Now, before we start, it must be clear that this game is set in Marvel’s Ultimate timeline. It’s similar to the familiar timeline, but there are some significant differences. The Goblin, for instance, looks more like the Incredible Hulk (ripped purple pants and all!) then the laughing, scrawny villain on a flyer as seen in the film. Nick Fury looks a little different as well, as the head of SHIELD is actually modeled after actor Samuel L. Jackson.

As with Spider-Man’s last DS outing, Ultimate Spider-Man, you get to control two characters throughout the game: the hero Spider-Man and the villain Green Goblin. Spider-Man is a much faster and agile character, while the Goblin is a very large and slow moving character. The controls for both characters are virtually identical with the Goblin shooting fireballs where Spidey fires webs.

The game is a 2.5D platformer; the gameplay is all against a two-dimensional backdrop though the action does rotate periodically to give the illusion of being fully 3D. Your movement is fully on rails, however, but it does allow the developers to create more varied environments.

The story is played out comic book style. You see panes of very well drawn scenes that slide in and out with complete voice-overs. While the voice-overs were very well done, subtitles should be a must. All too often handheld games are played in public places where the courteous thing to do is not have the sound blaring and you don’t always want to use headphones. In this case, no sound equals no story. In addition, the hard-of-hearing will be completely left out with no way to follow the story.

I found the gameplay to be rather shallow and if you played the previous title, you’re immediately familiar with how this one plays as it really has not changed much at all (save for the villain gameplay, since Venom had unique controls in Ultimate Spider-Man). Each level has you either swing or grunt your way across an area, fighting enemies along the way. As Spider-Man, you must protect civilians and this requires you to move quickly through the levels. Take too long and you must start all over again. This virtually forces you to play through some levels a few times and remember where each person is to save so you can find the fastest route to all of them. Thankfully, there are indicators to alert you where they are, but I still found myself having to re-try some levels numerous times.

The difficulty seemed to be reserved in the game, as well. I found the boss fights early on in the game near impossible, taking 10-20 attempts to pass some of them. Later in the game, however, I found myself easily dispatching the bosses on my first go. The biggest problem was that the game would simply not let you deal damage while the enemy was performing an animation. Goblin raises his arms above his head for a few seconds before pounding the ground would seem like an ideal time to attack, but the game simply would not register this as a hit. The greatest difficulty wasn’t fighting the enemies, but simply trying to play the game. Once these boss battles were finally beaten, I sailed through until the next boss battle where the same problems cropped up again. I think a little more third party play testing could’ve gone a long way to helping fix some of these glaring and incredibly frustrating issues.

The game itself is not very long and contains no real reason to replay through again. An option to play through Spidey’s levels as the Goblin and vice-versa could have added some longevity to the title, but it seems the only way the game was lengthened was by making parts of it aggravatingly difficult.

The game did have some bright points, such as swinging as Spider-Man, but the frustrations and length mentioned above make it impossible for me to recommend. In addition, this feels like almost the same game as Ultimate Spider-Man with just a different enemy throw in. Save your money and hope that the inevitable Spider-Man 3 movie tie-in game has a little more depth and fun to it.