Marvel’s Spider-Man by Insomniac Games has been a smash hit and one of the very best games released this year. As planned, we’re seeing the game expand with three sizable DLC packs, starting with The Heist that was released yesterday. Available stand-alone or as part of the Season Pass, “The Heist” is the first of three chapters in the story arc known as “The City That Never Sleeps.”
Having recently 100%’d the original game, and snared about 90% of the available Trophies, I was ready to get back to New York City and see what the crew at Insomniac and Marvel had cooked up next. To start the DLC, as the game will tell you on the main menu, simply load up your save game (you do not need to start NG+) and there is a new tab in the pause menu. Black Cat was sure to be a big part of this new content, and the romantic past between her and Spider-Man was also likely to create a side story now that Peter Parker had reunited with MJ. Anyhow, the story begins with Spider-Man investigating a lead regarding a robbery at the MOCA, the Museum of Contemporary Art. Working with MJ on the phone throughout the DLC, Spider-Man and MJ are piecing together a rise in the battle for power and money between five major crime families within the city. The Magga crime family, lead by the villain Hammerhead, have an unusual interest in an otherwise mildly remarkable painting at the MOCA. What secret does it contain?
Before the action begins, Spider-Man has a new exploration task that we didn’t see in the first game — piecing together a handprint to unlock a security door. This simple endeavor has Spider-Man scanning the environment and finding a few objects left behind by the MOCA security guards to pull partial prints from. Gathering three such prints, he’s able to form a complete one. Moments later, Hammerhead’s crew enters and begins to storm the museum, and we see the Black Cat slip in and steal what she and the Magga family were after.
A new brute enemy is introduced in this first battle that sees Spider-Man trying to prevent the Magga men from looting the museum (you have to stop random, but marked, criminals from exiting through the front door or you fail the mission). The chaingunner is respectably tough, requiring two full bars of Focus meter if you use a Finisher. They also recover very quickly from electric web, have a painful melee attack, and while they only fire in short bursts, you don’t want to be anywhere near that line of fire (which covers a pretty decent radius, though far from a complete circle). While maybe kind of generic or “obvious” in terms of character type, they’re nonetheless a welcome addition to the enemies that Spider-Man can expect to routinely face.
Part of what Spider-Man so addictively special was the balance of combat and exploration. The Heist maintains this balance by introducing some new side objectives for several of the districts. These take the form of five Magga Crimes in three different districts. These are similar to the Demon and Sable crimes that you completed in the original game. A couple of changes include the car bombs where Spider-Man deploys a Spider-bot that you control from the first person perspective and you have about two minutes to locate four to six IEDs placed under cars (or otherwise are outside) and get near them and press Triangle to emit a small EMP that disables it. This kind of crime “mini-game” is brief and very simple. There are also bomb defusing crimes that are a little bit different than the ones from the main game in that Spider-Man must complete one of those electrical circuits to get the ‘key’ to the bomb and then, under a time constraint, get over to the other two or three bombs to disable those. One Spectrometer mini-game is also thrown in as part of the story in The Heist.
The addition of fifteen extra Crimes to “solve” is welcomed, and you’ll net more XP and Crime Points in doing these of course, but finding the missing paintings was a lot more interesting. I can’t explain much about these without going into spoiler-territory, but Parker is asked by an old, retiring police detective to try and find ten missing paintings that the original Black Cat from decades gone stole but they were never recovered. Finding these is similar to finding the Backpacks from the original game, though more interesting in that, as you find them, and call the detective to let him know, more about the detective and the story in general are revealed. In that way it’s like chasing down those darn pigeons from the core game, hah. It’s another simple, worthwhile, addictive little side task to do that I enjoyed completing. Doing so unlocks one of the three new Suits available in this DLC, too.
Speaking of the Suits, the Resilient Suit is unlocked almost immediately, then the second Scarlet Spider Suit, and then upon completing the DLC you get access to the UK Suit. None of these cost anything, nor do they offer any new Suit Powers, and I really only found the Scarlet II Suit to be all that interesting, and I wore it throughout about the second half of the content.
The other piece of extra “side” content offered up in The Heist are the Challenge Missions presented by Screwball. You may remember Screwball as the annoying online personality that wants to test Spider-Man and net the online views and profits from filming it. These Challenges are made up of raw combat encounters, combat with conditions (like only being able to use two specific gadgets), and traversal missions under a time constraint (namely, destroying some EMP devices with Web Shots but having to do them in a specific order). Players can net a lot of extra points by doing the “Photobomb” mini-game within these side quests, too. For the combat ones, the requirement is to defeat enemies within a purple-lit area that moves during the course of the challenge. When the photo is about to go off (which Screwball will make known), you just have to press R1 at the right time when a meter fills to net a couple of thousand extra points. For the traversal side game, you need only to make a slight diversion along your path to enter into the purple lit area and again just press R1 when prompted. While not as entertaining and fun as battling the Task Master, doing Screwball’s challenges nets extra Challenge Points (which are needed to purchase some of the Suits from the original game).
Side-stuff aside, the story in The Heist of the brewing turf wars between the crime families and the triangle between Peter Parker, Felicia Hardy, and MJ is fairly interesting. I have to mention, though, that I was surprised and not particularly pleased with the amount of sexual innuendo that is verbalized, especially by Black Cat. Further, the running unknown answer to the question of whether or not Felicia’s son was fathered by Peter, and the awkwardness between Peter and MJ because of this unexpected question, is also a major (negative) departure from the character of Peter Parker that I had formed in my mind. Black Cat’s constant pouring on of innuendo is a bit much, and for me it tainted not only Peter’s character somewhat, but also seemed unnecessary. However, I’m not familiar with Black Cat in the comics (so maybe this is just her character persistently), and it does speak to her ability to deceive and manipulate (though Peter is admittedly gullible in the first place). That said, while you never get to control Black Cat directly, you do chase her and fight alongside her a couple of times.
The ending of this first installment of the DLC certainly ends on a cliffhanger, leaving us excited for November’s content. Whether you play it now or wait until all three DLCs are out, The Heist is definitely worth the price of admission and the four hours it takes to complete.
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