January 11, 2018
I’ve been in a bit of a slump when it comes to reviews, so I’m going to revert back to my old style of positives and negatives. The “too long; didn’t read” is that Spider-man is a good super hero game, probably the best Spider-man game of all time, but certain design quirks and lackluster DLC keeps it from being as good as something like Arkham Asylum or Arkham City. That being said, let’s dive in.
Liked
Web swinging: the web swinging is definitely great and you can do a lot with it, thanks in part to a few additional movement options that weren’t available in earlier Spider-man titles. The ability to quick turn, zip to launch points, or simply pull yourself forward to maintain speed/altitude makes the web swinging feel amazing, but it does feel a little more floaty compared to how the great web swinging physics were in Spider-man 2. Part of the smoother control experience comes from this game embracing the Assassin’s Creed style of free movement, which allows you to hold down the web swing button and freely run up the sides of buildings or parkour over roof obstacles. It can feel a little overly cinematic at times and chase sequences still suck, but I’ve yet to play a game with good chase sequences so I’m not going to execute the game for that.
Graphics & Photo mode: Spider-man isn’t the best looking video game around when it comes to human facial design but there has been a LOT of detail put into the costumes. Some have some weird textures or strange attempts to make them more “realistic” but a few of these choices help to make the costumes a little better (such as Kaine’s suit) so I won’t complain that much. It also comes out very well in the game’s photo mode, which many games have now (from Shadow of War to the upcoming Devil May Cry 5) but Spider-man as a franchise gives a lot of options that other games lack due to tone and time period, such as selfies, interesting borders, and tons of great aerial shots.
Story: The plot of Spider-man is rather predictable to a point, but it presents the problems that Peter has living his double life very well, and the ending takes the series in a direction that they haven’t had the nerve to do for twenty years. Plus the game actually starts with an experienced Spider-man that’s been doing the job for eight years and, shock of shocks, mostly knows what he’s doing. He still acts immature as hell, especially when he is talking about “Spider-Cop” but it’s nice to see a capable/non-high school Spider-man. Hoping the trend continues into the inevitable sequel.
Useful web-shooters: Rather than starting a fight about organic webs versus web-shooters, I’ll just say that this game makes the best use of Spider-man’s web-shooters that I’ve seen. So many other Spider-man games get hung up on the amount of web-fluid that Peter has on him or giving him infinite webs that are worthless, but Spider-man instead gives you webs that recharge and have the ability to “instantly” take out enemies if they’re close to walls. This has high utility, fits very well in-universe, and can create alternative strategies for making out large groups of enemies or tough single foes. It can be rather finicky but the basic web-shooter ability regenerates at a very fast rate so it’s not that frustrating.
Neutral
Combat: There is a LOT going on in Spider-man’s combat, and it actually makes the gameplay worse than its contemporaries. Think of almost any other action game and how the combat works: you start off with a small tool box with a handful of moves and then expand outwards into a lot more gear/weapons/abilities. Meanwhile Spider-man starts at 11 and then goes to around a 15 on the “amount of stuff you can do” scale, with the ability to throw items into your opponents, throw enemies themselves, web them up or to walls, and not to mention dodges, air combos, and launchers. This certainly helps you feel like an experienced, powerful super hero but it can be a little overwhelming. Then you get more and more gadgets, most of which are redundant or pointless, and it all feels like a mess. When in motion the combat itself is fine, focusing a little more on fighting guys with guns than the Arkham series and with webs that let you quickly move around fights rather than Batman’s ridiculous leaps around the room. However, dodges can be unreliable, with machine guns occasionally hitting you even after you’ve dodged an attack, and many areas are full of clumsy obstacles that can break up the flow of combat, which isn’t fun. Certain enemies are also a pain to fight, but we’ll get to that a bit later.
