Spider-Man 3 (X360) vs. Bee Movie (X360) a comparison…
I’ll be the first to admit I don’t play enough games as a game developer, but I do try to play all the game demos and games related to my current project.
I had the pleasure and displeasure to play Bee Movie + Spider-Man 3 – two licensed games with polar results. Usually licensed games are crap, which Spider-Man 3 definitely is. Swinging through the city is enjoyable, but all the missions are about repetitive button mashing and pressing the button shown on the screen. Kill me now. Even the swinging became repetitive in the “take Mary Jane for a tour of NYC” missions…
Bee Movie uses a similar “press the button when shown” game mechanic but uses animation + humour to expand it. Bee Movie also includes fun diversions like mini-games.
How could two licensed games with similar game mechanics and both featuring a open city end up with such different results? The two critical flaws in Spider-Man are:
- Lack of gameplay flow. The missions are disconnected messes that could be played in any order. All the dialogue and story makes zero difference other to annoy the player.
- While the God-of-War mechanics are fine, they are used in the game with zero emotional impact. In God of War and Bee Movie, pressing the button or moving the joystick as shown provides the player with a neat after effect… in GoW it was a “cool” effect and in Bee Movie… a giggle. In Spider-Man 3, I felt the tone was mechanical. The game required me to press dozen of buttons while the pre-mission cut-scenes telepath-ed the final results (i.e bomb would be de-activated if I completed the tasks). At no time, did pressing the buttons evoke a “wow” except for the odd unexpected explosion.
Blame must be laid on the Spider-Man 3’s game designer, who did not integrate the elements cohesively together. Instead, the game merely cloned the game mechanics of God of War and assumed similar “fun” results.
Add comment April 26th, 2008