Developer: Insomniac Games
Publisher: Sony Interactive Entertainment
Reviewed on: PlayStation 4Purchased.
Everyone, gather around for a celebration, as Spider-Man has managed to swing away from the dark abyss that is bad movie-tie-in games, and into the loving, masterful and caring arms of Insomniac and Sony to create a wonderful, vibrant beautiful New York City playground.
Whereas past games took place during his high school/college days, Marvel’s Spider-Man throws us into the world of 23 year old College grad, Peter Parker. Peter spends his days trying to balance his work life as a scientist (Yes, that is correct, scientist. He does not work for the Daily Bugle) with his responsibilities of protecting his city, his home. It doesn’t take long to guess however that his social life isn’t a very social one. Peter doesn’t really have any friends: MJ and him have broken up before the events of the game, and his best friend Harry is spending his days in Europe. Peter still manages to find time for his dear Aunt May though, and helps her out whenever he can.
Upon starting up the game and viewing the opening cutscene, you are immediately thrown into the action, which caught me off guard (I remember accidentally spilling a cup of Pepsi on myself from excitement) and it was just fantastic how fluid it shifted from cutscene right to gameplay. It’s very clear that Insomniac was influenced by Rocksteady and the Arkham games, but that is far from a bad thing!
While the combat may feel similar to the Arkham games, the countering mechanic clearly fits Spider-Man more than it did with Batman. Spidey uses his trusty spider sense, indicated by a flashing icon around his head, to notify you of when to hit the counter or dodge button during combat to avoiding bullets, punches, rockets, cattle prods, and almost everything his enemies use against him. You also have a combo meter you fill up and can eventually unleash a finishing move once your combo gets high enough. Insomniac may have outdone Rocksteady here. The combat is simplistic, fluid and really a blast. It all gets better though the more you play through the game and unlock better gadgets and suit abilities. Another thing Spidey’s combat has in its arsenal is the ability to heal yourself with the aforementioned combo meter if things get hairy, which they often will.
So you might be wondering, enough with the combat talk, how’s the web swinging? Because that’s half of what Spidey is known for doing, and let me tell you, it’s absolutely fantastic. If I have one very minor gripe with the swinging, it’s that I preferred the usage of L2+R2 in Amazing Spider-Man 2 where you had to alternate the buttons for which hand you wanted to swing with. That aside, it’s a thrill. Majority of my playthrough was me just wasting time swinging around. You can wall-run straight up, you can run on the sides of walls, you can web-zip across almost everything, and in a pinch, point launch off of obstacles to send Spidey flying with momentum. You can also unlock a skill that lets you do Air-Tricks and even gain a small amount of XP for said tricks. It’s a fun little addition that I found myself lost in. I would go bursts without doing any missions, just mindlessly swinging around as the epic soundtrack and score would play in the background and ramp up excitement. Being able to swing from one end of the map to the other without touching the floor, or even roofs for that matter, is definitely a nice accomplishment and a fun little challenge since you’d have to know the map well enough.
It’s also a very good thing that the web-swinging is fantastic, because boy are there are plenty of collectibles to collect throughout New York City. From backpacks, to Assassin’s Creed esque Sync Points, to pigeons, to taking pictures of iconic landmarks and lastly a whopping 165 (there are more, but only 165 are required) Crime Events. The Crimes vary between a few different types, but if anything they are more on the repetitive side. There are also a nice amount of Side Missions, ranging from going on a hunt for some disease-carrying pigeons, to going around looking for Rogue college kids, to fighting a few characters I refuse to name because of spoilers. Then we have the Research Bases, which are interesting to say the least. They aren’t too exciting (the very last one aside), but they are an okay distraction. There are multiple enemy bases for each Faction in the game, which play out as wave-based gauntlets where you have to survive while beating up all the enemies, and each wave gets progressively harder than the last. There are also some Challenges around the map to complete that deal with things like Bombs, Drones, Stealth and Combat. Each challenge grades you from 1-3 stars, the better you do, the more Challenge Tokens you will gain, which may be used to either unlock new suits and some new gadgets.
Without going too much into the story due to spoilers, like I said at the beginning of this review, Peter is actually a scientist, working under Octavius Enterprises. Spidey is also partnering with the police, ala Batman Arkham. However, the dialogue between detective Yuri and Spider-Cop, erm, Man is just great. Peter may not work for the Daily Bugle, but that doesn’t mean JJ Jameson isn’t in the game, because boy is he ever. JJ hosts his own radio show, in which you’ll tune into while swinging around and he does not disappoint. The majority of his rants are hilarious and I never got tired of him coming up with ways to blame Spider-Man for the next big issue that happened. I won’t go into specifics of story details because this is a game that needs to be experienced to fully appreciate, but I will say though, for an original story, Insomniac did a great job setting it up and having it play out how it did.
