Ultimate Spider-Man

Ultimate Spider-Man is an action game by studio Treyarch that brought the aesthetic of the then-popular Ultimate Spider-Man comic book to PlayStation 2, rather than the classic movie source material. The player alternates between Peter Parker and Venom, with each character offering a different style of moving around the city and a different combat approach - Spider-Man relies on acrobatics, web-swinging, and fast combos, while Venom relies on brute strength, tentacle attacks, and darker abilities derived from the symbiote. The game takes the player through a series of battles against iconic villains from the comic book mythology, with each encounter requiring a different tactic depending on whether the nimble Spider-Man or the physically dominant Venom is facing them. The game's visual style was drawn directly from Mark Bagley's comic book art, giving it a distinctive cel-shaded look unlike most licensed action games of the time.

The open New York environment allowed free movement across skyscraper rooftops, collecting items, and completing side quests outside the main story, which at release was one of the game's main draws alongside the ability to play as two different heroes with separate abilities and upgrades. On PS2, the game ran with slightly more limited graphics and a shorter draw distance compared to the more powerful platforms of that generation, yet it still became one of the best-received Spider-Man adaptations of its era thanks to its combination of action fun, faithfulness to the comic source material, and the inventive alternation between two opposing lead characters. The freely explorable city's scale continued a trend kicked off a year earlier by Spider-Man 2 with its natural web-swinging system, and Ultimate Spider-Man enriched it with a pair of playable characters offering a different strategic approach to both movement and combat.

Why play it: Ultimate Spider-Man suits fans of the comic book source material as well as players who want to experience two contrasting play styles in one game - the acrobatic hero and the dark anti-hero Venom - in a single open city full of optional tasks and collectibles.