Stealth mode: Much like the Arkham games, Spider-man has stealth mechanics that can be used to take out unaware enemies in one hit. These can be extremely entertaining sections as Spider-man bounces around the area, subduing enemies like dominoes, but there are a TON of minor issues that make the stealth feel more like a tacked on feature that pales in comparison to the Arkham series. For starters the enemies almost never wise up to Spider-man’s presence, regardless of how many of their friends they discover are missing. When I played the Arkham games I would complain about how there was no option to take everyone out without them being “alerted,” but now that I’ve experienced clueless enemies that have never looked up even once in their lives I realize why Arkham’s “now the enemies are looking for you” can be more exciting. Spider-man also as the ability to shoot his webs into the ground and lure enemies with the noise, so these infinite noisemakers are ridiculously easy to exploit and make most encounters laughable when compared to certain Arkham levels where enemies would not fall for distractions. The worst part about the whole experience is that the game doesn’t trust your ability to determine whether or not enemies are “safe” to take down, so you can use Spider-man’s version of “Detective Vision” to see if an enemy is tagged with a “Safe” or “Danger” marker. I’m not necessarily opposed to a mechanic that takes out the arbitrary nature of enemy awareness in stealth games, but the tags are spotty and take a while to show up so I would have preferred enemies changing highlight colors instead like other games with similar systems.
Bonus villains: For a brief moment in Spider-man I thought that it was going to be like Arkham City or Arkham Knight where there were side missions that related to many minor villains. Taskmaster, Tombstone, and Screwball all show up in relatively short order and I was excited to see who else was going to show up…only for no others to show up outside of the main story. Sure, there are lots of villains that are part of the main story, but in a universe where Spider-man has fought almost all of his main villains outside of Doc Ock, Venom, and the Goblins it’s really disappointing to not run into the likes of Chameleon, Sandman, Lizard, or Mysterio. I guess you’ve gotta save something other than Venom for the sequel…
Costume selection: I can appreciate that all of your favorite costumes will never be in any super hero game, and I can appreciate that there are a lot of costumes that did make it in the game that wouldn’t be in other titles, such as two of the new “Spider Armors” and the updated Spider-man 2099 costume. However, there are far too many costumes in the game that are in there specifically for marketing, jokes, or simple laziness. Where’s Ben Reilly’s updated Spider-man costume? Why is the “big reward” for completing the game getting Peter in his underwear? Why are the last DLC costumes completely terrible? It’s also worth noting that many costumes are really hard to see in much of the game’s lighting, but that leads us into…
Hated
The new costume: I don’t want to say that I HATED this costume, but I really grew to dislike how they had obviously worked on it more than the others when it comes to visibility. Their cover suit is a slightly brighter shade of red and the big white spider really helps Spider-man stand out in dark areas. It’s not a surprise that this is how it works, they said as much when fans interrogated them about the strange new costume design, but when many other costumes didn’t seem to get the same “at least slightly visible in light” attention I get a little upset. I wanted to play through at least some of the game as classic Spider-man or original 2099, but outside of sunlight Spider-man was essentially just a dark suit.
Side missions: During the course of the game you’ll occasionally get a blip that says “new side mission available,” and so you need to pull open your map, find where it is, and then go trigger it. These missions can be interesting at times, such as stopping a string of assassinations across the city, but more often than not they’re frustrating busy work, especially once you unlock the “missing students” side quests where you need to bounce from one side of the city to the other to find a stupid NPC based entirely on a photo. Yes, I can’t wait to swing around every train track in New York to try to find a dude bro that didn’t ring up his buddies yesterday. The game’s scripting clearly isn’t a big fan of these side missions either, since if you use the fast travel system to get to the objective area quicker than the game is expecting you’ll have Spider-man repeatedly harping the “oh man I bet the guy is over here” dialogue while you’re finishing the mission rather than while you’re on route like the game expects.
Challenge missions: There are many types of missions in Spider-man, from side missions to science missions to random street crimes, but even worse than the obnoxious side missions are the irritating challenge missions. These stages play out exactly like they sound, with Spider-man engaging in a race, fight, or stealth section that scores you based on your performance and speed. The big issue here is that the scores appear to be so obnoxiously high that you have no way of knowing how well you’re actually doing with them until you get to the very end, at which point you get a huge dump of bonus points that are never explained to you and, SURPRISE, you’re 3,000 points off of the gold medal. Several of the challenge stages also suffer from the hit detection of the game’s “grab something in the environment and throw it,” which requires you to be a very short distance from an object to throw it and god forbid you’re half an inch off. It would have been much better to either reward more points over the course of the challenge rather than all at the end, or to have a “score summary” to explain where your score was lacking.
