Spider-Man for the PlayStation 4 is more proof that Sony’s console is the system to beat, if for no other reason than the sheer quantity of amazing, exclusive titles you can’t play anywhere else.
It’s more than a little amazing to see a game as good as Spider-Man release just a few months after the incredible God Of War reboot. That game has already become a critical and financial success, wowing critics and gamers alike with its new surprisingly fresh take on Kratos’s story and gameplay.
Now we have Spider-Man from Insomniac Games (Ratchet & Clank, Sunset Overdrive) and get ready to be wowed all over again. In this review I’ll talk about the gameplay, graphics and the quality of the story itself without spoiling anything important from the story. I’ll have a more detailed look at the narrative elements after the game has launched.
Let’s start off by making the inevitable comparison.
Arkham Spidey
Marvel’s Spider-Man and DC’s Batman share much in common. They’re both denizens of a fictional New York City (aka Gotham in Batman’s universe.) They both wear masks and use high-tech gadgets to take down enemies. And (usually) they’re both non-lethal superheroes, preferring to incapacitate their enemies rather than kill them.
They even have two remarkably similar games. For Batman it’s the Arkham trilogy which culminated in the big, open-world game Arkham Knight. Now Spider-Man has his very own open-world game, Spider-Man, and it shares plenty in common with the Arkham series while also surpassing it in many ways.
After all, Bruce Wayne and Peter Parker only share so much in common. The billionaire playboy and the friendly neighborhood superhero are both good guys, but they’re not the same kind of good guy.
There’s no denying that Spider-Man plays similarly to Arkham. You zip around NYC with webs instead of a flying cape, but you’re still navigating skyscrapers from on high rather than running around the ground. Fighting with webs and web-based gadgets is different, but still mechanically similar, to Batman’s array of toys.
The Good.
But whatever Arkham does, Spider-Man can do better. (Before the chorus of dissent, I’ll admit this is likely a matter of opinion. I’m usually a Batman guy but I’m team Spider-Man now.)
Web-swinging through the city (which entails swinging, dashing forward, doing cool tricks in the air, running up and along walls and zipping to perches) is glorious. There’s nothing quite like it in modern video games. In many ways it’s the high-definition sequel to 2004′s Spider-Man 2 and shares many of the same systems.
Movement is glorious
That simply can’t be overstated. Moving about the expansive, richly detailed open-world burgh of Manhattan is a joy. This is a world tied directly to the MCU films though in an alternate universe where Spidey himself is older and more experienced. He’s put plenty of bad guys behind bars. He’s had a relationship with Mary Jane that’s already on the rocks. He’s worked for, and departed from The Daily Bugle. And he can fly through the city like a god. You’ll spot the Avengers building and the Wakanda embassy along the way.
Seriously, the traversal system in Spider-Man is a rush and it gets better as you level up. It’s some of the most fun I’ve had just moving through a game in ages. You can do tricks in the air, run up or across the sides of skyscrapers, zip across rooftops and once you master it, which shouldn’t take long, you won’t always want to use fast travel (aka the subway.) Moving is half the fun here, and the city is scattered with various types of challenges that become more and more diverse as you advance.
There are stealth challenges, combat challenges, movement-based challenges, research challenges and much, much more. This is an open world filled with stuff to do and all of it helps you unlock an array of gadgets, Spider-Man suits and their associated special powers, as well as level up and fill out your skill tree. A good deal of that skill tree is devoted to traversal. Much of the rest of it is geared toward Spidey’s other talent: Kicking butt.
Combat is a blast
Once again, the comparison to the Arkham games is apparent. This is almost a sub-genre now, with the Shadow of Mordor titles also making an appearance. I’m not including Assassin’s Creed because those games employ a very different, much more simplified combat system. Even Assassin’s Creed Origins employs a much simpler form of combat than what we have here.
That isn’t to say that (on normal difficulty) Spider-Man’s combat is ever too hard. I still have to play it on the harder difficulty setting (or the Ultra that’s being patched in at release) but at normal difficulty combat is fun. You can pull of combos, tinker around with your array of web and tech-based gadgets, and wreak havoc on your unwitting foes. As you unlock your skill tree and gadgets, combat becomes far more varied and interesting. That’s good, because enemies get tougher as the game progresses as well.
