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If you're gonna buy Spidey 3, skip this version

Words: Brett Elston, GamesRadar US

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Spidey, a handful of textures and the bosses look friggin fantastic, but most everything else is bland and washed out. Sure, the city feels immense and the skyscrapers are quite daunting, but nothing screams "PlayStation 3". The game also suffers from chronic pop-in, so you'll be swinging through the city when major details will suddenly appear right in front of you. Certain areas, like Central Park, look like a joke. We're not out of line to say at times the visuals look like a first-gen PS2 game. Yes, it does get that bad - not very often, but it does indeed happen.

Thus, it makes no sense why Spider-Man 3 moves along so jerkily slow. It's definitely not because the graphics are pushing the system. Everything was nice and clean in 2004, so what happened? Are the bloom effects too much for the system to handle?

You know how city folk get scared and run away in Grand Theft Auto or Crackdown? None of that here. These zombified dolts keep walking in a straight line no matter what happens, be it Spidey and the New Goblin getting into a fireball tossing match or a gang war erupting in the streets. They'll blindly walk into walls, get stuck in corners, obstruct your path... the list keeps growing every time we play, and we're already at the end, after 15 painful hours.

Care for another other example of such nonsense? While fighting the New Goblin in the streets, you might come across an open air streetball court. Rather than flying into the court with his jet glider, the Goblin will hover around to the only part that's not fenced in and enter the proper way - by using the entrance.