Act 3 in a trilogy is always going to be hard work. You're in the home stretch, knackered from all the hard work...the finish line is in sight, but the marathon is far from over. Not only do you need to collect all the loose threads from the previous acts and tie them all back together coherently, you also need to send the whole thing out on a bang and give the whole thing a memorable and worthy conclusion. And in the case of film trilogies, people immediately conjure up classics like Return of the Jedi, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Die Hard with A Vengeance, Return of the King and Naked Gun 33 1/3...it's a lot to live up to!

Enter Spider-Man 3, the third film in Sam Raimi's blockbuster franchise based on one of Marvel's most beloved superheroes of all time. Raimi is a man with trilogy experience having gifted the world with the classic that is Evil Dead, but even so these are big shoes to fill. Not only does he have the trilogy expectations to fill, but also hordes of ravening fans who still have spidey sheets on their beds. But this isn't a film review, people, we're actually here to talk about Treyarch's movie tie-in videogame, something with lower expectations but just as much to lose.

As with most movie tie-ins, Spider-Man 3 borrows heavily from the film to slingshot its sales into the stratosphere; the actors lend their likenesses and in most cases their voices to the characters they portrayed, and the overall plot is pretty similar to the movie. It's at this point that game developers are faced with a dilemma: copy the movie almost scene-for-scene in the name of being "faithful”, or mix it up a bit to avoid spoiling the film at the risk of people complaining it's not enough like the movie. It's a lose-lose situation at the best of times, and judging by reactions already clogging the Interweb's tubes, Treyarch's attempt to straddle both worlds has just ended up making twice as many people angry as usual.

You see, what Treyarch have done is boil the plot of the film down into its core components which become only one or two stories out of ten in the game. The rest have nothing to do with the movie, and instead utilise villains from the Spider-Man comics like The Kingpin, Lizard and Scorpion among others. They also introduce three street gangs who have their own mini-arcs and stand in as the bad guys in most of Spidey's random battles throughout the game. It's a brave move, and one that deftly avoids egregious spoilers for those yet to experience it on the big screen.

While this was a great idea in theory, in practice each of the stories feels a little diluted and it isn't always entirely clear how you've gotten to where you are, such is the scale of the narrative leaps between missions. But while it can be a tad confusing, the chances are you didn't buy Spider-Man 3 for its gripping plot and in-depth storytelling. No, true believers, like a seedy old man at a key party, you came for one reason and one reason only: you want to swing like it's the 70s, baby!

Treyarch really nailed the web-slinging in Spider-Man 2, and for the most part things remain unchanged here. It's hard to dispute that this is one of the coolest modes of transportation in any free roaming game, and while it may not be as fast as Superman speeding faster than a bullet, it manages to remain fun from the beginning to the end of the game. There's a great sensation of speed whether you're swinging in a straight line or taking corners, and freefalling from impossible heights only to sling a web mere metres from a face-plant and whooshing off is a real thrill.

It helps that Spider-Man 3 looks great as you're swinging through the city – in fact, being in motion is the real highlight of the game. The camera is almost flawless as you web between buildings, handling the sharpest of turns with ease and only really hiccuping when you latch onto walls for crawling purposes. It's a shame, then, that the camera lets you down in pretty much every other aspect of the game. It's almost like Treyarch spent months working on the swing mechanics and hooning around the city, only to be reminded they had to make the rest of the game. Make no mistake: if this was Spider-Man 3: Skyscraper Swingfest Super Slalom, you'd have to consider it near-perfect. Unfortunately in reality, there's that pesky "rest-of-the-game” to deal with...

Okay, so that's a little dramatic, and reading other reviews of the game, you'd be forgiven for thinking that Spider-Man 3 hates you and wants to make you as miserable as possible. This isn't quite the case, but to run with the analogy, Spider-Man 3 doesn't like you a whole lot, thinks you look at its girlfriend funny, and will try to make your life difficult without crossing the line into...felonious behaviour. And trying to work out where to start when tackling the "rest-of-the-game” is going to be a tough one. Okay, deep breath...

Since we've already touched on it, let's tackle the camera first. Put simply, outside of swinging around, it's okay at best, heinous at worst, and tends to find an unhappy median in awkward. Just running around on foot outside is usually pretty good, but once you transition to indoor areas things start to go pear-shaped. Introduce combat into the mix – arguably a fairly crucial aspect one might say – and you've got problems and bigger ones. There's no lock-on during combat, and Spidey will utilise a distinct lack of spider-sense sometimes when trying to decide who he wants to lay the smack down on. Coupled with the fact he can't block, and you've got a recipe for fisticuff frustration.

Frustration. It's a word you'll hear a lot in this review and an emotional state you will become intimately acquainted with when playing this game. Combat is a right royal mess, and it doesn't matter how many cool sounding combos Treyarch put in your moves list; at the end of the day, Spider-Man 3 is the basest sort of button-mashing. In fact the game not only encourages it, sometimes it requires it to succeed. This has a lot to do with some incredibly cheap enemies, you all know the kind: the sort you can't even hit unless you either A) do what the game wants or B) randomly spam buttons on the controller. Half the time they don't even look like they're blocking, your hits just simply don't do a jot of damage.

If you choose option A), then expect to be doing the same thing over and over and over. Spidey cannot block enemies by default, unless you activate his Reflex mode which essentially puts things into slow-mo. When you do this, the little yellow warning symbol that appears over enemies as they launch attack lets you know that you can dodge the attack. Unsurprisingly, this leaves your foe vulnerable and lets you get off a few hits.

