Your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man is back, and he’s never played nor looked better than he does in Insomniac Games’ latest Sony exclusive. Available this Friday for PS4, and best enjoyed on a PS4 Pro with 4K and beautiful HDR, Marvel’s Spider-Man is the most ambitious, polished, and must-play videogame starring the web slinger ever released.
Indeed, we’re a far cry removed from the Parker Brothers’ 1982 Spider-Man for the Atari 2600, which I played once at a friend’s house probably thirty years ago. I skipped most of the Spider-Man games in between then until the last two generations, having played through, and mostly enjoyed, all the Beenox games and as well as The Amazing Spider-Man 2 on PS4. All of these games had their moments and bright spots, but also their frustrations and shortcomings. Insomniac are no slouch when it comes to quality game development, having themselves been in the business for nearly twenty-five years with a legendary portfolio. Their setting a new bar for not only Spider-Man videogames, but superhero games in general, was almost likely with this endeavor (although I’m not inferring it was an easy feat, just one that Insomniac were well capable of achieving). I would say they have succeeded, or at the very least, matched the impressive clout of the Arkham games by Rocksteady Studios.
What made the Arkham games so good, and what is also so good about Marvel’s Spider-Man, is its depth and polish in all aspects. Nevermind the stunning graphics (for now); honestly, I was just eager to see how traversal worked compared to other Spider-Man experiences. I wanted to see, how well does trying to navigate the massive NYC sandbox actually work? It may seem like a simple piece of gameplay to get right, but there’s nothing more annoying in a Spider-Man game than having issues trying to quickly navigate around the city, especially if you’re chasing a moving objective under tight time and distance constraints. Fortunately, Insomniac has done a solid job here. It does take some getting used to — but so also does the combat system and understanding the layers and weaving together of collectibles, tokens, unlockables/purchaseables, suits, suit mods, gadgets, etc. The game introduces you to these mechanics at a very reasonable and good pace, giving you ample time to understand and implement these, as well as a way to go back and re-read about them if need be. I lost my first probably half dozen or so encounters with Brutes. I couldn’t keep up with the first two or three car chase/theft events that I encountered — but I learned from these, and came to quickly understand the dodge and traversal (respectively) gameplay mechanics Insomniac designed.
In the case of traversal, button-wise it’s simple enough: X to jump and R2 to sling out web onto a nearby building (you can’t just throw web up to the sky and expect it to stick, and I like that). If you want to go faster, but not higher, press X during a swing, if you want altitude instead, hold R2 until the top of the swing. I like that you can also quickly target spots within the world like a nearby building edge or a street light and press R2 to zip right to it, just aim for the small white circle indicators. You can also go into a ‘bullet time’ like mode by pressing and holding L2, which brings up a reticule to help you aim where you want to web-zip to. Wall-running works in a similar manner, with the additional plus of being able to look “up” and press X on building ledges to launch yourself up high. Sometimes transitioning from a horizontal plane of a building to a vertical one can be jarring, but it’s hardly a big deal and frankly it’s to be expected. Also of note, you can press L3 to perch on pipes, edges, and so on to not only look cool, but give yourself a moment to take in the visual beauty of the game and plan your next move. Of course, different suits and upgrades make traversal even smoother and faster, too.
Combat is obviously the second biggest component of most Spider-Man games. While tough, most of the time Spidey goes up against foes that are just plain bigger than he is, so blocking is literally not an option. Instead, acrobatic dodge moves are what Spider-Man uses to avoid taking hits. Spider-sense gives you the warning you need to make a quick exit from a dangerous situation by pressing Circle, which can be combined with other buttons for lots of great moves like the ‘dodge under,’ whereby Spider-Man will slide between the enemies legs to get behind them, perfect for shield-wielding baddies. You can also hop off of walls to counter-attack, or if you purchase one of the first available upgrades in the three-section skill tree you can hit your foe with a blinding web shot as you dodge out of the way of their strike or shot. Quick attacks with Square, web-related attacks and moves with Triangle (such as yanking a foe close, pulling their weapon away, etc), and dodging with Circle are the main functions during combat, as well as Focus meter use. The Focus meter fills up as you fight, and you can use it to fill up your health gauge by pressing down on the d-pad or execute a cinematic finisher with Triangle+Circle.
Fighting in Marvel’s Spider-Man quickly becomes a joy to behold and to play, and I found myself avoiding the main story objectives for hours at a time to find more collectibles and encounter more random criminal activity ranging from drug deals to hold-ups to kidnappings and more. Whether fighting just a handful of random punks in an isolated incident or storming a boss stronghold (like one of Fisk’s construction sites to battle dozens of enemies in waves), either way it’s a lot of fun and only increasingly so as you level up, purchase new suits, suit mods, additional powers/skills… suffice it to say that I learned quickly that there was always a lot of worthwhile things to do in Spider-Man, and it does not always involve just fighting random (and honestly, repetetive at times) enemies. I found value in going after the fifty-five backpacks that Spidey had stashed all over the city, including one waaayy up high on a skyscraper that contained a gym shirt he meant to wash six years ago. Finding these hidden backpacks is not only fun thanks to solid traversal controls, but also a great way to explore the city, encounter random, quick side missions, and just enjoy the sights. I like that, within each of these backpacks, you not only get Backpack Tokens, which are one of the Token currencies in the games used to buy suits and suit mods, but you also get a specific item from Spider-Man/Peter Parker’s past. The menu from the Italian restaurant that he and MJ went to on their first date, his Oscorp Visitor’s badge, a Spider-Man plush prototype that some businessman wanted to market, and all kinds of random, but neat things. With each discovery, you get a high-res rotatable model of the item to take a (quick) look at, and a few sentences of Spider-Man talking about the item and his memory of it — good stuff.
More worthwhile, non-combat tasks that you can do include some circuit puzzles and spectrography in Doc Oc’s lab, where Peter Parker works. The circuit puzzles are like water flow pipe puzzles where you have to get the electricity from A to B at a certain voltage going a certain route using only certain types of components. These puzzles eventually get challenging, but they’re a nice pace-changing way to earn some XP and I appreciated the detail that Insomniac put into these, as all of these and the spectography puzzles have Parker talking about something game-world related, such as a new compound that might prove to be good for Doc Oc’s research into prosthetics, or how making this new circuit work will make the movement of a prosthetic arm work better, and so on.
Most folks would probably agree that Peter Parker/Spider-Man is typically a pretty likeable character, be it in comic book, cartoon, movie, or videogame form. Sometimes annoying, but overall easy to relate to and cheer for, I also liked how Insomniac didn’t just make this a game purely about Spider-Man, the masked man, but also literally makes Peter Park playable as well. This adds a lot of balance and ‘reason to invest’ into the game and, for me at least, that really paid off and made the experience more rewarding and something I kept/keep wanting to return to. Besides all of the other reasons to dive in, quick load times, absolutely stunning visuals in 4K HDR, and an amazing overall presentation also have kept me excited to keep playing. And, three big DLC releases are still due out this year, starting next month (not that the base game isn’t already quite large and thoroughly enjoyable).
In sum, Marvel’s Spider-Man is not only the best Spider-Man game to date, and one of the best games this year, but it’s also the best superhero game since Arkham Knight. It’s sure to appeal to any fan of Spider-Man, superhero games, or open world sandbox games in general.
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