Marvel's Spider-Man

Note: Video version here. The text below is a transcript of the shooting script. Some wording might be slightly different between the text and video. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I am not really into comic books and superheroes in general. I know things about the stories and characters, but don’t actively follow them. At most, I watch some of the Marvel movies and enjoy them for what they are. That said, I do have a favorite superhero. And that’s Spider-Man. I love Spider-Man. As a superhero but also just as a character. So it’s probably no surprise that I love this new Spider-Man game as well.

My ears perked up when this game first got announced. If there’s one superhero I would want to be, it’s Spider-Man. That’s not gonna happen, so I’ll settle for the next best thing: living as Spider-Man vicariously through a video game. Which is a tall order that Marvel’s Spider-Man totally gets right.

I’ll start with what everyone’s minds immediately go to when talking about a Spider-Man game. How’s the swinging? Is it better than Spider-Man 2? Yes! It’s great! It’s one of the most polished, fluid, exhilarating world traversal systems I have experienced in a video game in recent memory. It feels like a lot to get a grip on during the initially tutorial when you first boot up the game, but I found it very easy to wrap my head around after the first mission or so.

Transitioning between swinging, wall running, jumping off rooftops, and web zipping all feels incredibly smooth. The swinging mechanics are mapped to the triggers, bumpers, and the X button depending if you’re just swinging from buildings, zipping forward for momentum, or zooming onto a perch. Once you’re in the flow of it, it just feels like a natural extension of you hands to the controller. Almost in the same way that it might feel like a natural extension for a real life Spidey.

There’s a great sense of speed and momentum to all of it. The swinging feels fully featured right up front, and you can unlock more traversal skills in the skill tree to make it feel even better. Higher jumps, more web zips, further rooftop launches. The only thing that breaks the flow of swinging for me, it’s the unlockable trick system. It’s fun and silly, and nets you some extra experience points that can add up nicely, but I often found it to interrupt my momentum if I held a trick for a hair too long. But besides those few extra points of XP, it’s fairly inconsequential and I eventually just stopped doing tricks all together unless I was just goofing off in the open world.

Which leads me into the next big question, how’s the open world? Does it actually feel like New York? The answer is also yeah, pretty much!

Anyone who knows me by now also knows I spend a lot of time in New York. I love that city. I don’t live there, but it feels like my second home. It’s not often I get a chance to explore a video game recreation of a city and experience that sense of familiarity. I live in Miami, and there aren’t many games set here, and I haven’t seen a recent game set in New York that I actually wanted to play… Until Spider-Man.

It’s not a 1:1 recreation of New York of course. It’s largely condensed and has some landmark changes and new additions, but the general feel of the city is there.

One of my favorite things to do in that game was simply going around the city visiting landmarks and doing things I have done when I’m in New York. I sat in Bryant Park across what would be the Kinokuniya. I took a relaxing walk down the Highline. I looked for Joe’s pizza on Broadway. It wasn’t there. I went to the top of the game’s equivalent of One World Trade Center and enjoyed the view. Just… on the outside this time.

Luckily, the game also encouraged some of this exploration through it’s side activities. There is a mission type that asks Peter to break out his photography skills and get shots of major real world and in-universe landmarks. The Empire State Building, Avenger’s Tower, Madison Square Garden. MSG in particular got gave me a special kind of joy because it’s one of my favorite buildings in the city. And if you still need more photo shenanigans after you’ve completed all the landmark activities, there the wonderful photo mode to fill that need for you.

There are plenty of other mission types littered around the city as well. Activating towers to reveal the map, stopping petty crimes, taking out enemy outposts, world traversal challenges, and even pigeon chasing. Turn a corner, and you’re bound to find something to do.

It’s almost Ubisoft like in how many side activities there are. The difference being I actually had fun doing the majority of them. The challenge missions were my least favorite type of activity. Luckily, completing them at any rank counts towards the district completion percentage. You only have to worry about getting higher scores if you plan to get all the unlockables. And even then, you can get by with a lot of rank 2s and only a handful of rank 3s. I tried for better scores in a few to get more costumes and it wasn’t nearly as annoying as I expected it to be.