Most non-story combat encounters such as taking out an enemy base or stopping a crime will come packaged with challenges. So you’re tasked with webbing five enemies to walls, or electrocuting three enemies at once, or doing ten swing kicks and so on and so forth. You get more Tokens for this. Pretty much every challenge in the game rewards Tokens of one stripe or another, whether they’re Challenge Tokens, Base Tokens, Crime Tokens or Research Tokens, etc. These are spent to upgrade and unlock gadgets and suits.
Doing well in stealth or combat or chasing drones about the city will reward you with higher numbers of Tokens, so there’s always another level of challenge beyond just beating the bad guys to a pulp (though never, ever killing them.)
In any case, combat is fun. There’s a bunch of combos you can employ and they’re all fairly simple to learn. Press square and you punch. Press and hold square and you punch an enemy into the air. Now you can punch them a few more times in the air or you can hold triangle to slam them to the ground. Or you could hold square to do a swing kick then follow that up with a series of punches. If you face off against an enemy with a riot shield, punch them once then dodge with circle and you’ll slide between their legs so you can hit them from behind. If another enemy is across the street, tap triangle to web your way directly to them.
As the game progresses you unlock skills that give you a bunch of new choices in combat, from webbing guns out of enemies hands, to landing “perfect dodges” that can be followed up with one-shot KO. There’s a lot here but none of it is terribly complicated and when you find your rhythm it’s great fun.
Top this off with your Focus bar and special suit power. Both build as you score hits and dodges. You can spend Focus to heal or, when it’s built up to the brim, unleash a one-hit finisher move. The suit power recharges separately and can be used by clicking both joysticks down. There’s a ton of different suit powers that you unlock when you unlock suits, but you can mix and match them. My favorite is still the web blast where Spider-Man leaps into the air and webs every enemy in a pretty massive radius. It’s a great way to clear out a room or put a stop to a particularly nasty wave of bogies.
Truthfully, this isn’t my favorite combat system of all time but it fits perfectly with this game. I’m more of a Dark Souls guy at the end of the day, but Spider-Man is less stressful and the way the combat works, the way you chain it all together and the way you’re always moving, it starts to feel like a dance. I like that.
The game is gorgeous
There’s not much to say about the game’s graphics other than they’re lovely. Animations, in particular, are incredibly good and tight, making movement and combat both visually pleasing and satisfying to play. The city is beautiful. There’s a day and night cycle of sorts so you get to play in Manhattan in light and dark, sunshine and rain. The cutscenes are likewise outstanding and I’m just enormously impressed with how well the characters all look and how much that adds to the emotional impact of the game. Which brings us to . . . .
The story is shockingly good
I don’t mean to skimp on graphics but it’s one of those things where you’ll just have to see for yourself. There was a controversy about the game being downgraded but from my time with the game it looks terrific and I see no signs of Insomniac cutting back on the graphics.
Where the game shines even more brightly is its story. It’s one of the best Spider-Man stories outside of the comics—period. I enjoyed it as much as the best of the Spider-Man films. It’s not terribly surprising—maybe to newcomers to the Spider-Man mythos and the cast of villains surrounding Peter Parker—but the surprises don’t carry the story regardless. There’s a lot of emotional weight to the story, which culminates in a finale that’s truly powerful. Great performances and solid writing really help also.
That isn’t to say that it’s all weighty and emotional. There’s plenty of good Spider-Man humor and levity to keep the game clipping along. It’s a good mix. I enjoyed it a lot and I’m pretty critical of many video game stories. I’m very impatient with cutscenes a lot of the time but I never felt impatient during the game’s main storyline.
I did find myself impatient at other points in the game, however.
The Bad.
So thus far, most of this review has been incredibly positive. But I didn’t like everything about Spider-Man.
Forced stealth missions
What I hated most, and what I truly did hate about this game, were the forced stealth missions. I’m not talking about using stealth in combat. That’s loads of fun. Taking out enemies by distracting guards and then webbing their partners, or dashing between rooftops to silently eliminate snipers, is plenty fun.
