J. Jonah Jameson was right.
(Heavy spoilers follow)
What would be nothing more and nothing less than a derivative bare minimum ubigame is brought low by its gross mishandling of its story and many of its characters.
To begin with, this is a reality in which Peter Parker has been Spiderman for well over ten years (putting him around the 27 years of age mark) but somehow he still has the trappings of a teenager and his only enemies have been Kingpin, Shocker, Electro, Rhino, Scorpion, Lizard and Vulture. No Doc Ock (though he is introduced in this game), no Venom and, most egregiously, no Goblin: his defining nemesis, key in his formation as a superhero, and he's not in the story for a whole decade of spider business. Yes, this game does provide the soil for the green villain's genesis but it's simply absurd to not make him instrumental in Peter's growth.
No Goblin then, and no Gwen Stacy either, whose existence (and more importantly: her death) is conspicuously absent from the backstory, which begs the question of exactly what drama has Peter lived through to mold his character as a self-sacrificing hero. At least Uncle ben is still dead, though off-screen, long ago and never really explored or even mentioned beyond a few weightless musings here and there. The game reads like yet another origin story, but it premises itself as anything but, with lots and lots of baggage and history between characters already, resulting in a very jarring narration.
Aunt May's character has been nothing short of vandalized: she has now been rewritten as some kind of no-nonsense charity CEO, which sorely detracts from the kind, fragile motherly figure Peter feels responsible towards; this May doesn't need anyone's help, and this once again knocks items off Spiderman's superproblems list. Furthermore, not only does Peter almost never refer to her as "aunt", bafflingly preferring to call her "May" (which surely must have confused newcomers as to who exactly she is to him) but the fact the ending reveals that she was all along aware of the fact that Peter was Spiderman, and that she admired him for it, is simply absurd: the original Aunt May's distaste for his secret identity was an essential point in deepening Peter's cognitive dissonance regarding his double life, the removal of which damages his characters almost irreparably. There is no conflict in Peter's life, no hardship coming from his secret identity beyond maybe trying to reconcile with his ex girlfriend Mary Jane. There is some compelling drama with Doc Ock near the end of the game, but it doesn't account for the missing decade of, well... nothing.
Much like with Aunt May, the writers' fretful insecurity about not knowing what to do with the character of Mary Jane shines through, how they had no idea on how to present her as a pivotal, meaningful, emancipated character. Their solution was to rewrite her from a successul fashion model (which evidently just won't fly as a Disney age aspirational profession) into a crack investigative journalist always on the edge of a felony arrest ("Hey girls, fuck the rules, live dangerously!" -Walt Disney 2018). This of course wasn't enough to exorcise any possible spectre of controversy about female empowerment, so they have her directly partake in the violence, making her sneak around criminal lairs and high security compounds like Sam Fisher, silently zapping trained paramilitary commandos in the back with a taser gun in one of her many, many interludes serving to break up the monotony of Spiderman's gameplay. In short, they turned Mary jane into Lois Lane from the movie Man of Steel: she even looks exactly like a young Amy Adams, down to the vestiary and hairdo she wore in the film.
While web slinging around the city you will hear a number of broadcasts by J. Jonah Jameson (here a radio pundit) in which he comments on recent events and expresses his contempt for Spiderman. Whereas in any other piece of Spiderman fiction it always was impossible to relate to JJJ, patently wrong as he has always been written, blaming Spidey for things that were not his fault, here it's difficult to listen to his monologues (which the game lets you toggle off, assuming you'd find them irritating) and not find yourself nodding here and there when he points out the damage that Spiderman does to the city on a regular basis either via clumsiness or cavalier overconfidence.
The ludonarrative dissonance this commentary spotlights is pretty glaring: in one particular mission, Spiderman is trying to catch the leader of a terrorist cell as they rob one of Kingpin's weapon stashes inside of a Manhattan highrise. Once he is spotted, the baddies attempt to flee by helicopter, at which point Spiderman webs the chopper (in itself a dangerous action since there is a busy street underneath) and this quickly escalates to a rocket knocking down a giant construction crane, which demolishes several nearby buildings before being webbed into inertness. A piece of it gets stuck on the web attached to the helicopter, which causes a wrecking ball effect, causing further destruction (and likely victims) around the city. Result: more damage than 9/11, when sticking a spider tracker on the fuselage of the helicopter would have sufficed, but since the game needs an Uncharted-style set piece, here we are, and JJJ is proven correct, since this happens every other mission.