I guess my major gripe with the side activities is the pace at which new types of them are dolled out. I see the reasoning, there is a large variety so the game feeds them to you at a slow pace as to not overwhelm you right from the get go. But I think that pace is a bit *too* slow. It should have been ramped up a tad. This is especially true with the full on side missions. Different from side activities, these are unique little side stories of Spidey helping out some folks with their problems. There just aren’t that many of them. Because of that, there were long stretches of the game where I had none on the map because I hadn’t hit a point where the game would sprinkle out the next batch. Even though I knew they existed because they were on the district checklist. I would have much preferred more side missions at the cost of less side activities.

All in all, the side stuff does a good job at keeping me engaged with the world. And when I don’t want to do any of it, it’s still plenty of fun just swinging from district to district and finding points of interest. Spider-Man’s version of New York *feels* like New York. Aesthetically at least. Some of the city’s personality isn’t quite there, but the game makes up for that because it has personality to spare in other parts.

You can’t have a Spider-Man game without nailing Spider-Man’s persona. I’m happy to say that Yuri “all I hear is Yosuke” Lowenthal did a good job in doing so. He’s no Tom Holland, but really no one is. Love you Tom. In Marvel’s Spider-Man, Peter Parker is older, a bit more mature. He’s been fighting crime as Spidey for a while now. But he’s still that goofy nerd we know and love.

Spidey has quips for days. And there are a large amount of them too. Not quite enough that you won’t hear repeats often, but still enough that it isn’t annoying in ways other chatty protagonists can get. There is even an unlockable ability whose sole purpose is to quip at enemies.

Of course Spider-Man’s personality isn’t everything. There are more characters in this game. There’s Mary Jane, who at this point has broken up with Peter. You can definitely feel a bit of awkwardness between them in their interactions. Yuri Watanabe, Spidey’s cop contact who just barely deals with his antics. And you can’t forget about Jay Jonah Jameson, who in this world has been ousted from the Daily Bugle and now has his own podcast where he just yells about Spider-Man conspiracy theories all day.

Even things in the periphery are dripping with personality. The fake Twitter feed in the menu, the chibi Spider-Man emotes, to the fast travel subway scenes, to the bits of info on the backpack collectibles, and all the cool suits Spidey can wear. You can even walk around the street and high five or shoot finger guns at folks. All this really helps push that sense of enjoyment I would want out of a Spider-Man game.

So, we got the swinging down, the open world covered, all of Spidey’s character traits. What else does Spider-Man do? He punches bad guys. Let’s talk combat. If you have played an Arkham game, the combat will seem a bit familiar at first blush. I do think that is a little reductive though because of all the unique things only Spider-Man can do with his webs.

The combat can be broken down to three buttons: Square to attack, Circle to doge, and Right Bumper to use your various types of web gadgets. Sounds simple enough, right? And it is at first. Throw a few punches, dodge when the Spidey Sense buzzes around Spidey’s head, throw some more punches and a few webs for good measure. It’s not until the game starts throwing more and tougher enemies at you that things start to get a bit hairy. You’re gonna need to get pretty good at balancing tons of dudes and perfect dodging real fast. I would say the combat has a low barrier to entry, but a high skill ceiling.

Of course, as you level up, you get more skills to make fights easier. Triangle becomes a web zip that can also disarm enemies, your Spidey Sense gives a better indication of when to execute a perfect dodge, and you unlock more gadgets and perks to pull off crazy tricks. In fact, let’s talk about those for a minute.

