Spider-Man (GameCube)

Ultimate Spiderman plunges you into the comic book world in a story some may not be familiar with at all compared to the ones we've been used to through the various cartoon and movie series. This revolves around the Ultimate Spiderman comic universe so Peter Parker is a teen in high school, he's best friends with Eddie Brock, their parents are scientists who made a cure for cancer - but sadly that cure turns out to be the Venom symbiote which causes Brock to go on a rampage.

The game is quite large. You can freely explore New York. Web slinging is loads of fun. Spiderman's agility is amazing - you can ping pong off walls, do flips and so much more. Controls are amazing & easy to learn.

The negative is that the game is really short. Between each boss battle you're left to roam around in the city and do repetitive things like beating up and chasing thugs, taking people to the hospital, and so on. They're cool at first but the fact that you have to go hunting for them is just annoying, time consuming and deja vu sets in immediately. I never played Spider Man 2, but apparently those are things that originated there, so I guess if you've done that before this game won't seem as fancy.

Character design is great. Bright vivid colors, well detailed characters and a great voice cast. Outside of the game being extremely short, its pretty cool overall but another flaw is that in order to get the black suit Spider Man, you need to pretty much clear all events in the game and find all hidden tokens and things which is EXTREMELY tedious and annoying to do. Seems like more effort than its worth and most players probably give up on it. Racing Johnny Storm around the city is fun and helps you perfect your web slinging especially when a boss battles requires a high speed web slinging chase.

In some points you can play as Venom to battle Wolverine and cause chaos. At the end you can freely switch to Venom but that's pathetic because all you do is play this mini-game where you're trying to destroy things and survive while the military chases you down.. basically you're just playing a survival game and it gets dull FAST.

So in the end its a fun game and pretty cheap now. I'd recommend it over Spider Man 3, Friend or Foe, & Web of Shadows.

(this review was originally placed on Dooyoo - my account there is called randomreviews)