Unreleased Spider-Man 4 gameplay released on YouTube

Gameplay for the unreleased Spider-Man 4 video game has been released following the discovery of a development build on a Nintendo Wii development kit.

Shown off in a 27-minute YouTube video on channel Hard4Games, the in-development build is clearly far from completion. However, a few levels and miriad debug rooms are included to get a taste for what this game would have been.

Cancelled midway through development due to the scrapping of Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 4 just weeks before filming, there’s not too much to see in this Wii gameplay. It would have at least followed the plot of the film; The Vulture is set up through menus as the main villain of the game.

Mechanically, the canned Spidey title looks like a fine iteration on its previous movie tie-in releases. For web-slinging down the streets of New York, there’s physics-based web-play. Clear anchor points show that webs connect to nearby buildings, helicopters and other environmental objects.

There are a few oddities within the Spidey build that makes for some intriguing tidbits. For example, despite not using a computer mouse for its gameplay at all, Spidey 4’s current build will display a mouse cursor whenever a GameCube controller is plugged into the Wii.

Another oddity is that emulators pick the game up as Dead Space: Extraction, a horror FPS by the now-defunct Visceral Games. Perhaps the title runs on the same engine? Or perhaps it shares a similar title key? I’m not smart enough to know.

Nevertheless, Spider-Man 4 appears to have been another fine title for wannabe web-slingers everywhere. While this Wii version is far from as pretty as the recently leaked Xbox 360 version, it’s still a title we would have loved to see release. Well, at least now we have the spectacular PS4 game!