One of the year’s best games, Marvel’s Spider-Man, gets its second DLC this week with The City That Never Sleeps: Turf Wars. Continuing where the first DLC left off, Black Cat is missing and presumed dead, and Hammerhead is intent on taking over the entire Maggia crime family by killing off its five dons. He’s acquired a massive stockpile of wares from Sable International, including new tunneling transports, and it’s up to Spider-Man and Captain Yuri Watanabe to stop this massive gangwar and takeover from happening.
As with the first DLC, Turf Wars adds three new suits (with no additional powers, cosmetic-only), new Crimes, new Bases, and new Challenges. There is of course the obvious boss-fight with Hammerhead as well. What struck me right away about this DLC was its combat difficulty. Some of this was just rust in not having played the game in a month, but Insomniac ratcheted up the difficulty of some of the story encounters, but especially of the Base encounters (and to a lesser degree, the Crimes, too). The story begins with Hammerhead apparently holding up in an old, abandoned sanitarium in Harlem. Spider-Man gets dropped right into the middle of a firefight that, near its end, introduces a new enemy type: the shielded jetpack guy. This enemy type is tough in that it’s airborne (though it typically stays low), has a shield, can move quickly, and the red trail it leaves behind can disable your gadgets for several seconds (a big problem in the middle of Wave 5 during a Base fight). Quickly dodging these characters is important, but I found the Electric Web also be a major help. I also upgraded my Concussive gadget using points earned from the first DLC.
Without getting into spoilers, the combined raid on the sanitarium by Spider-Man, Watanbe, and the officers that fought with her, goes badly. Hammerhead made things personal, and it’s within this DLC that we really get to see a shift in the relationship between Spider-Man and Watanbe, and her character develops more than it had during the main game or the first DLC (of which she was little part of). Early on, you unlock the black and silver MK II armor suit, and the four Hammerhead Fronts (the new Bases) also unlock. I have to admit, these Bases have proven to be the hardest content of the game thus far — far worse than even the toughest Sable Base for example. The chaingunners from the first DLC, the new shielded jetpack guys, snipers, heat-seeking rockets launchers, stun baton dudes, the orange whip guys, Sable vehicles, they’re all here and the combination of these makes things insane at times. I think I mentioned this in my review of the base game or maybe in the first DLC, but the inability to assign more of Spidey’s gadgets is unfortunate. It would be ideal, for example, if I could press L1 plus another button to quick-assign multiple gadgets (one per button). As is, you can only fast toggle between the most recent two gadgets and use the radial dial to switch to others, but, to me this isn’t as smooth or ideal as being able to just quick-assign multiple gadgets.
Soon after you unlock the Bases, Screwball returns with another six Challenges that introduce a new stealth element in the form of moving sensors (which have a vision cone). These felt uninspired and didn’t do much to help my interest in jumping back into her antics, which are as annoying (by design) and as demented as ever. Like the first DLC, I just didn’t find these as interesting as when the Taskmaster was working the Challenges. Another twenty Crimes are unlocked as well, and these are very much like what we have played before. Honestly, between the difficulty of the Bases and the growing repetition of the gameplay, I found myself completing the Story missions before the side missions this time around, which is the exact opposite of how I approached the main game and the first DLC. Upon completing everything, you get all three suits, namely the one aforementioned, a manga-inspired one, and a new Iron Spider one that looks pretty great, and is probably in my top ten.
Compared to the first DLC, Turf Wars is much more combat focused. Overall, I didn’t like it as much as the first DLC, not because combat isn’t fun, but it’s gotten quite repetitive and tedious. Still, I suspect part three, arriving next month, will strike a better balance overall, as it completes the City That Never Sleeps story arc.
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