Thing is, such setpieces are necessary, since the core of the gameplay is as bland and monotonous as they come: no effort was made to come up with anything original to freshen up a formula that had been tired and overdone for a decade by the time of the game's release. Move around Manhattan in a manner lifted straight from 2009's Prototype (incidentally also set in Manhattan) repeating ad nauseam a loop of activating towers with a minigame pilfered from Batman Arkham City to reveal the map, running into crime incidents to resolve (a couple different types at most) and bagging a myriad of different collectables clearly marked on the map and none of which is any fun to get. Do they at least reward you with anything good? Not really. You use them to upgrade gear you don't really need and unlock suits that serve little purpose aside from sheer cosmetic appeal. A few sidequests appear here and there but they are hardly worth the time.
Particularly hilarious are the backpacks that Spiderman has apparently left around the city years before. Not only are these still stuck to the wall without the web having dissolved, but they contain mementos from Peter's private life, sometimes going as far as his ID card or student pass bearing his name and photo. Imagine being a construction worker refurbishing a rooftop and finding a backpack clearly belonging to Spiderman (the web, the web!) with his secret identity revealed by the items within. They couldn't come up with less nonsensical ideas for collectibles? Silly!
Story missions are the highlight of the package, with a genuinely good character arc for Doc Ock and a suitable amount of visual spectacle. However, it's hard to shake the feeling that the game sits there spinning its wheels for the better part of the first and second acts, wasting the player's time with pointless minigames (hey look, it's Pipemania again!) and tedious missions in between the decent ones. The rogue gallery of villains is uninteresting to say the least. Kingpin and Shocker show up for one boss fight each and are never seen again, and the aforementioned Rhino, Scorpion, Electro and Vulture are hardly the most compelling villains, as is Mr Negative, whose arc is passable, but not given any interesting conclusion before or after the credits roll. These Sinister Six are more like the Spiritless Six.
Combat is, once again, stolen straight out of the Arkham series. Now, I was never a fan of Batman's X,X,Y,X,X style of automatic combat, but at least there it was done properly. Here, trying to vault over or slide under one of the many enemies that are impervious from the front is a proper chore that will fail far too often for its own good. Encounters boil down to interminable waves of identical enemies to dispatch the same way, with easy and repetitive boss fights peppered throughout, all boiling down to the same soup of "dodge dodge until the boss gets tired, then press triangle and button mash. Rinse and repeat". the final encounter of the game has you sit through the exact same five second dodge, punch and slam loop for a good three minutes.
You will want to avoid the tedious combat as often as possible, which brings us to yet another thing lifted from (you guessed it) the Arkham franchise: the stealth. Spiderman can zip up to rafters and flagpoles and use them as perches to stealth takedown enemies the same way that Batman can, though in a much more simplified manner: there are no floor grates or vents and there is no crouching, so any ground level action is discouraged, only leaving perch takedowns and web tripmines (whatever they are). It's simplistic and doesn't even work properly: sometimes you will have an enemy right below you, having made sure nobody can see him being taken down, and the prompt to do so just will not appear, forcing you to move to another position hoping the game will like it more. Fiddly and frustrating.
Even the web slinging itself has problems. while it's generally fit for purpose in simulating Spiderman's trademark mobility, it sometimes just won't respond to commands. Whereas previous Spiderman games tended to fudge the web slinging by letting Spidey attach himself to things off screen that may or may not have been there, this game chooses to be a stickler for realism: if an object isn't there, you won't be able to hook on to it, meaning you will plummet face first to the ground. this is not a massive problem in practice, since there is no fall damage whatsoever, but when the game arbitrarily decides that the floor is lava (like in a particularly dreadful dream sequence) you will find yourself missing a swing and dying, ever so more noticeable when the absence of consequences is removed.
One last mention for the music: the composer sure was proud of the five notes of the main theme, as you hear them on a constant loop in one form or another the entire game. The worst offender is the traversal music that flares up whenever you are not with your feet planted firmly on the ground, which is 90% of the time. You will become nauseated by the constant repetition of the (awfully generic) jingle, which is paradoxically so forgettable that you will not manage to recall what it sounds like even after being drilled with it non-stop for 20 hours. Thankfully the third act of the game features a far more somber tone, including a much more lowkey score, meaning you will actually be able to hear yourself think for a change.
Marvel's Spiderman is a derivative, unimaginative affair, ridden with inconsistencies, a plot that makes no sense due to the careless changes made to established lore and gameplay that fails to impress in any way, having been done often and better before.
