System Played: Playstation 4
Year Released: 2018
Year Reviewed: 2021
Spider-Man is a 2018 Playstation exclusive from Ratchet & Clank developer, Insomniac Games.
Spidey games seem to have gone downhill a bit in recent years as they’ve been developed to tie in with the movies, which rarely results in a quality title. This game is free from such shackles, and doubtless one of the reasons it turned out as well as it did.
I played the GOTY edition which includes the 3 chapter “the city that never sleeps” DLC.
The game starts with an explosive opening, with proceedings already in full swing (pun) as you’re working with the NYPD to raid Kingpin’s tower block, but he isn’t going quietly.
Insomniac have been allowed to put a slightly different spin on well known characters. Peter Parker is Otto Octavius’s lab assistant in this incarnation (which obviously won’t end well!), Norman Osbourne is mayor, and no sooner is Wilson Fisk behind bars than a new crime syndicate, “the Demons”, come to town, fronted by an original foe going by the name of Mr. Negative.
There’s other familiar names in the mix, with Electro, Rhino, Scorpion and Vulture putting in a (brief) appearance to make a bit of a Sinister Six for the finale. Along with some less high profile ones like Shocker, Tombstone, Taskmaster and Screwball bringing up the rear.
Structurally and mechanically, the game is not exactly doing anything “new”.
It’s a city sandbox that you zip around doing your hero’ly duty. Previous Spider-Man games have done similar, but there’s more of a definite Arkham/Assassins Creed influence here.
You’re confined to Manhattan island which is divided up into different sectors, each with a police “surveillance tower” which has (conveniently) “gone offline”. That means having to work your way around, reactivating them, which then allows you to tune in to police chatter about crimes being committed in that vicinity, as well as other collectables, challenges, etc.
It’s just like Assassins Creed, and almost every other of these sandbox adventures games.
Spider-Man also doesn’t shy away from the sandbox “busy work” so many of these games rely on to pad out their duration, including many instances of photographing Black Cat toys scattered around the city and (no shit) catching pigeons for some homeless guy...
Harry Osbourne’s “research stations” (??) are spread around the city, requiring all sorts of random shit from you, like checking air pollution levels and “spraying fish''... It feels like Spider-Man should be doing something more exciting/important with his time? Once it had me clearing out drains!
Assorted non-mandatory distractions earn you “tokens”, to be spent on new suits (most of which leave very little to the imagination!) and gadget upgrades. There’s 6 token types, representing different activities you might choose to spend time on, including photographing landmarks, “solving” crimes (with vigilante violence), collecting “backpacks” stashed all around the city, or breaking up enemy base locations. These feel especially Arkham-esque, encouraging you to act stealthily, sticking to the rafters and picking off patrolling guards silently, webbing them up and such.
You get bonus tokens for successfully completing these objectives with proficiency, be it performing so many of a specified attack whilst crime fighting or completing challenges within a time limit, etc. The whole experience is “gamified” to the max, giving completionists a lot to chew on.
It is genuinely exhilarating web-swinging through the city as fast as you can, seeing the skyscrapers and the folk below zoom by. Better still if you can stick the landing exactly how you’d planned.
The city environment is super detailed, up there with similar scenes that you’ve seen in the movies, and kept from feeling too repetitive by regular audio, be it Parker's irreverent inner commentary or phone calls from friends and foes. JJJ has been updated for modern times, now an angry talk radio host (rather than an angry newspaper editor), still with an axe to grind.
You’ll be spending a lot of your time swinging through the many streets of this huge city, following on-screen objective markers or just for the fun of it. I’m not saying it never got old (it’s not a short game!) but it is very enjoyable. There are fast travel points for when you’ve had enough.
There’s not a day/night cycle as such. Some missions do take place at night, but it’s a loading screen transition. Old school.
When you’re not swinging, you’ll probably be fighting.
Combat is mostly melee, supplemented by all kinds of acrobatics, web abilities and gadgets.
Again, it feels Arkham-like, taking on large groups of thugs at a time, keeping them at bay by zipping around the place like an elasticated maniac.
Square to punch. Circle to evade. Use webs to gunk up enemies, pull them towards you, etc. similar to in previous Spider-Man games. When you’re in the flow, chaining together attacks and evades, it all feels very satisfying.
Again, like in Arkham, the challenge increases over the course of the game, with enemies upgrading in ability along with you. Kingpin flunkies are replaced by the Demons who are joined by Silver Sable’s heavily armed mercenaries like the nursery rhyme; there was an old lady who swallowed a ...spider.
