Ultimate Spider-Man

Mark Bagley's ink lines survive the trip to polygons, which is the first thing you notice and the thing that still holds. Rather than chase the photoreal Manhattan that the previous Spider-Man game aimed at, Treyarch rendered the whole city in flat colour with hard black outlines, cut between missions with real comic panels, and hired Brian Michael Bendis to write the dialogue. The result looks less like a movie licence and more like the Ultimate books it came from, and cel-shading has aged far better than 2005's attempts at skin and asphalt.

The web-swinging is inherited rather than reinvented. Lines attach to actual geometry, momentum carries between arcs, and the wall-running and vaulting flow into it well enough that crossing the island stays the best part of the game long after the missions stop surprising. Combat is looser, a serviceable crowd-clearing set of strikes and web attacks that rarely asks much of you. City challenges pad the map: point-to-point races against other costumed characters, combat tours, collectible tokens scattered up the sides of buildings.

Then it hands you Venom. Eddie Brock plays nothing like Spider-Man, moving in heavy tentacle-assisted leaps instead of swinging, and his health drains constantly unless he grabs a civilian and consumes them. That is a genuinely unpleasant mechanic to put in a licensed game aimed at children, and it works precisely because it is unpleasant — the rampage has a clock on it, and the clock runs on people. The Venom sections are short and mostly linear, but they give the campaign a shape the Spidey half could not manage alone.

The campaign is the weak spot. It runs brisk to the point of feeling abbreviated, boss encounters land unevenly, and anyone who spent time in the sprawl of Spider-Man 2 will notice how much thinner the open world's supporting structure is. Traffic is sparse, crimes repeat, and the map fills up with checklists rather than incident.

What lingers is the confidence of the presentation. This is a comic-book game that trusted comics to be enough, and it looks sharper today than its more expensive contemporaries because it never tried to be a film. Swing between the towers at dusk, with the outlines catching the light, and it is easy to forgive how quickly the story runs out of road.