Marvel’s Spider-Man
PS4
Afew minutes in to Marvel’s Spider-Man, Peter Parker is preparing to suit up and head out. Picking up his costume from a table, he brings it to his nose, and looks briefly disgusted. It’s the sort of peek behind the curtain that this kind of game should be perfect for: it’s only when you get this close to a superhero, and see the world through their eyes for a couple of dozen hours, that you start to wonder about the little things: about, say, what a man-made, skintight costume might smell like after a few nights on (and above) the town. Not great, it turns out.
It’s also, whether by accident or design, a canny way of introducing one of the game’s key features. Parker can change his getup (and its accompanying loadout) on a whim, crafting new kit using tokens earned through completing various open-world activities. If Parker’s failed sniff test is an elegant way of introducing us to suit crafting, however, the opening hour of his latest game fails what Edge has come to know as the phone test. It’s a miserable start. By introducing its various currencies one after the other – clear bases to earn base tokens, stop street crimes to earn crime tokens, and on and on – Insomniac has us frequently reaching first for the pause button, and then for the phone in our pocket, looking for something better to do.
Mercifully, it’s a false dawn. Insomniac will still be introducing you to new currencies 15 hours later, but by then they’ll be so infrequent as not to irritate, and in all likelihood you’ll be so in love with the game they underpin that you won’t mind the intrusion in the slightest. This is a troubled game, certainly. Yet it gets away with a tremendous amount thanks to the easy charm of its characters, its fine technical achievements and, above all, the graceful implementation of its decades-old power fantasy. Spider-Man has had his ups and downs in videogames. This is by far his peak.
You’ll be forgiven for not quite agreeing early on, when the idiosyncrasies of the traversal system have yet to reveal themselves, and an apparently amazing superhero spends most of his time bouncing awkwardly off the sides of buildings, smacking into cars, or landing gormlessly on rooftops after finding nothing to moor his webbing to. By game’s end, however, you’ll be fully deserving of the name, cresting the corner of a skyscraper’s roof and pirouetting into the night sky, doing a couple of airborne forward rolls before diving at pace back towards terra firma, swinging back up inches above street level. You’ll have unlocked skills that mean that, if you do make a mistake, momentum is easy to regain. But it’s personal experience, rather than experience points, that make the difference. Rare indeed is the open-world game where you purposely choose far-off objectives because of the pure pleasure of getting to them. The game has a fast-travel system, for some reason. Only a fool would use it.
Combat follows a similar pattern, even if it’s ostensibly more familiar than the web-slinging traversal. One early sticking point is the button mapping, in which Insomniac tries vainly to disguise the obvious Arkhamisms of its fighting system by putting dodge on the Circle button, instead of Triangle. Yet the developer quickly reveals that this is no copy-and-paste job. While the lowest level of enemy fist fodder can be dealt with on the ground in the jab-thwack-counter Batman style, those with melee weapons will block your attacks, and must be dealt with in the air. Holding the attack button sees Parker perform an uppercut that launches an opponent skyward; the next punch will take him into the air to continue the assault.
Later skills will let you stay up there, with a Bayonetta- style web pull that yanks foes toward you proving particularly invaluable. Enemies with guns can shoot you out of the sky, while those with whip-like weapons can yank you back down to ground level. Both can be dodged, but doing so will take you out of range of your mid-air victim more often than not. Unlock the swing kick, however, and you can not only avoid an imminent attack, but take your quarry along with you so you can maintain your combo.
Staying at ground level can be a thrill too, mind you. Parker can grab and throw nearby bits of scenery, or enemies who’ve been encased in a volley of web fire. He can yank and topple scaffolding, or chuck a baddie at a junction box, electrocuting them and any others nearby. But it’s in the air that combat truly sings, and speaks most fluently to the Spider-Man power fantasy. Fights start innocently enough on the ground, but before long you’ll have gone up in the air and then over the side of the building you started on, dispatching a full wave of enemies without touching the ground, never mind taking a hit. It means that, by the game’s final stretch, Insomniac knows it can push you hard, with a double boss fight that takes place almost exclusively in the air providing one of the game’s many highlights.
Mechanically speaking, then, this is comfortably Insomniac’s best work to date. And it’s the greatest story it’s ever told, too, this streakiest of developers clearly benefiting from working with a beloved IP and a generous budget. In narrative terms this feels more a Marvel product than an Insomniac one, and smartly mixes the breakneck pace of its action sequences by frequently putting you in control of Parker, who spends most of his downtime at a homeless support centre. The game doesn’t have one antagonist, but several, giving the feeling of a playable Spider-Man miniseries rather than a movie; if that suggests an unevenness in its pacing, then the final act will put any concerns to rest, as everything comes together (and falls apart) in style. There’s filler – mostly in the form of forgettable,
Spider-Man has had his ups and downs in videogames. This is by far his peak
barely failable stealth sections which put you in control of Mary Jane or another character – but they’re made with the best of intentions, and are at least brief.
The game’s major problems, however, appear when heading off the critical narrative path. As the sprawling web of currencies with which you’re assaulted early on suggests, Spider-Man’s vision of New York is packed out with things to do, and with which the game gives you little alternative but to engage. Yes, skill points are earned by levelling up, and story missions pay out generously. But to ignore the other icons on the map is to deprive yourself of new suits, each of which comes with a super power on a cooldown (unlocked ones can be assigned to any suit you like). It means you won’t get the full suite of suit mods, which afford passive bonuses, or the support gadgets that flesh out the core stealth and combat toolsets. And the game frequently insists you get out your mop and set about cleaning up the map before it unlocks the next story mission.
This would be perfectly acceptable were it not for the fact that most of Spider-Man’s side activities were inspired by, if not lifted directly from, the open-world games of half a decade ago. Some are simple collectibles; others require a chase sequence, or a punch-up. But almost all are quick, throwaway little mundanities that the game neither needs nor benefits from. There are exceptions – enemy bases are essentially Far Cry outposts, a no-brainer for a hero with Spider-Man’s stealth and combat abilities, while Research Stations play around with the formula in ways that feel tailored to both our hero’s superpowers and his scientist alter ego. But the rest has been done before, and often better, in the sorts of open-world game the industry at large iterated itself beyond some time ago. Put it this way: when was the last time a game of this type told you to climb towers to fill out the local map?
Weirdly, it gets away with it. Perhaps it’s precisely because the industry has stopped making open-world games in this fashion, meaning that what would have felt boring just a few short years ago feels oddly fresh. After all, there’s a reason everyone settled on the formula: it’s enjoyable, a brisk, low-stress exchange of a little effort for a small reward, little dopamine top-ups that have you pulling up the map looking for the next little hit. Maybe it’s because seeking out even the most humdrum of collectibles means getting to use that wondrous traversal system, or that the most basic of streetside punch-ups allows you to put that classy combat moveset into action. Either way, despite a tight deadline, by the end we’ve unlocked everything the game has to offer save for a couple of suits.
We’re not sure we’ll be back for them, however. Once the credits roll, all you are left with is a highly polished, but thoroughly generic, open-world action game, and the momentum afforded by the campaign’s final stretch no longer gives you the impetus you need to continue clearing out the map. Yet that serves only to prove this game’s many achievements: it is at its core a forgettably designed, cookie-cutter open-world game, that is elevated by its traversal, its combat and stealth, by the eventually irresistible pull of its story. It may not have legs, but while it lasts it is delightful. The Amazing Spider-Man? Not quite. But it is frequently spectacular, and given Parker’s rather chequered videogame past, that feels like some achievement.