You can ‘come a cropper pretty easily if you get complacent. Success relies on building combos without being interrupted by damage to charge a Focus meter. This can be used to refill health or perform fancy finishers.
As you progress through the game, you also unlock lots of additional web abilities and gadgets to offset the gains of what does feel like an endless supply of cookiecutter enemies.
The variety of “crimes” also quickly gets very familiar. There’s only a handful of different types which the game unconvincingly tries to combine and package as different. They aren’t.
Completing actual story objectives (between all the filler) nets XP, needed to level up (increasing health) and earn Skill points for spending on unlocking yet more new and upgraded abilities from a skill tree.
There’s sections where you play out of costume as Parker, usually as a plot driving device.
Also sections where you control Mary Jane (here a humble reporter rather than a supermodel) and Miles Morales, in some extremely unrealistic stealth sections where you infiltrate secure enemy locations ...by hiding behind crates and knocking over toolboxes to attract/distract scripted idiots. There’s more of these sections than there needed to be!
The game also includes two quite out of place mini-games, one where you have to route current through electronic circuits by placing and rotating boards, and another to do with chemical analysis where you’re lining up markers on bits of litmus paper?...
Again, it feels like they’ve taken inspiration from Arkham. Perhaps not 100% successfully. Peter Parker is a scientist, so let’s cram that in there!
The City that Never Sleeps DLC comprises 3 separate chapters/episodes which take you off to a parallel version of the city, complete with different (but the same) objectives/filler. I suppose if you are going to go to the trouble of modelling out all of Manhattan in super detail, you’ll be wanting to use it more than once.
It’s really just more of the same. That’s not a bad thing exactly, but it doesn’t shine if you go straight into it after the main game (like I did). It’s harder! Not better.
Overall, Insomniac has done a very accomplished job with Spider-Man (the game and the character).
Production value-wise, it is once again better than you could even imagine. It’s getting ridiculous what they can do now graphically. And in this case the voice acting is up there with it.
The control-scheme is deep, and great about 90% of the time.
There are occasions (typically where a bit more precision is required) that you find yourself having to fight it to get it to do what you want. And occasionally, stopping is a problem. There is no fall damage fortunately.
The art of a good sandbox game is not having it at the front of the players’ mind the whole time that they’re just repeating the same busy work over and over again (even if they are). Spider-Man is mostly good at this delicate balance. Not “Amazing”.
The Arkham games are frequently cited as the best superhero video games, but this is in the running. Insomniac have certainly borrowed more than a few things from Rocksteady’s series. It is certainly the best Spider-Man game, to date.
There’s other familiar names in the mix, with Electro, Rhino, Scorpion and Vulture putting in a (brief) appearance to make a bit of a Sinister Six for the finale. Along with some less high profile ones like Shocker, Tombstone, Taskmaster and Screwball bringing up the rear.
Structurally and mechanically, the game is not exactly doing anything “new”.
It’s a city sandbox that you zip around doing your hero’ly duty. Previous Spider-Man games have done similar, but there’s more of a definite Arkham/Assassins Creed influence here.
You’re confined to Manhattan island which is divided up into different sectors, each with a police “surveillance tower” which has (conveniently) “gone offline”. That means having to work your way around, reactivating them, which then allows you to tune in to police chatter about crimes being committed in that vicinity, as well as other collectables, challenges, etc.
It’s just like Assassins Creed, and almost every other of these sandbox adventures games.
Spider-Man also doesn’t shy away from the sandbox “busy work” so many of these games rely on to pad out their duration, including many instances of photographing Black Cat toys scattered around the city and (no shit) catching pigeons for some homeless guy...
Harry Osbourne’s “research stations” (??) are spread around the city, requiring all sorts of random shit from you, like checking air pollution levels and “spraying fish''... It feels like Spider-Man should be doing something more exciting/important with his time? Once it had me clearing out drains!
Assorted non-mandatory distractions earn you “tokens”, to be spent on new suits (most of which leave very little to the imagination!) and gadget upgrades. There’s 6 token types, representing different activities you might choose to spend time on, including photographing landmarks, “solving” crimes (with vigilante violence), collecting “backpacks” stashed all around the city, or breaking up enemy base locations. These feel especially Arkham-esque, encouraging you to act stealthily, sticking to the rafters and picking off patrolling guards silently, webbing them up and such.
