Holy languishing franchise, Batman! Oops, wrong reference. Truth is, Spider-Man has seen better videogame days. Sure, the third movie is a huge, glorious epic, and yes, Spider-Man games based on huge glorious, epic Spider-Man movies thus far have bucked trends by actually being good, but new-generation whiz bang or no, Spider-Man 3 for Xbox 360 has officially joined the rank and file of hopeless merchandising schlock based on awesome movies (as has the PlayStation3 version).

Problem is, you'd expect more from the game's developer, Treyarch, the same studio that brought you three other Spider-Man games (one movie-based, two other rock-solid, stand alone Spidey-games). Complacency, rushed deadlines, poor intra-studio communications, who knows? ...but this is way below the studio's lofty standards.

It's a good looking game, but not great, not thoroughly crisp and detailed like the overly-touted high-def systems claim to be capable of. Spidey's animations are ultra-fluid and super slick, same with several other characters, but the environments, objects and thugs therein, as often as not, come off as draft framework with a coat of paint.

Gameplay has little originality, following the same basic play mechanics of the last movie game's web-slinging, wall-crawling, free-roaming, bad-guy bashing gameplay, except with new, loosely-incorporated plot bits, upgrade incentives and some random acts of button activated cinematics knocking off the God of War games (which knocked-off the old Dragon's Lair games from 20-odd years ago, so nobody is scoring originality points for that one). It would all be tolerable in a more-of-the-same goodness were it not for the hopelessly wonky camera that can't seem to find a comfortable position for your viewing pleasure, jerking and fluttering around to angles unwarranted.

Yes, Spider-Man is the coolest comic-book hero on the planet and the films do the hero great justice, but you wouldn't know it by this particular game. Too bad.

TIP: For the PS3 and 360 versions of Spider-Man 3, you have to successfully complete the game to unlock the Black Spider-Man suit.