What is not fun—what I truly cannot imagine another living soul describing as fun in any way, shape or form—is the forced stealth missions where you play as MJ or Miles Morales. These missions are scattered throughout the main story and they are awful. They could have, and should have, simply been cut-scenes.
Instead, we’re forced to creep through various encampments or buildings, silently avoiding guards, and if we’re caught we have to start over at the last checkpoint (blessedly not the beginning.) It’s tedious and frustrating. Even when you get more tools to help you sneak past enemies by distracting them, there is just nothing about it that I enjoy. No redeeming qualities.
If every single one of these forced stealth missions had been struck from the game before release, this would have been a much more positive review. As it stands, including them strikes me as rather boneheaded and out of touch with what gamers actually enjoy (i.e. fun.)
Repetitive mini-games
There are a variety of mini-games in Spider-Man. Mostly these are simplistic puzzles that require you to “rewire” tech by adding pieces to a board and getting a line of energy to pass through the circuit with correct voltage. It’s fine, I guess, a couple of times. After the tenth or twentieth time it’s just boring and annoying.
Another less frequent mini-game tasks you with lining up rectangles just so. It’s as fun as it sounds.
QTE-drenched boss fights.
Quick-time events are scattered throughout Spider-Man and they’re okay sometimes. I’m not someone who usually says that about QTEs which I generally find abhorrent in most games, but there are a few times where these make sense and work okay in this game. Say you stop a car of criminals and then have to jump in front of it to stop the car and have to press square really fast. That’s fine.
There’s a couple big cinematic moments where you have to hit R2 and L2 at the same time, or guide the cursor into the circle and hit R1 just so, and none of that really bothers me (the last one reminds me of Shadow of Mordor.) Overall, these are pretty infrequent.
Where I really dislike them, and where they’re sadly far too common, is in some of the boss fights. Including side missions I think there are around seven or eight boss fights that I played. I didn’t play every side mission. At least three or four of these fights are massively QTE based. Very staged and cinematic, for lack of a better word.
I don’t like QTEs because they take me out of the normal rhythm of the game and they punish failure in an almost arbitrary fashion. (But don’t worry, timing is not that important. If you know the button to press just mash it and you’ll be fine.)
As a matter of course, of principle really, I prefer boss fights that test what you’ve learned so far and demand that you employ it well. I haven’t learned when to press triangle at just the right time when it flashes onscreen. I’ve learned how to string together combos and use my gadgets and dodge at just the right time. That’s what I’ve learned. A boss should put that learning to the test and make us even better (says the Dark Souls player.)
QTEs aren’t always lame but they’re always lame when they’re how you take down a boss. As a cool God of War style finisher, fine. But I have my limits. Fortunately Spider-Man isn’t the worst offender here, but I still have to lay out my protest.
The Ugly.
There’s nothing ugly about Spider-Man, so we’ll skip right ahead to whether or not you should pick this one up. No reviewer can totally answer that question, of course. We have our biases. We have our review codes. We have our preferences and we played the game in five days instead of five weeks or five months. But I do give Spider-Man a Buy on my Buy/Hold/Sell scale.
For one thing, I liked it enough to finish it and I only started to get a little tired of it toward the end (and only with all the side content that non-reviewers can enjoy without the need to get a review published on time.) The story kept me hooked right up until the bitter end and when the credits rolled I couldn’t wait for the sequel, which (depending on sales) seems all but inevitable.
You could wait for a sale, absolutely, but you won’t regret this purchase if you enjoy Spider-Man, action games, and swinging through Manhattan like a damn god.
TL;DR: Spider-Man is a fantastic action game with great movement and combat and a compelling story that’s only dragged down from time to time with boring missions and QTE-based boss fights.
Spider-Man (2018)
Platform: PlayStation 4
Developer: Insomniac Games
Publisher: Sony Interactive Entertainment
Release Date: September 7th, 2018
Price: $59.99
Score: 9.5/10
A review code was provided for the purposes of this review. If you have any questions, comments or just want to say hey hit me up on Twitter and Facebook. Thanks!
