Being Beenox's first foray into the Spider-Man mythos after receiving the license from Treyarch, this is one of the definitive Spider-Man games in my opinion. While it lacks the open-world New York that other Spider-Man games since Spider-Man 2 provide due to the technical constraints of dumping four open worlds onto a Gen-7 console, it nevertheless gets almost everything else right. The swinging still feels smooth, and the combat is satifying. The real masterclass of this game is the way they smoothly integrate four different playstyles into a single game, with brawler,speedster, tactics and stealth. Beenox captured not just a solid experience of Spider-Man, but four distinct experiences.
The presentation also shows a great deal of thought. Beenox combined an all-star voice cast of Spider-Man veterans with writers who understood the behavior of Spider-Man, down to every joke and quip. My siblings would watch me play just to laugh at Spider-Man harassing the villian of the week.
The visuals were also a master-stroke. Each Spider-Man has its own visual theme, with its own shader-set. The Amazing Spider-Man has a Borderlands-like cel shading that imitates classic comic books, while Ultimate possesses a brighter, painted environment. Noir stands out in particular with gray and sepia tones out of a classic noir thriller (which has the added bonus of assisting the stealth gameplay). Spider-Man 2099 is a little less original with a shader style consistent with many 7th-Generational console games at the time, but combining even that weaker entry with the strong art directions gave this game a unique visual flair.
Of course, the legacy of this game cannot be understated. The original story of this game directly influenced the 2014 comic storyline Spider-Verse, which in turn inspired the critically-acclaimed Spiderverse movies, regarded as a small revival in film animation post-Disney-Pixar. This game plays an important part in preserving the legacy of American culture.