(Heavy spoilers follow)
What would be nothing more and nothing less than a derivative bare minimum ubigame is brought low by its gross mishandling of its story and many of its characters.
To begin with, this is a reality in which Peter Parker has been Spiderman for well over ten years (putting him around the 27 years of age mark) but somehow he still has the trappings of a teenager and his only enemies have been Kingpin, Shocker, Electro, Rhino, Scorpion, Lizard and Vulture. No Doc Ock (though he is introduced in this game), no Venom and, most egregiously, no Goblin: his defining nemesis, key in his formation as a superhero, and he's not in the story for a whole decade of spider business. Yes, this game does provide the soil for the green villain's genesis but it's simply absurd to not make him instrumental in Peter's growth.
No Goblin then, and no Gwen Stacy either, whose existence (and more importantly: her death) is conspicuously absent from the backstory, which begs the question of exactly what drama has Peter lived through to mold his character as a self-sacrificing hero. At least Uncle ben is still dead, though off-screen, long ago and never really explored or even mentioned beyond a few weightless musings here and there. The game reads like yet another origin story, but it premises itself as anything but, with lots and lots of baggage and history between characters already, resulting in a very jarring narration.
Aunt May's character has been nothing short of vandalized: she has now been rewritten as some kind of no-nonsense charity CEO, which sorely detracts from the kind, fragile motherly figure Peter feels responsible towards; this May doesn't need anyone's help, and this once again knocks items off Spiderman's superproblems list. Furthermore, not only does Peter almost never refer to her as "aunt", bafflingly preferring to call her "May" (which surely must have confused newcomers as to who exactly she is to him) but the fact the ending reveals that she was all along aware of the fact that Peter was Spiderman, and that she admired him for it, is simply absurd: the original Aunt May's distaste for his secret identity was an essential point in deepening Peter's cognitive dissonance regarding his double life, the removal of which damages his characters almost irreparably. There is no conflict in Peter's life, no hardship coming from his secret identity beyond maybe trying to reconcile with his ex girlfriend Mary Jane. There is some compelling drama with Doc Ock near the end of the game, but it doesn't account for the missing decade of, well... nothing.
Much like with Aunt May, the writers' fretful insecurity about not knowing what to do with the character of Mary Jane shines through, how they had no idea on how to present her as a pivotal, meaningful, emancipated character. Their solution was to rewrite her from a successul fashion model (which evidently just won't fly as a Disney age aspirational profession) into a crack investigative journalist always on the edge of a felony arrest ("Hey girls, fuck the rules, live dangerously!" -Walt Disney 2018). This of course wasn't enough to exorcise any possible spectre of controversy about female empowerment, so they have her directly partake in the violence, making her sneak around criminal lairs and high security compounds like Sam Fisher, silently zapping trained paramilitary commandos in the back with a taser gun in one of her many, many interludes serving to break up the monotony of Spiderman's gameplay. In short, they turned Mary jane into Lois Lane from the movie Man of Steel: she even looks exactly like a young Amy Adams, down to the vestiary and hairdo she wore in the film.
While web slinging around the city you will hear a number of broadcasts by J. Jonah Jameson (here a radio pundit) in which he comments on recent events and expresses his contempt for Spiderman. Whereas in any other piece of Spiderman fiction it always was impossible to relate to JJJ, patently wrong as he has always been written, blaming Spidey for things that were not his fault, here it's difficult to listen to his monologues (which the game lets you toggle off, assuming you'd find them irritating) and not find yourself nodding here and there when he points out the damage that Spiderman does to the city on a regular basis either via clumsiness or cavalier overconfidence.
The ludonarrative dissonance this commentary spotlights is pretty glaring: in one particular mission, Spiderman is trying to catch the leader of a terrorist cell as they rob one of Kingpin's weapon stashes inside of a Manhattan highrise. Once he is spotted, the baddies attempt to flee by helicopter, at which point Spiderman webs the chopper (in itself a dangerous action since there is a busy street underneath) and this quickly escalates to a rocket knocking down a giant construction crane, which demolishes several nearby buildings before being webbed into inertness. A piece of it gets stuck on the web attached to the helicopter, which causes a wrecking ball effect, causing further destruction (and likely victims) around the city. Result: more damage than 9/11, when sticking a spider tracker on the fuselage of the helicopter would have sufficed, but since the game needs an Uncharted-style set piece, here we are, and JJJ is proven correct, since this happens every other mission.
