To get from place to place, Spider-Man crawls up walls, zips across ceilings, casts webs, and swings from structure to structure with amazing grace and stamina. The early-warning Spider-Sense serves an absolutely crucial role by detecting enemies and threatening situations from a distance. The range of motion this web-crawler can undertake, combined with the hyper-sensitive detection system, provides you with an exceptionally multifaceted and fluid way of moving around and detecting foes. The result is that your cleverness is just as much evident in how you get to your destination — and how you figure out where to go — as in what you do when you get there.

Spider-Man can perform almost 20 specialized fighting moves in order to defeat his enemies. Some foes need to be fought from afar, while others need attacks at close range. In face-to-face battles, you may jump, kick, and punch your way to victory, even creating spiked gloves out of your web for extra effect. At longer distances, you may launch balls of webbing at enemies, use web-lines to pull them in any direction you wish, or create web shields for defense. These core moves can be linked into combinations which can catch even the most pesky adversaries by surprise. This arsenal appears to be more than adequate for the tasks at hand.

Several power-ups are available to help Spider-Man out; each power-up has a different function: the blue web-cartridges allow Spider-Man to execute his web attacks without losing too much of his webbing; the red and white heath cartridges restore your health as you progress; and the rare gold armor changes the costume and properties of Spider-Man for a brief time, increasing the amount of damage he does to his opponents while reducing the amount of damage an enemy can do to him. To obtain a power-up, you simply need to find a way to touch it, either directly or through your webbing. If Spider-Man has reached his carrying capacity for a certain item, the power-up will become transparent when you make contact with it. These pickups are not nearly as diverse as those in other titles of this type, but they do spice up the action a bit.

A number of important extra documentary features deserve special mention. The movie viewer allows you to watch any of the entertaining cutscenes that you have unlocked during the course of gameplay. Hidden throughout are a number of icons looking like comic books, and collecting these unlocks classic Spider-Man comic book covers. The character viewer gives you in-depth profiles of the bizarre assortment of characters in Spider-Man, including short but intriguing biographies. For long-time Spider-Man fans, these special informational elements are nearly priceless.