To say that Spider-Man 3 is bound to be one of the hottest movies of the summer would be an understatement. So when checking out preview versions of the upcoming games based on the film, I was concerned with how much of the plot from the games would be potential spoilers for movie. From what we were told by Activision representatives during our demo, the movie plot only makes up about 10% of the total storyline in the games. In order to flesh out the video game experience, they went ahead and added new villains to the mix and came up with original storylines so that gamers would have far more in store than just a scene-by-scene re-enactment of the film.

With Great Power Comes Great Beatdowns

Conceptually, Spider-Man 3 is an improvement and expansion of what we’ve seen from the previous Spider-Man games. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The Spider-Man franchise breathed new life into the stale and underutilized comic book game niche, a segment nearly as maligned as movie-to-game translations. While the Spider-Man games are both things at once, the sheer thrill of web-slinging through a crowded cityscape was beautifully captured, and when combined with decent combat and familiar comic book characters, the recipe for success was assured.

The biggest new feature that fans of the witty webslinger will get to play with is the new black costume. The black suit is a symbiote lifeform that drastically changes Peter Parker’s persona and abilities when it’s worn. In the game, this is translated as a rage meter which powers Spider-Man’s combat abilities. Spidey’s fighting style and special moves take on a more barbaric, violent aspect in this form, which manifests itself in some interesting ways. To go into "Enraged mode," you’ll have to hit a trigger button just as Spider-Man starts glowing red. When in this state, he’ll deal substantially more damage in combat. The drawback here is that if you don’t shift out of the black suit after a while, you can lose control and black out. The different animations for Spider-Man’s attacks make all the difference here. Red-suit Spidey is an agile fighter that bounces around, making his quarry look silly and using his agility to keep away from any incoming attacks. While wearing the black suit, he becomes more of a brawler, attacking with brutal double-fisted strikes and far less concern for his own safety.

The dichotomy between the red suit and black suit Spider-Man fighting styles is shown to great effect in how they make use of their webbing. Red-suit Spider-Man has an attack where he lassos an enemy at range, and then swings him around to dizzying effect. In the symbiote costume, Spider-Man instead envelops enemies, a handful at a time, and then proceeds to swing them up in the air, brutally smashing them down repeatedly. This is the sort of violent behavior that could easily reinforce J. Jonah Jameson’s assertion that the wallcrawler is a menace.

Viewtiful to Behold

One of the other major changes being introduced in this latest batch of Spider-Man games is the use of interactive cut-scenes, similar to those utilized in God of War and the upcoming Heavenly Sword. In one of the missions I played, I was up against the New Goblin on his hoverboard. The camera work during this fight made use of a lot of slow motion techniques that allowed Peter Parker to bend over backward and dodge strikes with ease, similar to the best defensive moves that Neo utilized in The Matrix. The same technique was used when Spider-Man would traverse a corridor with a laser-beam security system. With quick button-presses you could slip past each beam and avoid a nasty death.

Much of our demonstration took place in a subway system where we fought against one of the classic Spider-Man villains, Sandman. Here we got to make full use of the available combat options, and got a good feel for what the boss battles would be like. When an enemy is ready to clobber Spidey a yellow icon appears above them. This is your cue to hit a button to dodge the attack. After dodging, you can immediately strike back with a counter. Keeping an opponent in the air for extended periods of time during a chain combo is possible on most foes and you can even juggle some bosses, so I tried to do my best impression of Dante from Devil May Cry.

While Sandman can’t be juggled, he did show us a few other combat situations that gave us an idea of what to look forward to. He would erect a tombstone-like shield telling us that he was currently immune to attack, and follow this up with an unblockable attack. A red icon over his head gave advance warning of a projectile attack. By keeping aware of the surroundings and making frequent use of the dodge button, there wasn’t much that a capable player would get hurt by.

If you got enough licks in on Sandman without allowing him to get away, the game launched one of several interactive cut-scenes. Some of these scenes just showed off impressive back-and-forth moves between the two combatants, while others allowed Spider-Man to pull off some impressive web swinging, train hi-jinks, and other acrobatics during what was otherwise a pretty ordinary fight. The liberal way in which these are sprinkled throughout the game, especially in boss fights, came across as a welcome direction for the series to take. God of War helped establish these cinematics as a capable tool for injecting a dose of visual storytelling into what would otherwise be repetitive combat sequences, and it works pretty well here.

 Spider-Man 3 captures what the first games did so well and looks to be improving upon the formula. With boosted web swings, you can literally fly around New York City, happily swinging around buildings like a child at the playground. The Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions of the game that we saw were nearly identical, using the same in-game assets and both running at identical 720p resolutions. With a wide array of different comic book villains to beat up on, and a spacious city to patrol, it looks like there will be plenty to do in Activision’s next big game. Stay tuned for our review as we get closer to Spider-Man 3’s release date this May.