You have three types of interchangeable abilities at your disposal for combat. Gadgets, Perks, and Suit Powers. Gadgets include your basic web shooter, stun webs, web grenades, and even a anti gravity field. Perks are passive abilities you can equip and change out at any given time. You can have up to three equipped in total. Suit Powers are your supers. Each suit you unlock comes with it’s own power, but they aren’t tied to the suit. So you can mix and mach your power with your aesthetic choices. Which was a big deal to me. Going back to my personality point, seeing all of Spider-Man’s different suits is part of that. Having the freedom to pick any suit without being locked into a suit power I didn’t like was vital.

By the end of the game I did have a favorite combination of skills to use when in a fight, but never did I feel like it was the be all end all loadout. I still enjoyed engaging with most of the other gadgets in different situations. Many times switching on the fly in the middle of a large combat scenario. Guy with a rocket launcher? Impact Web him to a wall. Group of enemies? Shock blast, Web Bomb, and Suspension Field one right after another. You can also go through certain combat scenarios with a focus on stealth. Picking off enemies one by one, stringing them up on flag poles and street lights. This approach was incredibly satisfying and always tried to go about it this way at first when given the chance.

Like many other parts of the game, the combat feels very polished and fluid. I played Spider-Man for 30-some odd hours and still got into some fights post game for the hell of it after the fact. I never got tired of it. Mostly. Boss fights can be repetitive since they just amount to hitting a guy a bunch of times and doing a few quicktime events. There’s a few set piece interactions that are different with every boss, but the damage dealing section is basically the same all the way through.

While I’m on the boss fights, a lot of them are put in the final act of the game. I expected them to be spread out a bit more. In fact, Spider-Man as a whole is pretty back loaded. The first two acts are much slower paced. I don’t meant that negatively, the game is just very deliberate with it’s story pacing. A lot of time is spent getting to know Peter, his current life situation, and the people close to him. There are even segments where you play as people other than Peter. It’s a neat idea on paper, but in practice they were some of the weakest segments in the game. All you’re doing is sneaking around an area trying not to get caught because it’s an instant fail state. They aren’t particularly challenging, the checkpointing is very generous. It’s just kind of an inconvenience in a game full of so much enjoyment otherwise.

The third act ramps everything up significantly. More spectacle. More excitement. More of the classic Spider-Man villains you expect to see. It really pushes the story forward and made me want to see it through. The stakes are raised, relationships are tested, and Peter has to be a proper crisis averting superhero now. Unfortunately, this comes at the expense of a core aspect of the entire game, swinging around the open world.

The story events in act 3 lead to circumstances where enemies show up all over the map. I couldn’t go 2 blocks without getting shot at or having to dodge some rockets. You’re not forced to stop what you’re doing to deal with the enemies, but it makes traversing New York and doing any side activities more of a chore than it should be.

The story does end on a satisfying note. The final boss fight, while very mechanically similar to the other boss fights, still conveys a sense of tension and heavy consequence thanks to the character work. There’s some great acting in this final sequence that does a fantastic job in selling the emotional burden that being Spider-Man has on Peter.

Overall the story is something you you can absolutely see fitting right into the kinds of stories the Marvel Cinematic Universe tells. Great action, fun moments of levity, and serious dramatic shifts. It goes beyond what you might expect from games based on comic book characters in the past. It’s not just something tacked on hoping you’ll enjoy the game mechanics enough to not care. It’s something you’ll be invested in.

It even does the leg work to set up for a sequel. They don’t just leave the door wide open, they also open the windows, the pet doors, the vents, hell they might as well blow the damn roof off the house. I’m not one to ask for direct sequels to many things, but another Spider-Man game is definitely something I want now. Hell, I even think starting a separate Marvel Game Universe might be a thing worth looking into after this.

Marvel’s Spider-Man doesnt reinvent open world games. It’s an open world game that is refined and focused on making the player really feel like Spider-Man. It is easily some of the most fun I’ve had with a video game in 2018. It’s one of only two games I have 100%’d this year, and only 1 of 3 games I have ever platinum’d. Even after doing all that, I still want to play more. There just literally isn’t more for me to do. I think that clearly shows you where I stand on this game. What else can I say? I love Spider-Man. It’s as simple as that.