In a world where the sun sets on a Sunset Overdrive sequel, I wouldn't have guessed Insomniac would be the ones to take the mantle on a new Spiderman game. Of course, I'm an idiot with no profesional experience in the games industry bar a bad Youtube channel and some cobbled together video reviews. But that's off-topic.
Spiderman (2018) sets out to give the titular superhero his Batman: Arkham Asylum moment and I've got to say it really knocked it out of the park. The city of Manhattan is not your average take on New York but a treasure map of hidden visual quirks and novel sights that aim to give the city far more personality than it knows what to do with. Between your obvious New York sightseeing staples, Insomniac peppered in more Marvel references than you know what do with between the Wakandan Embassy, Dr. Strange's Sanctum Sanctorum and the Spidey staple; Oscorp Tower. Thankfully, the majority of the collectibles such as photographing these sights actually work with the flow of navigating that world. And goddamn is it fun to get around.
If you're a stranger to Sunset Overdrive, the game built off this notion of using the mobility in order to generate style. Building up your style meter allowed you to deliver more damage by triggering your powerups. You also had to maintain this high sense of speed in parkouring around environments to avoid enemies whie building style JUST to stay alive. Because at the core, getting around had to be slick, fun and responsive, Spiderman cribs that entire playbook in creating a mobility system that's just a treat at any point. The skill tree doesn't lock you out of the fun early on, but rather empowers you with cheap skills to make getting around faster. This in turn let me get comfortable but eager to go faster and get around quicker at my own pace.
While it's an easy shout to point at Spiderman's combat and call it an Arkham ripoff, it's a hard undersell of the ways that game works off the aforementioned movement. Flinging Spiderman around the environment is no hard task; but learning to use that zippy, at times disorienting mobility to your advantage becomes key to building your combos and improving your play. I was never a massive gadget user in the Arkham games because for the most part, I'd found they offered solutions that felt optional. Sure, you can batarang a guy and grapple hook another, but what was the point? You're just going to punch, counter and finish your way through every fight.
Spiderman instead meters out new equipment either as the story needs it or your character level grows. And every tool I felt became my own personal choice in dealing with the smorgasborg of different enemies you face. Let's not lie; you're still going to punch dudes, knock them into the air and juggle enemies from beginning to the end - it's how that equipment suddenly plays new roles in each encounter you'll find adds to the experience. Hate flying enemies? Use electricity to stun them and go in for an air combo. Don't like the brute-style thugs you're not in the mood to stun? No problem. A shot of your concussion cannon could help take care of that. It becomes so much less about combos, counters and finishers but evolves into allowing you to mitigate as many threats before and during you start even thinking about winding up your melee attacks. And that, in a sense, is sort of what Spiderman is so inhumanly able to do. Any movie; comic or TV show he's usually doing at least four different things at once and this game really brings that together. It really makes you FEEL like-
Anyway.
The story is a nice treat; the Arkham comparison returns but only in that it is a narrative tailor-made for Spiderman geeks. We meet Peter Parker entering his mid-20s; a little older than we usually see, definitely wiser in some ways and not in others. As Peter becomes an adult that worries about rent, work and family, his arc surprised me fairly well. The game tries more often than not to make you think about how someone given superpowers as a teenager might not exactly grow out of the tendencies he formed during his initial few years and how those fare with the cast staples of Mary Jane and Aunt May isn't always rosy. How Peter learns to accept the changes that come as part of getting older and taking on more responsibility is just one part of this, though.
The actual part where it's a comic book story has Peter working at a science reserch facility early in the days of one Otto Octavius. Between balancing his life and work to help Dr. Octavius crest on a new scientific discovery; he gets wind of a new faction entering the Manhattan crime scene after the arrest of a major crimelord in the game's opening. Like any good New York-type story it becomes a tale of the city itself; the inner struggles and how each character deals with the events and outcomes. The realization of the stakes are metered out slowly through the Norman Osborn reelection campaign and the power struggle in the criminal underworld, all the while taking place in a city where each week the new bad guy's got a new gimmick and only Spiderman's got what it takes; or so Peter tells himself. And that's what is so frigging neat about that story, especially as someone who isn't majorly into that license.
