Ultimate Spider-Man

The Good
Ultimate Spider-Man has three major selling points - comic book visual style, Venom, and introducing the Ultimate line of comics to the world of video games. And all of these definitely work - the cel-shaded graphics combined with 3D environments look great, getting to play as the man-eating symbiote - though not for the first time ever - can be really satisfying, and it's nice to get a glimpse of a whole new universe so different from the classic Amazing Spider-Man comics.

But possibly the strongest point of the game lies in its web-swinging mechanics. Moving around New York's skyline feels (relatively) realistic and extremely fun at the same time. Combined with a large open world, it allows you to get genuinely immersed in the Spider-Man experience.

The Bad
However, the game seems to rely too heavily on the open world and the very act of moving around it as Spider-Man. A majority of the missions, both story-related ones and generic semi-optional quests, centers around either a simple beat 'em up in an open area or some form of race or chase scene. While fun at first, these get excruciatingly repetitive over the game's relatively short runtime, especially with some of the story-related chase sequences being unusually unforgiving without really presenting a new challenge.

The boss fights can be mixed bag as well, with some of them having a great flow or really interesting gimmicks, others feeling rather unintuitive or heavily overstaying their welcome.

Ultimate Spider-Man is a bit messy when it comes to storytelling too, as there's generally no link between the main storyline centered around the Venom suit and other elements. And while it's understandable how an isolated Shocker or Rhino fight might just happen to your friendly neighbourhood superhero at any time, there's also a Beetle/Green Goblin subplot that seems like it's a part of a larger arc, but doesn't actually lead anywhere (at least not within the game).

The Bottom Line
Ultimately (get it?), the game looks great and has some really strong points which make it a fun experience overall, but fails to really utilize them. Relying too heavily on simplified open-world exploration and web-related mechanics, it fails to provide any focused and creative level design and ends up being rather repetitive. 6/10