Rapid Fire: Ultimate Spider-Man (NDS)

*Dear reader, unfortunately Giantbomb.com still refuses to allow me to submit reviews, now the site says "Please select an object [to review]" although I chose the game to review for a thousand times. So I'm just going to post the review here. Apologies for the inconvenience.

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Ultimate Spider-Man is one of those games I really wanted to come back to. The first time I played it came from summer school close to a decade ago. I was on the bus when a friend pulled out an NDS to pass the time. When I asked to play on the NDS for he agreed, and out of the many games he had I picked Ultimate Spider-Man (USM). Long story short I had a blast playing it on the bus, but that was as close as I got to the game. Once summer school ended I didn't get my hands on USM because I was nowhere near a Gamestop and never heard about Amazon. The game just faded into memory... until recently. I traded in an XBox 360 game for a used copy of Ultimate Spider-Man. Finally, I had a chance to finish what I started, and play a game I adored as a 13ish-year-old. After playing through it twice, I find it very satisfying and surprising that USM, despite being close to 8 years old, still delivers a fun and stylish experience that puts many games today [of even console games if I may say so myself] to shame.

In this game you play as both Spiderman and uber-villain Venom. The former is trying to figure out the whereabouts of his family while kicking villain butt at the same time. You will run into villains such as the Rhino, Electro, and even the mercenary Silver Sable. Venom, who is possessed by Peter's friend Eddie Brock, is trying to go after Spider-Man every chance he gets because of his own motives. Eddie is also pursued by a giant corporation for his Venom suit. You first play as Spider-man that introduces to you the basics for playing your friendly Web-slinger. You can certainly propel yourself forward via web-swinging, stick to walls/surfaces and have your share of punches and kicks to do away with thugs, robbers and super-baddies. You also have a useful dodge move [aka Spider Sense] to avoid 99% of enemy attacks. But what makes this game as Spider-Man that much more interesting is that civilians get caught in the middle of the struggle, which means that as Spidey you also have to save them from things like falling off a ledge or carry them away from a fire. Failure to save these hapless people and it is game over. So instead of just moving from screen left to screen right, you have to zip all over the place to find anyone of need and helping them. It is gives you a challenge by making the Spider-man portions races against time, forcing you to get everyone to safety and not go about the deeds leisurely.

Venom presents a somewhat different [yet fun] challenge altogether. Unlike his heroic counterpart Venom is not going to save his breath rescuing people, but rather has to save himself; the Symbiote suit gradually decreases his health over time. To counteract this issue Venom has to go up to any human being and consume them. You press the R button when up close to a human enemy or civilian and Venom starts to chomp down on the victim, increasing a portion of his health until the enemy reaches 0 health. But it's not just the need to chow down on people that makes Venom different from Spider-Man. Though both share attack combos and can use their webbings to reach some places, Venom does not have a speed boost [no web swing per se] and does not have the dodge move. What he does have is his tendrils, which can be used both with the Y button and the touch screen. You can pick things up with your tendril and do as you please with it. You can move some objects onto pressure switches or abuse your opponent with them [smack them into a wall, eat them]. One fun thing you can do as Venom is catch a Helicopter missile and redirect the thing back to where it was fired from.

The two characters are different in kind, but what puts Ultimate Spider-Man over the edge are two things: Excellent control and stage design. Aside from some rare slips where Spidey's dodge doesn't propel him forward, the controls are tight and excellent. You really feel like you can pull off just about anything, and that dying from running into a laser fence has more to do with your incompetence than the game's inability to provide strong controls. Once you get used to the game both characters will move at a lightning pace without a hitch, and do what you command them to do. What makes the game even better is that the game really allows you to take advantage of the skills provided. As Venom for instance there is a platforming stage where you need to carry around a giant battering ram wherever you go via tendril and ram down a couple of doors. You have to carry the darn thing even while climbing up and guiding yourself through some laser defenses; it does take a bit of hand-eye-coordination to pull off the feat. As for Spider-Man, there is one instance where you need to catch up to a bad guy, but the bad guy then fires upon a building, forcing you to save those people before the villain gets away. The best stages are the ones that allow you to play both Spidey and Venom; both take very different paths on the same stage and travel differently. Venom smashes his way through most steel doors while Peter Parker has to travel through air vents to reach his location, or gather keys to get to other places.

You are going to kick major butt in this game and look good doing so. It's not just because of the slick controls, but it is also due to a very lavish presentation. I kid you not, you would mistake what you see in the game for a comic strip. The backgrounds are really colorful, the panels that give the game's plot are stylishly moving in and out of the screen, and the stills in stage-select are exquisitely drawn as if it actually came out of a Marvel comic book. One element I think is cool is that when your character gets shocked or burned there is an onomatopoeia to indicate that you have been burned or zapped [something like 'Tsss' to signal that you just brushed yourself against a flame]. The only issue I can possibly find is that enemy grunts are a bit generic, but that is not a great problem per se. The main minimalist soundtrack for this game could be a bit overused, but it sounds dramatic and bold, something that symbolizes the super-hero comic book genre. There is a lot of voice-acting in the plot sections, and they are all competently done; not too many hams or robots heard in the voice department. Props for the voice actor for Venom, because the voice really sells this nemesis as a badass villain, which he is. The grunt he makes when he takes a violent swing at something is animalistic and ferocious, something to definitely be feared.

The game is not perfect by any means. I really wished the boss battles were a little more creative, because most bosses have you mashing buttons and just dodge a move here and there. The game is also very short; I finished the game in about two sittings even when restarting some parts. The multiplayer, for all intents and purposes, is not worth discussing. Key issues aside, Ultimate Spider-Man for the NDS is a game you have to have if you are a fan of action games [assuming you have an NDS or 3DS] or the Spider-Man franchise. This game has some very creative moments, so much so you would be fooled to think that the game is released after 2010. To think that this game is still so fun, even after close to a decade, is a testament to this game's quality and attention to detail. Cheers, Marvel and Activision. You two have outdone yourselves here.

I give Ultimate Spider-Man for the NDS 4 Stars out of 5.