You get bonus tokens for successfully completing these objectives with proficiency, be it performing so many of a specified attack whilst crime fighting or completing challenges within a time limit, etc. The whole experience is “gamified” to the max, giving completionists a lot to chew on.
It is genuinely exhilarating web-swinging through the city as fast as you can, seeing the skyscrapers and the folk below zoom by. Better still if you can stick the landing exactly how you’d planned.
The city environment is super detailed, up there with similar scenes that you’ve seen in the movies, and kept from feeling too repetitive by regular audio, be it Parker's irreverent inner commentary or phone calls from friends and foes. JJJ has been updated for modern times, now an angry talk radio host (rather than an angry newspaper editor), still with an axe to grind.
You’ll be spending a lot of your time swinging through the many streets of this huge city, following on-screen objective markers or just for the fun of it. I’m not saying it never got old (it’s not a short game!) but it is very enjoyable. There are fast travel points for when you’ve had enough.
There’s not a day/night cycle as such. Some missions do take place at night, but it’s a loading screen transition. Old school.
When you’re not swinging, you’ll probably be fighting.
Combat is mostly melee, supplemented by all kinds of acrobatics, web abilities and gadgets.
Again, it feels Arkham-like, taking on large groups of thugs at a time, keeping them at bay by zipping around the place like an elasticated maniac.
Square to punch. Circle to evade. Use webs to gunk up enemies, pull them towards you, etc. similar to in previous Spider-Man games. When you’re in the flow, chaining together attacks and evades, it all feels very satisfying.
Again, like in Arkham, the challenge increases over the course of the game, with enemies upgrading in ability along with you. Kingpin flunkies are replaced by the Demons who are joined by Silver Sable’s heavily armed mercenaries like the nursery rhyme; there was an old lady who swallowed a ...spider.
You can ‘come a cropper pretty easily if you get complacent. Success relies on building combos without being interrupted by damage to charge a Focus meter. This can be used to refill health or perform fancy finishers.
As you progress through the game, you also unlock lots of additional web abilities and gadgets to offset the gains of what does feel like an endless supply of cookiecutter enemies.
The variety of “crimes” also quickly gets very familiar. There’s only a handful of different types which the game unconvincingly tries to combine and package as different. They aren’t.
Completing actual story objectives (between all the filler) nets XP, needed to level up (increasing health) and earn Skill points for spending on unlocking yet more new and upgraded abilities from a skill tree.
There’s sections where you play out of costume as Parker, usually as a plot driving device.
Also sections where you control Mary Jane (here a humble reporter rather than a supermodel) and Miles Morales, in some extremely unrealistic stealth sections where you infiltrate secure enemy locations ...by hiding behind crates and knocking over toolboxes to attract/distract scripted idiots. There’s more of these sections than there needed to be!
The game also includes two quite out of place mini-games, one where you have to route current through electronic circuits by placing and rotating boards, and another to do with chemical analysis where you’re lining up markers on bits of litmus paper?...
Again, it feels like they’ve taken inspiration from Arkham. Perhaps not 100% successfully. Peter Parker is a scientist, so let’s cram that in there!
The City that Never Sleeps DLC comprises 3 separate chapters/episodes which take you off to a parallel version of the city, complete with different (but the same) objectives/filler. I suppose if you are going to go to the trouble of modelling out all of Manhattan in super detail, you’ll be wanting to use it more than once.
It’s really just more of the same. That’s not a bad thing exactly, but it doesn’t shine if you go straight into it after the main game (like I did). It’s harder! Not better.
Overall, Insomniac has done a very accomplished job with Spider-Man (the game and the character).
Production value-wise, it is once again better than you could even imagine. It’s getting ridiculous what they can do now graphically. And in this case the voice acting is up there with it.
The control-scheme is deep, and great about 90% of the time.
There are occasions (typically where a bit more precision is required) that you find yourself having to fight it to get it to do what you want. And occasionally, stopping is a problem. There is no fall damage fortunately.
The art of a good sandbox game is not having it at the front of the players’ mind the whole time that they’re just repeating the same busy work over and over again (even if they are). Spider-Man is mostly good at this delicate balance. Not “Amazing”.
The Arkham games are frequently cited as the best superhero video games, but this is in the running. Insomniac have certainly borrowed more than a few things from Rocksteady’s series. It is certainly the best Spider-Man game, to date.
8/10
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