Ultimate Spider-Man has been out for a few weeks now and I finally got a chance to sit down and play through it.  This latest adaptation to the wonderful world of Spidey is cell shaded, which is an automatic plus because it just makes things look better.  What’s more, it’s done by the same people who actually make the Ultimate Spider-Man comic book.  The gameplay for Ultimate Spider-Man will seem very familiar if you’ve played Spider-Man 2 (The Movie).  The game adapts the Grand Theft Auto free roam feature, and the city is quite large.  To move on through the story you have to swing around the city completing “City Goals” which consist of helping out the good folks of New York all the way to racing Johnny Storm (Human Torch) of the Fantastic Four. A really fun thing about this game is that you switch characters to get all sides of the story.  After completing certain goals the story moves on and you then take over Venom and play through his side of things.  The controls in this game are fairly simple: Jump, Kick, Punch, Grab, Swing, Web Shot, etc. so you shouldn’t have a hard time adapting.  The game consists of several different Spider-Man baddies like Rhino, Carnage, and Green Goblin.  One thing we didn’t like is that the story is shorter than a kids pop-up book.  I was able to play through the whole story in less than 10 hours. One glimmer of hope is that once you complete the story mode the game turns into complete free roam and you can pick which character you want to be.  I mostly played as Venom at this point in time and it started to remind me of Grand Theft Auto.  The more damage/harm you do as Venom the more points you get, and the higher your points go the more calvary gets sent out on you.  All in all the game is fun, but semi repetitive if you’ve played through Spider-Man 2.