with an analog stick. The controls are once again unresponsive at times and add absolutely nothing to the immersion of the game. The Wii version is also missing content that exists on the PS3 and 360.

If this was an enjoyable game, it really could last a long time. There are tons of missions, sub-missions, things to unlock, and hidden icons to find. Unfortunately there very little reason to make this trip to Manhattan, and it's a waste of Spidey's iconic image.