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.