Wrapped in its own tangled web
Open world games have to walk a cobweb of fine lines to succeed. They need to have lots of things for the player to do. However, if you have too many things to do then you can't bug test the game enough. Combat needs to be simple, because the player is going to be doing a lot of it. If you make it too simple it gets monotonous and boring. Too complicated and it gets hard to keep track of what you need to do. Spider-Man: Web of Shadows tries to walk this cobweb, but falls and get tangled in itself.
The plot follows an attempt by the Venom Symbiont to conquer the world (starting with New York), with his own spawn (in a nod to the Spider-Man: Reign mini-series). As part of this Spider-Man gets infected by the symbiont, giving him back his black suit, though Spidey apparently has some control of it and doesn't seem too concerned by his re-infection. The first part of the game has Spidey attempting to take down some of the members of his Rogues Gallery while trying to earn the trust of former allies. The second part occurs after the Infection has spread throughout the city, and SHIELD cuts the bridges and tunnels to and from Manhattan.
Now, comic book video games are unfortunately known for having plots that aren't as good as the comics themselves, and Spider-Man: Web of Shadows is no exception. While the game's writers included other members of the Marvel Knights in the game, they basically picked the wrong people. Without going into spoilers, probably the two super-science heroes in the Marvel U who would be most helpful in this story - Tony Stark & Mr. Fantastic - are absent. Also, considering Spidey's prior poor history with the symbiont, he's remarkably blase about having the costume back on him again.
Speaking of the costume, Spider-Man's two costumes form the parts of the game's "morality system". Like most games with a Morality system, the system works on one axis. One half is the "Red" half, and represents the Red Costume, and is the good, just and noble half of the axis. The other half is the Black Half, represents the Black costume, and reflects the anti-heroic, tough, nasty half of the axis. Similarly, you can play using either the Black Costume or the Red Costume, and can switch between the two on the fly. Each one has a different level up talent tree, and has different powers - Red outfit regenerates health faster, Black has increased strength. The problem is this. The game makes it really easy to build up lots of black alignment points on accident.
For example, if a civilian is injured or knocked unconscious by an enemy, you can get Black points. Normally, if a civilian is walking around and gets injured, they're highlighted and you can just walk over, pick him or her up, and then take him or her to the hospital or to an EMT, and you get some Red Alignment points. The problem comes when fighting some enemies near cars. If in the course of the attack, you damage the car, and it blows up, you have to quickly target the person while he or she is in mid air, use webbing to rescue them, and then deposit them on the ground. The problem is that the targeting system is so poorly designed as to make it impossible to quickly target anything. So, the civilian goes splat, and you get Black Points. Additionally, there are powered armor enemies introduced in the first half that can beaten in two ways - you can either try to slug it out with them and fail often before you finally succeed (just because of how much damage they can dish out) in a long drawn out battle, or you can switch to the black suit and throw cars at them. This causes you to get Black Points. However, with the longer, more drawn out battles, it becomes more likely that civilians will be injured, either pedestrians, or civilians in cars, which in turn leads to more Black points.
In the second part of the game, though, we start running into some serious bugs. With this portion of the game, the missions become considerably more monotonous, and bugs come up more often. For example, one of the main missions in this half of the game involves escorting APCs to rescue civilians which are holed up in buildings, protected by cops. However, the APCs can take damage and can be destroyed - additionally, the APCs won't advance to the next building until all the civilians are in the APC or have been defeated by the many symbiotes. However, some of the civilians - usually the police officers who are covering the first civilians - won't go to the APC. They'll just stay there guarding the exit from the building. So, the APC will stay there until the guards are taken out, at which point it will finally move on. Fortunately, the game doesn't give Black points for this, but it's still an annoyance. Additionally, on some of these APC runs, I've found that the game wouldn't recognize that the mission had ended, so I was stuck following the APC until I deliberately killed my character. On another mission, the game wouldn't proceed out of an in-engine cutscene about halfway through, so I had to start the mission over, which wasn't fun.
In the game's favor, with the exception of the power-armor enemies, you can go through the game without using the black suit. Additionally, swinging through the city is incredibly fun in this game. It's probably the best web slinging since Spider Man 2. If there was just a better game built around it, I'd enjoy this game more. I hope that the next Spider-Man game finally gives us the experience I'm looking for in a Spider-Man game.
