The recent history of Spider-Man games has been the exact opposite of fan expectations. Spider-Man 3 was a hopeless buggy mess rushed to market to release at the same time as the equally bad movie, and Friend or Foe was a mindless brawler that lacked the all-important element of fun. Activision has turned to Shaba Studios to try and change the webhead’s fortunes. Spidey’s latest outing, Web of Shadows, is a step in the right direction, but it looks like there’s a lot more work to be done before Marvel’s poster boy is back in our good books.

With no association to any existing Spider-Man project, Shaba Studios had free reign over the story. Rather than actually doing something cool, they’ve instead thrust another lame symbiote story upon us. The game begins with a scene that’s supposed to be emotional, but is either going to make you vomit or roll around on the floor laughing. Anyway, Venom and his symbiote buddies are out messing things up, and Spider-Man gets hit with some of his goop causing the “black suit” to come back. The opening has you watching Spidey get all emo, beating up Venom’s goons after Mary Jane leaves him for refusing to get rid of the black suit. Turns out the game actually starts a couple of days before that, and has you running all over New York doing menial tasks for other superheroes like Luke Cage and Moon Knight (because evidently if you’re not the star, you don’t have to do jack), before stumbling onto the symbiote invasion. Symbiotes are evil, must be stopped, Brock hates Parker, Uncle Ben is still dead – you know the deal.

Like most other recent Spider-Man games, Web of Shadows is set in Manhattan, but it is looking a whole lot better than it did in Spider-Man 3. The city has been given a fresh coat of paint with new higher resolution textures and drastic improvements to the drawn distance. Character models have a greater level of detail, and Spider-Man has some spectacularly smooth animation, particularly while swinging through the air. It still doesn’t look anywhere near as good as you’d think a Spider-Man game on HD hardware should look, and some choppy frame rate issues drag it down a notch. A veteran cast of voice actors (though no recognisable names) has been charged with providing the voices for the game, but several of them seem pretty off target – particularly Spider-Man himself, who still sounds like he’s dealing with puberty. The script does feature a couple of amusing lines though, particularly with Spider-Man ribbing his allies about their past comic history and ridiculous costumes.

As mentioned earlier, Web of Shadows pairs Spider-Man up with a bunch of other superheroes currently active in the Manhattan area. These guys basically take Spidey under their wing to teach him the ins and outs of the new combat system, and to make him do their work for them. Combat is Web of Shadows’ main focus, so it’s much better than it has been in any recent Spider-Man game, but it comes at the expense of other aspects of the game. Spider-Man’s moves are easy to grasp and simple to execute, but the game provides plenty of room for expansion of his abilities, either through improvement on the player’s side (by learning about counters), or by spending experience points earned through crushing enemies and completing missions.

Combat takes place in three different states – on the ground, in the air and on walls. Each of Spider-Man’s suits has its own respective move set and powers, and combat in each situation varies based on which suit you’re currently wearing. The red suit is suited more for speed and agility and has access to traditional webbing, while the black suit is for brute force and uses symbiote tentacles to restrain opponents. Regardless of which suit you’ve got on, Spidey’s got some pretty impressive moves – web strikes let you pull yourself towards an opponent for a quick bounce attack, which springs you up into the air, allowing for another one. Each combat situation has its own set of enemies; in the air you’ll run into troopers using Green Goblin-style hoverboards and Vulture symbiotes, shock troopers and Venom symbiotes roam the walls, and regular thugs and gangsters roam the streets (with the occasional mech and tank thrown in for good measure). Each enemy requires a different approach, and can be prone to easily countering certain attacks; for example, baseball wielding thugs, if not properly subdued first, will practice their home-run hitting skills on Spidey’s skull if you use the web strike on them. Unfortunately, you’ll figure out which moves are best, and rely solely on those – thus rendering combat rather dull.

Players can roam Manhattan Island at their leisure, as has been par for the course since Spider-Man 2. Rather than lumping in a bunch of half-assed missions involving ill-conceived races and rescuing children’s lost balloons, Web of Shadows tries to integrate its side tasks into the main plot. When you get a mission from whoever you’re working with on a particular character, they’ll also tell you what else you can do in the area. Sadly, all of the missions in the game, be they major or minor, are terribly redundant. Most missions can be fit into one of three categories; getting to a location, beating up a specific set of goons, or rescuing a person/object, which just isn’t enough variety for a game in the modern day. At various points in the story, you’ll have to make decisions which affect the outcome of the plot. These are basically identified as red suit or black suit choices, red for the greater good, black for the needs of the self. Web of Shadows also neuters the swinging mechanics from other open-world Spider-Man games by limiting players to two moves – swing and web zipline. Swinging around the city as Spidey just doesn’t feel fun with this set up – why is it that nobody has managed to get it right since Spider-Man 2?

Web of Shadows has a few different avenues of extending gameplay beyond its initial 12 hour run time. Alongside the various move set upgrades players can earn from experience points (earned from fights and side missions), there are also over a thousand Spider Tokens distributed around the city. Getting specified numbers of these tokens will increase Spider-Man’s level, increasing your health and special meters. If pointless busy work isn’t your thing, you can replay the story to experience the full range of the black and white plot decisions players get to make at pre-defined times. The Achievement set rewards completion of the story and reaching arbitrary combo and collection targets; one gets the feeling that Shaba could easily have done more.

Arguably, that’s the point that surmises the Spider-Man: Web of Shadows experience. Shaba Studios has put a good foundation in place, but they need to do more with it. The combat system solves one of the biggest problems that has plagued Spider-Man games, but some moves totally overshadow others. With all of the good they did on the combat side of things, they’ve brushed aside other important aspects of the game like the web-swinging and mission variety, and focused on the silly story and cramming in cameos from other Marvel superheroes. If you put Web of Shadows’ combat system together with Spider-Man 2’s swing system and a more interesting set of missions, you might have a Spider-Man game that’s worthy of the license.