Thing is, such setpieces are necessary, since the core of the gameplay is as bland and monotonous as they come: no effort was made to come up with anything original to freshen up a formula that had been tired and overdone for a decade by the time of the game's release. Move around Manhattan in a manner lifted straight from 2009's Prototype (incidentally also set in Manhattan) repeating ad nauseam a loop of activating towers with a minigame pilfered from Batman Arkham City to reveal the map, running into crime incidents to resolve (a couple different types at most) and bagging a myriad of different collectables clearly marked on the map and none of which is any fun to get. Do they at least reward you with anything good? Not really. You use them to upgrade gear you don't really need and unlock suits that serve little purpose aside from sheer cosmetic appeal. A few sidequests appear here and there but they are hardly worth the time.
Particularly hilarious are the backpacks that Spiderman has apparently left around the city years before. Not only are these still stuck to the wall without the web having dissolved, but they contain mementos from Peter's private life, sometimes going as far as his ID card or student pass bearing his name and photo. Imagine being a construction worker refurbishing a rooftop and finding a backpack clearly belonging to Spiderman (the web, the web!) with his secret identity revealed by the items within. They couldn't come up with less nonsensical ideas for collectibles? Silly!
Story missions are the highlight of the package, with a genuinely good character arc for Doc Ock and a suitable amount of visual spectacle. However, it's hard to shake the feeling that the game sits there spinning its wheels for the better part of the first and second acts, wasting the player's time with pointless minigames (hey look, it's Pipemania again!) and tedious missions in between the decent ones. The rogue gallery of villains is uninteresting to say the least. Kingpin and Shocker show up for one boss fight each and are never seen again, and the aforementioned Rhino, Scorpion, Electro and Vulture are hardly the most compelling villains, as is Mr Negative, whose arc is passable, but not given any interesting conclusion before or after the credits roll. These Sinister Six are more like the Spiritless Six.
Combat is, once again, stolen straight out of the Arkham series. Now, I was never a fan of Batman's X,X,Y,X,X style of automatic combat, but at least there it was done properly. Here, trying to vault over or slide under one of the many enemies that are impervious from the front is a proper chore that will fail far too often for its own good. Encounters boil down to interminable waves of identical enemies to dispatch the same way, with easy and repetitive boss fights peppered throughout, all boiling down to the same soup of "dodge dodge until the boss gets tired, then press triangle and button mash. Rinse and repeat". the final encounter of the game has you sit through the exact same five second dodge, punch and slam loop for a good three minutes.
You will want to avoid the tedious combat as often as possible, which brings us to yet another thing lifted from (you guessed it) the Arkham franchise: the stealth. Spiderman can zip up to rafters and flagpoles and use them as perches to stealth takedown enemies the same way that Batman can, though in a much more simplified manner: there are no floor grates or vents and there is no crouching, so any ground level action is discouraged, only leaving perch takedowns and web tripmines (whatever they are). It's simplistic and doesn't even work properly: sometimes you will have an enemy right below you, having made sure nobody can see him being taken down, and the prompt to do so just will not appear, forcing you to move to another position hoping the game will like it more. Fiddly and frustrating.
Even the web slinging itself has problems. while it's generally fit for purpose in simulating Spiderman's trademark mobility, it sometimes just won't respond to commands. Whereas previous Spiderman games tended to fudge the web slinging by letting Spidey attach himself to things off screen that may or may not have been there, this game chooses to be a stickler for realism: if an object isn't there, you won't be able to hook on to it, meaning you will plummet face first to the ground. this is not a massive problem in practice, since there is no fall damage whatsoever, but when the game arbitrarily decides that the floor is lava (like in a particularly dreadful dream sequence) you will find yourself missing a swing and dying, ever so more noticeable when the absence of consequences is removed.
One last mention for the music: the composer sure was proud of the five notes of the main theme, as you hear them on a constant loop in one form or another the entire game. The worst offender is the traversal music that flares up whenever you are not with your feet planted firmly on the ground, which is 90% of the time. You will become nauseated by the constant repetition of the (awfully generic) jingle, which is paradoxically so forgettable that you will not manage to recall what it sounds like even after being drilled with it non-stop for 20 hours. Thankfully the third act of the game features a far more somber tone, including a much more lowkey score, meaning you will actually be able to hear yourself think for a change.
Marvel's Spiderman is a derivative, unimaginative affair, ridden with inconsistencies, a plot that makes no sense due to the careless changes made to established lore and gameplay that fails to impress in any way, having been done often and better before.