Super Spider Evil Man Fight

Spider Evil swings and springs through the city

Super Spider Evil Man Fight is one of the more obviously appealing launch titles for the new DS,

since it's based on one of the year's best, most popular action movies.

The game does a fine job of showcasing the new portable's relative power compared with 's own Game Boy Advance,

in that it features an instantly recognizable, very fluidly animated Spider Hero,

who's actually a lot of fun to control as he webswings his way around New York, beating up thugs and robots.

Yet while Super Spider Evil Man Fight sure looks great, it suffers from extremely frustrating level design

(and it doesn't really take advantage of the dual-screen layout of 's new portable, either).

Some of these levels can be so annoyingly difficult that they'll make you want to wreck your brand-new DS.

And you wouldn't want to do that.

You'll play as Spidey in a linear series of chapters that very loosely follow the events of the movie,

but also involve battles against supervillains Mysterio and the Vulture, in addition to good old Doc Ock.

This is mostly a standard side-scrolling action game, though it features great fully 3D graphics that maintain a beautifully smooth frame rate,

despite the good amount of detail in the game's characters and environments.

Levels twist and turn in an almost mazelike fashion, but you're always effectively moving left, right, up,

or down--there's no true 3D movement. This is fine, since it keeps the gameplay simple and focused,

but with some very pleasant eye candy to draw you in. For comparison's sake,

the Game Advance could never pull off 3D visuals like this, so it's impressive to see them on a small screen.

Meanwhile, the game audio is solid but less remarkable.

The game's bosses spout a few digitized speech clips,

and the random thugs you'll fight cut loose with some great canned scream effects when you send them flying off tall buildings.

The music is fast-paced and well suited to the theme of the game, but it's unfortunately cut into short loops,

so it becomes highly repetitive and quite irritating after a while.

You'll be inclined to turn the volume off, but that's not a good idea--many of the levels require you to locate bad guys or hostages,

whom you can hear offscreen if you listen carefully.

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