This is an ongoing list where I attempt to do the following: Play, Complete, and Rank every video game in the known universe in order to finally answer the age old question "What is the greatest game of all time?" For previous entries find the links on the attached spreadsheet.

How did I do?

I can't imagine I am alone in this, but big open world games are very hard for me to finish. Dating back to the X360 era I was unfortunately addicted to getting achievements, so I made sure to 100% nearly every game I started in earnest. That meant doing incredible monotonous tasks over and over again to make sure I shot every pigeon in GTA4, or collected every flag in AC1, because despite achievements meaning nothing in the world to anyone (not even Microsoft) I couldn't stop myself from playing that way.

When it came down to picking either the Xbox One or the PS4, I jumped ship on purpose as a way to break myself out of the achievement lifestyle. Sure trophies existed but I was out of that ecosystem so I wasn't worried about being sucked in, but my gaming style had changed during those X360 that stuck with me throughout. In fact despite not actively trying to get the trophies I found myself still trying to check off every single item on Spiderman's list before progressing the story. It actually made me put the game down from when it was a new release to lets say now. It wasn't until I did a playthrough with a buddy, who I was actually cognizant of their time that I was forced out of trying to 100% the game on this playthrough.

For those who are unaware, Marvel's Spiderman is the open world Spiderman game for the PS4. You play mainly as Peter Parker who already has his powers and is looking to clean up the streets. The first task you are given is to essentially take on Kingpin whom sets of an opening for a new villain to come to New York and take over the city. Being an open world game you can take Peter from either story mission to story mission, or stop and do some side activities like taking pictures, stopping crimes, or fixing police towers. There is a lot to do.

First off, this game looks and plays amazing. Controlling Spiderman is the true joy to this game. Swinging from building to building captures that feeling, we all wanted it to. Traversal is fast and energetic, you can aim to do stunts or tricks and rarely if ever do you feel that the camera or ruleset of how to swing is getting in your way. Even if you do mess up, Spiderman can essentially just sprint up to the top of a building for you to launch yourself off into swinging all over again. In a game where fast travel exists, swinging felt so good, that I only used fast travel once or twice for an entire playthrough. Even in combat, Spiderman can bust out his traversal moves to either swing into an enemy, or to dodge projectiles mid flight with barely a hitch in the locomotion.

A lot of the game centers around combat and for the most part it holds up in Spiderman. You can mash a single button for combos, or unleash special moves depending on what you have learned. There are even finishing moves that allow you to quickly drop an enemy. As you gain experience you can upgrade to learn some different moves, such as a ground pound, or gun takeaways, etc. There are very few moves you can envision Spiderman can do in your head that are not somewhat incorporated into the game. See a rocket coming at you and want to swing it back at an enemy? You can do that! Want to stick an enemy to the side of a building or throw a sewer grate at a baddie? You can do both of those! While there are moves that are very area specific, you essentially have the freedom to fight how you would like Spiderman to fight.

In addition to using experience to level up your moves, you can also level up gear, "craft" different suits, and purchase a million other upgrades to help you in your adventure. Each suit has a unique power attached to it, but if you aren't happy with that you can mix and match powers so that no matter what costume you are wearing your custom Spiderman is set how you want.

There are so many upgrades and customization offered, that it feels weird to say that it is my biggest gripe with the game. I wanted to engage with all the unique offerings the game had, but found a relatively good build earlier on and barely touched it as I moved forward. Even as I was able to afford new suits, I always brought along the same powers from my previous suit to just update my look but not my new abilities. Now granted there is no wrong way to play the game here, but outside of my own desire to buy more suits for dumb fun, I feel like you could play and beat this game barely engaging in what feels like a pretty crucial thing. Now it can be confusing, but I am talking about suit/suit power upgrades that are optional here and not necessarily the perk upgrade path that you get just from general leveling up. By giving us too much of a good thing and spoiling us so early, it made future upgrades almost meaningless as opposed to something to strive for.

While we are on the subject of minor nitpicks here, there are a handful of side activities that I feel are thoughtless and something tossed into the game as padding, when it didn't need padding. So, as the game progress you unlock more and more side activities. These can be interesting from little puzzle elements, to combat zones, to traversal puzzles, and picture taking. However, the farther along you go in the game, they just feel like carbon copies of other side quests, but are somehow worthy of their own map icon. For instance, early on in the game, you get an icon of a Kingpin hideout. In this locations you fight a few waves of enemies to clear out some Kingpin thugs and get scored accordingly. Later on you get hideouts for the new villain's thugs where you fight some waves of enemies, get scored accordingly. Then a prison break occurs, and you have prisoner hideouts where.... you fight waves of enemies and get scored accordingly, and so on and so on. Now I can understand that as the story progresses Kingpin's thugs are no longer ones that need to be viewed as a threat, but when the game starts and it shows you 10 or so locked side activities, its a shame that 4-5 of those 10 are literally the same side activity just different skinned bad guys. This is more semantics, but just make one general side quest called hideouts and classify them all together, don't give me the promise of fun and interesting side quests only to be rewarded with my 300th combat trial.

The plot for the game is pretty solid, even if some of the twists and turns are easy to spot a few chapters ahead. However, I will give the game credit for not just copying the origin story for the 10th time, or trying to quickly tie it in to either Spiderman Homecoming, or whatever the other movie was called that this game is sandwiched between the releases of. Now I don't read comics, and I can't say if this story is one that is a carbon copy of one of those, I was just pleased to see a new story as opposed to the well worn stories of superhero video game pasts. I would be remise to not mention that there are parts of the story, where you don't play as Spiderman and instead have to be a boring human with boring human powers. I honestly didn't hate these parts as much as other reviewers/players have mentioned in the past. Does it stink to go from playing as an all-powerful super-hero to a human? Sure.. but it does mix up the game and at least force you into situations you can't just swing your way through.

Marvel's Spiderman is a great game, full stop.. I enjoyed my time with it, but towards the end of my time I was ready for it to close as I was weary with some of the aspects of the game. The combat against non-bosses had me fairly bored towards the end of the game, but that was because we engaged with so much fighting earlier on. I will say that I think this game would have been given worse marks if I had forced myself to 100% the game like I would have in the past. To be fair, I don't think that is a unique problem to Spiderman I think that is a problem for all open world games.

Is this the greatest game of all time?: It's pretty close

Where do they rank: Spiderman is a top 5 game, coming in at #5. It is below Katamari Damacy, and above Mario 64.

Up Next: Super Mario World (SNES)

Anyone looking for it: here is the link to the list and more if you are interested in following along with me (this is not a self promotion). Here. I added links on the spreadsheet for quick navigation. Now if you missed a blog of a game you want to read about, you can get to it quickly, rather than having to scroll through my previous blogs wondering when it came up.

Thanks for Listening.