Spider-Man: Web of Shadows Preview

The Web-crawler has certainly seen his share of media platforms, from movies to television to video games. When it comes to the latter, some of the titles have not been that good, but the recent trend has been to try to capture the essence of Spider-man as it pertains to not only his web-slinging abilities, but his fighting style. And there has been a certain fascination with Spidey’s black suit as well.

Spider-man’s black costume originally turned out to be a symbiote being and gave rise to the alien and nasty Venom super villain. But when you twist the idea behind the costume around a bit, and allow it to be used for good purposes, strange things can happen.

Activision, holder of the Spider-man license for video games, held an event recently in Santa Monica and trotted out the next title in the franchise, Spider-Man: Web of Shadows (developed by Shaba and Treyarch). Shown on the 360, the title will also be available on the PC, PS2, PS3, PSP, Wii and NDS. The release date is slated for mid-October.

In Web of Shadows, all of New York City is taken over by a symbiote invasion. The symbiotes are capturing citizens and using them as hosts, plus – no spoilers, though – a few others are taken over as well.

Shaba has developed some extreme sports titles and that sort of commitment to high-intensity action fit very well into the Spider-man framework. As a dev team member said during the presentation, Shaba wanted to bring “the fluidity of motion into the combat of an adventure game. Spider-man is a perfect character for this, because he can move so awesomely.”

So Shaba sought to marry movement and combat together, a task they seemed to accomplish judging from the hands-on time afforded. As the dev team admitted: “The trickiest thing was working with the camera.” But the problem was seemingly solved when the L2 button was employed to lock the camera onto the target, rather than centering on the third-person viewpoint of Spider-man.

As for the black suit … yes, you can switch between the two, on the fly, and each suit has its own strengths and weaknesses.

The event allowed for hands-on and it was apparent from the beginning that, while there is a learning, curve, this version of Spider-man offers a deep and evolving combat system, replete with role-playing elements. You play, you collect drops from enemies that you can spend on skills. Should you decide that the skills you have bought are not the direction you wish to take your character, you can sell them back and re-allocate your skills to fit the style of gaming you wish to play.

In addition to Spider-man, the game also has many familiar characters from the Marvel Universe, including Luke Cage, Wolverine, Black Cat, Moonknight and others. During the course of the game you will be able to team up with them, with the AI controlling the other character.

The action is very compelling and entertaining, and Web of Shadows looks to be gearing up to be a great time in Marvel’s Spider-man universe.