SWing aLong

Get your Spidey senses tingling with a first look at Insomniac’s Spider-Man on PS4

While Spider-Man: Homecoming is doing its victory lap of the Manhattan skyscrapers it’s easy to forget that, when it comes to videogames, Spidey hasn’t always had the pixelated offerings he deserves. The Wall-Crawler hasn’t had a truly good game since 2004’s Spider-Man 2 on PS2, where an open-world New York and physics-based swinging mechanics combined to make true webby heroes of us all. Insomniac Games is remedying this 13-year-old problem with a new Marvel-approved adventure that has nothing to do with Homecoming but everything to do with creating a true Spider-Man experience.

It’s immediately clear from watching it in action that Spider-Man has taken a few tips from Rocksteady’s Arkham series. The suited-up Peter Parker’s slick, crunchy combat is more than a little similar to the Dark Knight’s moves, with cinematic flowing counter attacks and thrilling goon takedowns. You can choose exactly how you’re going to handle each situation. Will you creep from the ceiling, stringing up those who stray too far from the group? Or engage everyone in fisticuffs, grabbing grates and sandbags with your webs to use as projectiles?

Also showing off a thrilling helicopter chase as Spidey attempts to catch his foes without dropping rotating blades on innocent New Yorkers, Insomniac is promising a genuine comic tale. Thankfully there’s no origin story to get through either – this is in the middle of his career and our hero has just popped Kingpin behind bars. “Peter Parker is feeling really good about being Spider-Man,” explains Insomniac community director James Stevenson. “He’s taken down his adversary but his personal life is still a mess. He’s still Peter Parker, the bills still aren’t being paid, he’s juggling his personal relationships and his work life and trying to be Spider-Man. One of the big things for us is that it’s really critical that in a good Spider-Man story you see those two worlds collide.”

Spider-Man is out exclusively on PS4 in 2018.