“No kill rule”?: Every city crime mission type comes with optional objectives for additional rewards, with things like “web ten enemies to a wall” or “get a combo of forty.” However when these fights take place on a roof there will often be the challenge of “throw ten enemies off the roof,” which leads to some questions about what type of Spider-man game we’re playing here. Sure, most of the time the game automatically webs these hapless fools to the side of a building after you knock them off, but sometimes it doesn’t. I threw someone off a twenty-story building once and he literally landed on his head and went limp like a rag doll, and that wasn’t even the worst example (see attached image above). Heroes like Spider-man and Batman are big on the “no kill” thing, so it’s surprising to see game mechanics built around potentially killing criminals, never mind that more often than not your dodges will lead to enemies behind you getting shot.
Silver Sable and her goons: Silver Sable’s soldiers are completely tedious “punch sponge” enemies that arbitrarily require you to hit them with environmental objects to “break” their armor when they aren’t using jetpacks to ruin your aerial combos. Almost every fight with them involves an APC that you can only disable with the game’s hit-or-miss environmental throw hit detection, and they also look like they’re wearing armor ripped straight from the new X-COM games, but more than that…who actually cares about Silver Sable? She’s been in the background or forgettable focus of several Spider-man stories back in the day, including several with Sandman and a “What If?” where she married Peter after Black Cat died, but then she got shoehorned into a Spider-man story that was meant for Black Cat a few years ago and now we’re supposed to like her?
DLC: As much as I enjoyed hanging out with Black Cat, the DLC isn’t really worth the twenty-seven dollars they ask for it. It’s essentially a side campaign that takes about ten hours to complete (more if you do all the side missions that come with it) but it ends on a lukewarm note and doesn’t actually seem to resolve much of anything. The game does introduce “new enemies” but they’re more obnoxious than fun to fight against and you’re really not missing out on much other than alternate costumes (including Kaine’s Scarlet Spider costume and the original Iron Spider, the devils) if you just skip the DLC entirely. Or do what I did and wait for a sale on a complete package.
Story hiccups: At certain points in the game you might get the feeling that parts of the story were left on the cutting room floor but not everyone realized it. The revelation of a villain’s identity is completely sidestepped by a time skip, robbing us of the SHOCKED REACTION that Spider-man should have experienced at the news, and a different character suddenly knows who Spider-man is without any previous hints that he had figured it out. This gets especially confusing because later on in the game Peter reveals his identity to this person and the guy acts completely surprised, so there was clearly a miscommunication between the “idle dialogue” writers and the “main story” writers. There’s also a strange obsession with Mister Negative to the point where they make him a member of the Sinister Six. Ah yes, Spider-man’s most memorable, classic villains: Electro, Rhino, Scorpion, Vulture, and Mr. Negative…well, not every member can be good, I guess.
Suit Powers: A good portion of the new suits that you can unlock in Spider-man come with “suit powers,” which act as super abilities that you can activate during combat. These can be swapped between any suits once you unlock them and come in the standard variations: increased damage, increased air time, increased movement speed, robotic spider arms, etc. The big problem is that they give you the best suit power right away: one that regenerates the game’s “focus” meter, which can be used to both use takedowns on enemies or heal yourself during combat. So if you immediately have the ability to KO any basic enemy OR heal yourself after being hit by a grenade you could swear you dodged, why would you use anything else?
I dream of a world where great web swinging and many costumes are not the only bars that a Spider-man game needs to hit to be a “good” Spider-man game. Spider-man is a good Spider-man game, and a good super hero game, but all of these qualifiers should tell you that I don’t think it’s a great video game. The finicky combat, annoying late-game enemies, easy stealth sections, and filler side missions create a game that feels more boring or sloppier than the best games in the genre (the first two Arkham games), but it is definitely the best Spider-man game in years and is a lot of fun if you want a long open world game without a lot of depth. Recommended to Spider-man fans, but people that hate super heroes or are scared of heights should probably pass.
