Now here’s the thing: Spider-Man 2 came out in 2004, and there hasn’t been a good open-world game starring the wall-crawler since. Last year’s Spider-Man 3 game was roundly viewed as disappointing at best (and the less said about the Wii version, the better – in what world does two park benches and a tree constitute Union Square park?), a rush job pushed out the door by publisher Activision that couldn’t manage to live up to its two-year-old last-gen forebearer. In light of this, Web of Shadows, built by Treyarch with a bit of help from Shaba Games, feels almost like an apology. The web-swinging is better than ever, bolstered with new character animations (you wouldn’t believe how much better it is when Spider-Man runs along side a wall you run him in to rather than flopping uselessly against it) and a camera that swoops and pans around you dramatically while practically never getting confused or stuck behind a wall. New York looks beautiful, opting to look more like the Marvel comics version of the city than the real one, complete with a Daily Bugle that isn’t secretly the Flat Iron building and Stark Tower (!!!). Combat is incredibly fluid, dropping the irritating complexity of past games for simpler combos of buttons that put the weight of successful fighting on timing rather than pressing half the controller at once. You haven’t lived until you’ve spent half an hour fighting your way through Manhattan, bouncing from thug to thug without ever touching the ground.

Of course, there is that niggling “almost” up there. The voice-acting is somehow worse in some ways than the uninspired drone Toby Maguire coughed up for the Spider-Man 2 game, with the whiniest voice actor to ever whine filling the starring role’s tights. The lines being read are every bit as bad, with costars Luke Cage and Black Cat written as Generic Black Friend #3 and Skank At The Party, respectively. The combat is fun and supports many differnt styles of play, especially once you get comfortable switching between the speedy red and blue suit and the more powerful, slower black suit, but it’s all there is. The crux of each of the game’s three acts is built around fighting visually different enemies that by and large all fight one of three ways, creating a fun but incredibly repetitive experience. The game is also buggy as hell – hit a wrecked car in the third act to make it explode, and it’s just as likely to disappear on impact, popping out of sight while accompanied by a suddenly awkward explosion sound. I picked up the game on sale for $40 and with a pile of credit at Gamestop (what? It was an excuse to finally get rid of Guitar Hero III), and I’m perfectly happy with he amount I paid, but I wouldn’t recommend it to anybody for the full $60 price tag.

Once you get past the horrible voice acting, the bad writing, the repetitive gameplay, and the distracting bugs, however, there’s really something worth seeing. The core of Web of Shadows is strong, the results of Treyarch refining the engine from Spider-Man 2 until it’s finally able to provide the experience they were striving for all along. While the writing built on top of it doesn’t do it any favors, the plot of the game’s story is a lot of fun, slowly building up from the initial fight with Venom on the city streets at the start of the first act to the full-fledged doomsday scenario of the third, complete with smoking buildings, symbiote-consumed people turned monsters wandered the streets, and S.H.E.I.L.D. Helicarriers blowing up the bridges leading in to Manhattan in hopes of quarantining the situation. Without exaggerating too much, the best way to describe the last third of the Web of Shadows is to say it’s the New York-based zombie game you’ve always wanted where, instead of a doomed civilian stuck in a mall, you can do whatever a spider can. The first time you see a besieged car careening through the empty streets, covered in symbiotes trying to beat their way in to the non-infected civilian inside, or the first time the mob of symbiote zombies you were about to pick a fight with are vaporized under a Helicarrier bombardment…. well, it’s a lot easier to overlook the game’s blemishes and just enjoy the ride.

So it’s not perfect. And while playing it, you’ll never quite shake the feeling that, with a little more time, Web of Shadows could have been something truly extraordinary. What we get instead is a flawed by deeply fun game that, if not quite showing us completely, at least gives an idea of what the developers are capable of when not tied down to the plot and release date of a big budget sequel. While I can’t recommend it unconditionally, I can say I happily poured hours up hours in to it over Thanksgiving weekend, zipping through Manhattan in search of new fights to get in to and new sights to see while neglecting my brand new copy of Far Cry 2 and the last push needed in Fallout 3 to reach the endgame. Because while post-apocalyptic D.C. and the African savanna are great places to spend time, neither of them let me web swing through the skyscrapers of New York. And finally, after four years of waiting, I have a new way to do that.

Oh, and in this one? Spider-Man can swim. Top that, Bethsoft.