Spider-Man 3

The black suit is a button press. That is the one idea in this game worth arguing about: at any moment in the middle of a fight you can let the symbiote take over, trading Spider-Man's precise, cartoonish combat for heavier hits, wider swings and a red-eyed sneer, at the cost of a meter that drains and a hero who gets progressively less pleasant to be around. It is a mechanical version of the film's plot, and it works better than the film's version of it.

Everything around that idea is a 2007 movie tie-in built to a deadline. Treyarch had already made the definitive open-world Manhattan with Spider-Man 2, and this follow-up inherits the same basic pleasure of web-swinging between buildings while the city rolls past underneath. The swinging is faster and more forgiving here, with a dive move and quicker turns, but it also feels looser, less like you are reading the geometry and more like the game is helping you along. The PS2 build in particular is a scaled-back cousin of the concurrent PS3 and 360 versions: fewer people on the sidewalks, plainer streets, a shorter draw distance. It still runs, which by the standards of late-generation licensed rush jobs is not nothing.

The structure is gang war plus set pieces. Rival crews stake out districts and you break them up in repetitive bursts of street fighting, while the story missions work through the movie's roster and a few comic imports, culminating in Sandman and Venom. The boss encounters are the strongest material, mostly because they change the rules — climbing, chasing, dodging on a schedule rather than mashing through crowds. The filler between them is where fatigue sets in, and there is a lot of filler.

What holds up is the moment-to-moment motion and the suit gimmick. What has aged is the camera, which loses Spider-Man in tight interiors, and the mission design, which too often means driving to a marker so another handful of thugs can appear. Judged against Spider-Man 2 it is a step sideways at best; judged as a film licence shipped alongside a summer blockbuster, it is more ambitious than it needed to be.

Play it for the two or three minutes at a stretch when you are high over the streets with the black suit on, hitting harder than you should and knowing the meter is running out.