“Cheap movie cash in” has been a phrase used time and again to describe a game whose release happened to conveniently coincide with the release of a major blockbuster movie of the same name. Catwoman, Fantastic Four, and Batman Begins all come to mind as far as super hero flicks go. Thankfully, much like its predecessors on the Xbox, and its predecessors on the silver screen, Spider-Man 3 on the Xbox 360 delivers in a big, big way.

The original Spider-Man was an excellent game that followed the movie, but was still loaded with bonus content and extra villains. While it confined Spidey to the rails of a storyline, it was still fun and accessible, and left most fans happy. Spider-Man 2, on the other hand, let you loose in a fully constructed, virtual New York city, free to web swing, fight crime, and follow the story as you saw fit, with a plethora of extra missions and races. Critics and consumers agreed, this was a fantastic game. Spider-Man 3 has taken the formula for success in Spider-Man 2 and expanded on it, making this the best, most complete Spider-Man game to date.

Gameplay:

Playing Spiderman 3 the swing physics are still fantastic in the sense that you have to actually hit a building with your web if you want to swing. Swinging around NYC in Spider-Man 3 is a mix of the swing physics in Spider-Man 2 and the swing physics in Ultimate Spider-Man. It’s a nice blend that lends itself to be both easy to pick up, but still complex enough to master without the complication level that SM2 has. Another nice touch is that Treyarch kept the acrobatic aspect of Ultimate Spider-Man, meaning that our friendly neighborhood Spider-Man will twist and flip from web-line to web-line, showing off the agility we’ve come to expect from our favorite wall crawler. This doesn’t mean you’re “confined” to just the skies of New York, however, as you can now visit the New York subway (complete with hazardous, but surf-able, subway cars) and even spend a few missions in the sewers tracking down the Lizard. All of New York is at your webbed finger tips for travel in SM3, and it beats the heck out of a tour bus any day.

Finally, when it comes to combat, Spider-Man 3 is a mixed bag, but it has much more good than bad. The new “Spider-Reflexes” system (read: bullet time) allows you to do whatever a spider can in a fight, handling multiple enemies with ease. You can dodge bullets and punches, and use special counterattacks to fight enemies that can actually match speed with you. Successfully fighting with style will allow you to build up a special move meter, which when full allows Spidey to unleash a massive attack in one of four flavors – speed, power, aerial, or web. Your combat move list is set up in tiers, as is your swing speed and health/reflexes, meaning that each finishing move leads to a more powerful version, and each combo leads to another combo. Fighting more enemies, winning more battles, and completing more missions upgrades each various aspect of your arsenal of super powers, making you tougher and tougher. This can get tricky at some points, as early on you can find yourself swarmed by more enemies than you think you can handle, but if you persevere and keep practicing, you’ll soon be kicking butt harder than The Hulk during a temper tantrum (give or take the scale of city-wide damage that would entail).

The one thing that could use some tweaking would be one again bringing back a solid “lock on” camera to stay focused on a single enemy, and making the damage done and taken by and from Spidey a little more accurate. It may be hard, but it seems doable.

Graphics:

Visually speaking, Spider-Man 3 is impressive not for sheer beauty in a game such as Gears of War, but impressive for the beauty it has while so much is in motion. Much like SM2, SM3 again has an amazing draw distance, letting you see from the roofs of one set of buildings, across Central Park, to the roofs of another set of buildings. Traffic goes on underneath you, with pedestrians crossing sidewalks and cars going about their business as if they weren’t in any danger at all from the threats you face as a costumed super hero. While there are some impressive textures here and there, SM3’s main attraction for its graphics still comes from the lack of slowdown when so much is going on at any given time. To its credit, however, SM3 still has gorgeous character models such as Spider-Man himself, New Goblin, Scorpion, Rhino, the Lizard, Kraven, Venom, and Sandman.

Unfortunately, J.J., Peter, MJ and Eddie Brock aren’t quite up to the same level, suffering from odd shadow details in certain lighting, but this is only a minor detail considering how much more time is spent in costume, and the Spider-Man costume in particular is especially nice to look at – be it black or red and blue (and Spidey’s eyes are as shiny and reflective as ever).

Sound:

The sound in Spider-Man 3 is fantastic, if for no other reason than the fact that every major character is voiced by their movie counterpart to give SM3 that authentic feeling. The voice acting, then, is not surprisingly terrific, and the dialogue for Venom is thankfully better than the garbage he spouted in the motion picture (Referring to yourself in the plural third person? Check!). The background music is a nice touch, nothing sweeping, meaningful or awe inspiring like Elfman’s movie score or Halo’s or Final Fantasy’s track, but it still does a good job of providing a backdrop for your web-swinging and picking up the pace in more tense moments. The sound effects themselves are nice, with satisfying cracks and thumps for the punches and kicks, and that oh-so-familiar “thwip!” when you fire a web-line to the buildings above.

Longevity:

You’ll get your money’s worth with Spider-Man 3. With multiple branching storylines with your favorite villains, races, stunt races, skydiving, Mary Jane missions, combat tours, token collecting, bomb defusing, combat arenas, and regular, good-old-fashioned city wide crime fighting, there is no shortage of things to do in SM3. Add in the inclusion of an unlockable Black Suit Spider-Man mode that lets you play through the game as the super powered symbiote Spidey, and the possibility of downloadable, playable characters and content, and you’re looking at an excellent long term investment for your Xbox 360, even without any kind of multiplayer experience.

Overall:

Although all of the game’s features are excellent qualities for a truly great game, the area where Spider-Man 3 succeeds most is in just being downright fun to play. Excelsior, true believers! My spider-sense is tingling for a 9 out of 10.