That's the thing--Spider-Man 2 was rather flawed overall. The main story missions were meh, and the side missions got tedious after awhile (how many people in this damn city are hanging from a ledge at any given moment?). It was much like GTA3, where it was almost a chore to make myself finish the thing, and I'd normally just fire it up to swing around town aimlessly. I'd probably only rate it an 8/10 overall (at the time). It just had the advantage of absolutely nailing the feeling of web-slinging in a way that no game ever did or arguably did again until Spider-Man (2018).
USM was definitely a downgrade on the freedom/webslinging front, but pretty much everything else was better, and it was a tighter experience. I guess it comes down to whether you're the type who prefers the game with the better overall package, or the game with one killer feature that it does really well and you can't find anywhere else.
I recently tried playing the Spider-Man 3 game on the PS2, and while I thought the web slinging was better than Ultimate Spider-Man, it still wasn't as tight as Spider-Man 2. I'm not actually 100% sure why it's worse, it's the same company that made it (Treyarch), so presumably they'd have access to the same game engines and could effectively just redo Spider-Man 2 but refine the missions to make them more streamlined and less tedious. They did actually somewhat fix the latter part there, the missions are a lot less boring, but the web slinging just isn't as fun.
I wish someone would make a mod/romhack of Spider-Man 2 with unique missions that are actually fun.
USM was definitely a downgrade on the freedom/webslinging front, but pretty much everything else was better, and it was a tighter experience. I guess it comes down to whether you're the type who prefers the game with the better overall package, or the game with one killer feature that it does really well and you can't find anywhere else.