This block-counter mechanic is hardly new, and it has worked quite successfully in other games. So why's it such a problem here? Frequency is one problem, as is the fact that almost every boss fight relies solely on this technique. The battle against the Kingpin stands out as a particularly annoying encounter: he hits, you dodge, hit him once, and then he's back to invulnerable. Rinse and repeat for 10-20 minutes minimum and you might be finished. The only saving grace is that Black-Suited Spiderman can enter into Rage mode, at which point your attacks can no longer be blocked, but you're looking at 4-5 wait-dodge-counter repetitions before your meter is filled.

The other problem is that Peter Parker is a pansy. Yeah, yeah, he's not invincible like Superman, but in Spider-Man 3, it will only take a half dozen or so whallops before he goes down like a two-dollar hooker. Even common street-thugs can take you down if you aren't careful, which in random encounters isn't a big deal, but in missions, this can be – yep, you guessed it – frustrating. Checkpoint placement is almost random, with some missions having lots and others having virtually none. They may save you a minute or cause you to replay 10-15 minutes worth of a mission, there's just no knowing.

These complaints are the kind of thing that you could overlook if the combat and missions were actually enjoyable, but in Spider-Man 3, they're mostly just mundane. It's mostly swing from point A to B, beat up some baddies, and then either swing back to A, or move onto C and repeat the beatings. There's the occasional rescue mission or returning of stolen property, but these are much less frequent than in Spider-Man 2.

The other mission mainstay involves taking photos, which makes sense, what with Parker's day-job being a photojournalist. Frank West he is not, however, despite Treyarch's incredibly blatant purloining of Dead Rising's great happy-snapping mechanics. But these missions nevertheless provide a refreshing break from crap combat, and also represent some of the funniest moments in the game, including a catfight at a fashion parade and a faux-spidey swinging from a helicopter and stealing your thunder.

Outside of the main missions, there are plenty of activities for Spidey to partake in. There's the obligatory races that see you swinging through the city at breakneck speeds, combat tours that require you to slam evil with much alacrity, disarm bombs, or even go skydiving. Masochists can also take the incredibly annoying MJ for a "thrill ride” around the city where she constantly shouts "go higher!” or "go faster” ad nauseum until you wish it was an MJ kill-ride. These provide a nice release valve for some of the frustrations the main missions create, especially given that the missions seem to disappear at random depending on which plot lines are active.

One of the big complaints with Spider-Man 2 was that the random missions you encountered while just swinging around town were repetitive to the point of cruel, and while Spider-Man 3 has a tad more variety, they still border on useless in terms of inclusion. The new crime-levels that represent gang control in various areas have virtually no bearing on the gameplay, and all the rescue missions are gone, replaced instead with the occasional gang throwdown and way, way too many car-chases that play exactly the same. It's quite disappointing that the developer's couldn't find better uses for Spidey's natural agility, but then, it kind of feels like your interaction with the game world in general is painfully limited due to laziness on their part.

It may seem picky, but New York as it is represented in Spider-Man 3 is a horribly static affair. You can bust the odd box or newspaper dispenser, but try taking a swing at a car or uproot a light-post and you'll be rewarded with...nothing. Vehicles look absolutely crap, and the pedestrians are, well, utterly pedestrian. They rarely speak, there isn't many of them, and you will never interact with them, unlike in Spider-Man 2 where they could ask for your help. In fact, for a city that never sleeps, New York feels positively catatonic, and it's eerily quiet as you swing through it.

If it all sounds a little grim, well, it is. And it's about to get worse. Why oh why do Treyarch seem to think that Quick Timer Events are such a Goddamned good idea?! Having to randomly press buttons on the screen to advance maybe be fine for guitar hero where it makes sense, but in Spider-Man 3 it's really the paragon of lazy game design. What makes it worse is that all the cut-scenes are rendered using the in-game engine, as are the QTEs, so if you aren't paying attention, what you thought was just another boring, poorly scripted cinematic can become a Simon-says pattern recognition test, and while failure is an option, it's a pretty poor one. The finishing blows in most boss-battles rely on these QTE moments, and if you screw it up, then Spidey gets knocked down (losing health in the process which can result in you failing the mission), and the boss gets some health back and you have to re-fight them and then do the QTE again. Worst. Idea. Ever.

Okay, so there's a lot wrong going on here, so what's good aside from the city-swinging? Well, the framerate is pretty solid and while there is some pop-in it's fairly negligible, especially compared to other versions of the game. Spider-Man himself looks great and is well animated, although the faces of characters in the game are likely to give small children nightmares because they just look so...wrong. What's right though is the return of god-actor Bruce Campbell as the snarky narrator for the game. His role has been pared down a little which is a shame, but his dialogue provides the majority of the scant moments of humour in the game. Most of the film's cast reprise their roles and make the best effort of what they have, but Tobey Maguire's softly-spoken sarcasm comes off as a bit half-arsed, and the majority of the others have only a handful of lines at best.

In closing, we are duty bound to say that the game is hardly bug free to boot. Graphical glitches, while occasional, are pesky, and an enemy getting stuck inside cars and walls is an all-too-frequent occurrence, and one that can end your mission right then and there. It's not a big deal, but in a blockbuster title like this, it's the kind of thing that QA should catch. Thankfully the Achievements are a good mix of easy and challenging, and if you swing that way, should provide you with plenty to strive for – if you can overcome the many frustrating hurdles placed in your path.