What the hell is wrong with Activision? They started off so well with the Spider-Man franchise back in 2000, on the original Playstation. Now they're shoveling tripe, pure unadulterated tripe on us--the hardworking consumer.<br /><br />I brought the PS2 version of this game and sold it back the next day, it was so unbelievably bad. The graphics made me want to vomit. The PS2 is hardly a graphics powerhouse system but this was unforgivably ugly. As for the game-play, it didn't make me sick. No, it made me want to kill someone. Seriously, if a felon was arrested for committing a string of horrific crimes and offered playing this game as a defense at his trial, the judge would have to let him off--the game-play is just that bad.<br /><br />Case in point, the mega-brawls. Every now and then, you have a major fight, with over eight enemies on screen at once. When this occurs, the game slows to a crawl and Spidey sinks into whatever surface he's standing on. It's like he's fighting on water, which just happens to look like concrete or grass. This same choppiness also prevents Spider-Man from using his incredibly limited repertoire of attacks effectively, since any attack activates about 2-3 seconds after the corresponding button has been pressed. Ugh, it stinks! However, what truly makes it horrible is comparing it to the highlight of this now failing franchise, Spider-Man 2.<br /><br />In Spider-Man 2, also for the PS2, the game-play was so good. Yeah, the story kind of blew, but the control was so unbelievably immersive. You could climb walls, run along walls, wall slide, and perform 360 degree swings with the greatest of ease. You could smack someone into the air, juggle their butt, then, just for kicks, hang them from a lamppost, and so much more. Unfortunately, in this game, you can't pull off a fraction of the aforementioned moves.<br /><br />In this game, if you want to climb a wall faster--too damn bad. You want better control over your swinging--not going to find that here. You want to unleash rapid fire combos on the bad guys--you'll wish you could. I can't begin to count the ways that this game whomps, in comparison to a title which predates it by three years. <br /><br />Activision needs to shape the hell up!! They should stop trying to reinvent the wheel and go back to what they know worked. Ultimate Spider-Man was somewhat of a step backwards in terms of game-play, from SM2. Spider-Man 3, on the other hand, is like a quadruple back-flip from a skyscraper from SM2. I don't know what they did to hack Activision off, but before Web of Shadows gets anywhere near alpha, Activision needs to get the two lead programmers from SM2 back. Those dudes seemed to have a pretty damn good idea about how to effectively portray this character in a game. If Activison doesn't, I'm pretty sure that Web of Shadows will end up being another black hole of suck which they see fit to present us with. No, I didn't like this game.