In the 16-bit era, licensed games earned their horrible reputation to be nothing but a popular license slapped on top of a poorly designed game in order to make a quick buck. Today that reputation lives on, but the Spider-Man franchise has been growing strong ever since Neversoft released their spin on the license. Treyarch followed up by maintaining that level of quality with their release of the game based off the first movie. Now Treyarch is back and instead of rehashing what they already had done before and slapping on the second movie license, they decided to go back to the drawing board and take the game in a new direction. That new direction is everywhere.

If you haven't heard by now, the big hoopla surrounding Spider-Man 2 is that it follows the footsteps of other games like Grand Theft Auto and True Crime: Streets of LA by giving the player full access to the world so that they can dictate how they want to play and when they want to progress. In fact, just thinking about applying such a world to a superhero based game would seem like a perfect fit. Treyarch has shown that it is, and has done so with recreating Manhattan as the natural setting for our beloved web-slinger.

Spider-Man 2 is broken up into over twenty chapters. Each chapter has certain goals that need to be met to move on to the next. These goals typically involve, go to a specified location at some point in time to trigger an event, get a certain amount of upgrades, and earn a certain number of hero points. An example of an event can be like head to the Daily Bugle to get a new assignment. Hero points are points that you earn by accomplishing just about anything in the game. These include finish an event, stopping a random crime, helping people out, delivering pizza, performing various skill tasks assigned at certain areas of the game, finding secrets, and more. Once you've earned these hero points, they not only help you complete your task of meeting a required number of points, they allow you to purchase upgrades to your attacks and your swinging ability.

Like all other games that have an open-ended nature to them, there are various things you can do at your leisure around the city. The most obvious is of course stopping crimes. These range from a simple mugging up to armored car robberies. As you advance through the game, new types of crimes will be introduced. Also, a type of crime can have small variations to it, so it's not exactly the same crime every time. Another thing you can do is help the people in the city. These tasks range from recovering a balloon for a kid, taking an injured person to the hospital, or even rescuing people from a sinking boat. If you ever get tired of these, there are all sorts of skill tasks and hidden icons to find throughout the city. With such a large city, there is an abundance of things to be done here.

Swinging around doesn't take long to get you moving, but it will take you some time to master. Even being comfortable with getting to where you want to go without running into things doesn't mean you've mastered it. Add in the fact that you won't have all of your web abilities until later in the game, and you can slowly begin to see how you will gradually improve your technique as you progress through the game with experience. Some of those abilities will include sprinting along the side of a wall, web zipping, faster swinging, and more. Even so, playing for quite some time and feeling comfortable, it took someone from Treyarch to demonstrate what they can do to make me feel humble to what I was able to do. The end result though is a very playable method of swinging through the city yet at the same time looking flashy and a lot like the way it was done in the movie. You can imagine the final few seconds of the first movie to get an idea of what you can expect, except you'll actually be doing it.

Besides swinging, combat is another area where you'll be spending your time with. It's fairly similar to before with your standard punch combos, and web attacks. You can cast a web and swing the guy around, pull their weapon out, knock them up to do an air juggle. But now there are more moves that can be purchased which increases the variety of attacks you can do. Despite the number of attacks, you are never actually required to do them if you choose not to. It's nice to not be forced to use all these moves, but at the same time if you do so, it will make fighting a bit easier to take on multiple guys, not to mention more fun, especially when the criminals get more difficult later on in the game.

The same applies to your spider-sense. When it goes off during combat, you don't have to utilize it, but if you do, you will perform a dodge move, to which you can also apply a counter-attack to as well. To take the spider-sense further, you can utilize spider-reflexes which when turned on, slows everyone else down, so that you can take advantage of your quick reflexes. This not only makes it easier to dodge and use your spider-sense, but also gives you the ability to pull off more powerful attacks.

Graphically, the game looks pretty nice in some areas, but only average in others. The trade off in visuals of course is made up in the vast scope of the city and certainly is not worse than those found in other games of a similar scope. The city in fact looks pretty good especially because of how vertical the game can be. What hits the visual the most though is the character models. Spider-Man himself looks pretty good, but nothing exceptional. Mary Jane looks nice, but doesn't look like a lot like Kirsten Dunst to me. The worst looking characters are the random people on the street. It's not when you're just swinging by seeing them on the street, but it's when you actually have to talk to them because they want to tell you about a crime in progress. They zoom in on them and look pretty mediocre. On top of that, their face is a static texture so when they talk to you, their mouths don't even animate. Since this can be a requirement to advance in the game, you will likely see them often.

While the graphics may be ok, the audio however doesn't disappoint with Tobey Maguire, Kirsten Dunst, and Alfred Molina doing the voice work for their characters within the game. Even Bruce Campbell reprises his role as your personal tour guide at the beginning of the game. While swinging through the city, you will hear various chit-chat from the people that populate the city. Usually those comments are directed at you as you swing by. Even the movie score is mixed in well with all new music for the game. If there is anything to complain about, it would be some of the random comments get a bit repetitive. I can't even begin to count the number of times someone yelled at me to "get a job!"

Only a few minor things keep this game from getting an A. The first is the repetition. Because you have to earn a specific number of hero points on each chapter, the easiest thing to do is pick up on random crimes that are around you. Pretty soon doing so gets repetitive. Even though it's not the only thing you can do, it tends to be the most convenient without going out of your way. Also, in terms of repetition, is the random comments thrown as mentioned before. Another aspect can be the length. If you tear straight through the game, it will probably take approximately 8 to 10 hours on average to play through it. But that's sticking straight to the objects to move through chapters as fast as you can. On the up side, that will only net you about fifty percent completion which means you can do the various tasks around the city still to finish it. However, to some, that length can be a bit short. Finally, there are just random glitches and small things that would have been nice to have been cleaned up had there been more time, but can't be blamed on Treyarch given they were stuck with Columbia Pictures release date as the deadline for the game. These things range from seeing cars pass through cars, a person on top of the hood of a car, other small stuff that is negligible.

When I spoke to members of Treyarch at the time of playing through the game for this review, they stated that there were two elements that was the focus of this game: a great swinging and control scheme with webs that actually attached to buildings, and a vast city to be able to do it in. Anything after that was just considered gravy if they could establish those two elements well. I'm more than happy to say they've not only achieved what they set out to do, but there is plenty of gravy to go with it. Aside from some minor issues, Spider-Man 2 is a shining example of how to do a license game, and build upon a style of genre rather than just copying it. Hats off to Treyarch for putting up with the deadline and delivering a quality game that when all is said and done is simply fun to play.