Spider-Man

Look up while you are swinging and you will notice there is nothing there. The web line rises into empty air, catches, and pulls you forward anyway. It is a straightforward cheat, and it is the single design decision that makes the 2002 film tie-in play as well as it does, because the physics never have to argue with the geometry of a rooftop. Momentum is king, and the game hands it to you free.

Activision had Treyarch build this alongside the Raimi film, and the seams show in the structure. Between the swinging there are corridors: warehouses, a bank, sewers, laboratory interiors where Spider-Man is reduced to punching thugs in a box. Combat is a small combo set plus web attacks — yank a weapon out of a hand, glue someone to a wall, drop from the ceiling. It reads fine for a few hours. It does not deepen. The wall-crawling is where the camera loses its nerve, spinning to find you as you round an interior corner, which was the standard failure state of third-person games in 2002 and is no less annoying now.

What the game does understand is fan service that costs nothing. Bruce Campbell narrates the training level with exactly the deadpan you would hope for. The boss roster reaches past the film to pull in Shocker, Vulture and Scorpion, which is how a licensed product buys goodwill from readers rather than just ticket-holders. Tobey Maguire and Willem Dafoe turn up on the voice track, Dafoe clearly enjoying himself more.

It is worth remembering how thin the ground was here. Neversoft's PlayStation Spider-Man had solved swinging in a fog-bound approximation of a city; this one had real draw distance and real speed but still could not commit to a whole open Manhattan, so it fences you into chase sequences and timed rooftop runs. Two years later its sequel would take the leash off and make the buildings matter, which is the version everyone remembers.

Play it now and you get a brisk, generous action game that is at its best in the thirty seconds between objectives, when nobody is asking you to fight anything and the sky is holding you up.