The only knock I would have against Spiderman are in it's mandatory stealth sequences and how parts of the open world unfold itself to build up experience and currency to purchase upgrades.
The stealth sequences are substandard sneaking around as various non-Spiderman characters. You can cause distractions, hide behind cover but whether it was a personal issue I'm not sure; these sections felt sketchy with enemy vision and player visibility. There were times I was seen seemingly out of nowhere by offscreen enemies or even as I was traversing to areas that would have taken me out of those spaces. One of the final sections involved me climbing a wall to escape to which an enemy had seen me after climbing the wall. Which, in turn, reset my progress by a few hours.
There's a lot here I haven't touched on as I feel if you're on this sight reading a review for the three year old game, you'll likely know what to expect from an open-world RPG-lite with outposts, towers and collectibles. If anything of what I've said above sells you, I say go for it; get it on PS4/PS5 and enjoy. I'm someone who has fallen out of love with that format of game so hard over the last few years and all it took was being a BIG FUCKING RIPOFF OF SUNSET OVERDRIVE INSOMNIAC I'M COMING FOR YOU, YOU LOMBAX FUCKS
Spiderman (2018) sets out to give the titular superhero his Batman: Arkham Asylum moment and I've got to say it really knocked it out of the park. The city of Manhattan is not your average take on New York but a treasure map of hidden visual quirks and novel sights that aim to give the city far more personality than it knows what to do with. Between your obvious New York sightseeing staples, Insomniac peppered in more Marvel references than you know what do with between the Wakandan Embassy, Dr. Strange's Sanctum Sanctorum and the Spidey staple; Oscorp Tower. Thankfully, the majority of the collectibles such as photographing these sights actually work with the flow of navigating that world. And goddamn is it fun to get around.
If you're a stranger to Sunset Overdrive, the game built off this notion of using the mobility in order to generate style. Building up your style meter allowed you to deliver more damage by triggering your powerups. You also had to maintain this high sense of speed in parkouring around environments to avoid enemies whie building style JUST to stay alive. Because at the core, getting around had to be slick, fun and responsive, Spiderman cribs that entire playbook in creating a mobility system that's just a treat at any point. The skill tree doesn't lock you out of the fun early on, but rather empowers you with cheap skills to make getting around faster. This in turn let me get comfortable but eager to go faster and get around quicker at my own pace.
While it's an easy shout to point at Spiderman's combat and call it an Arkham ripoff, it's a hard undersell of the ways that game works off the aforementioned movement. Flinging Spiderman around the environment is no hard task; but learning to use that zippy, at times disorienting mobility to your advantage becomes key to building your combos and improving your play. I was never a massive gadget user in the Arkham games because for the most part, I'd found they offered solutions that felt optional. Sure, you can batarang a guy and grapple hook another, but what was the point? You're just going to punch, counter and finish your way through every fight.
Spiderman instead meters out new equipment either as the story needs it or your character level grows. And every tool I felt became my own personal choice in dealing with the smorgasborg of different enemies you face. Let's not lie; you're still going to punch dudes, knock them into the air and juggle enemies from beginning to the end - it's how that equipment suddenly plays new roles in each encounter you'll find adds to the experience. Hate flying enemies? Use electricity to stun them and go in for an air combo. Don't like the brute-style thugs you're not in the mood to stun? No problem. A shot of your concussion cannon could help take care of that. It becomes so much less about combos, counters and finishers but evolves into allowing you to mitigate as many threats before and during you start even thinking about winding up your melee attacks. And that, in a sense, is sort of what Spiderman is so inhumanly able to do. Any movie; comic or TV show he's usually doing at least four different things at once and this game really brings that together. It really makes you FEEL like-
Anyway.
The story is a nice treat; the Arkham comparison returns but only in that it is a narrative tailor-made for Spiderman geeks. We meet Peter Parker entering his mid-20s; a little older than we usually see, definitely wiser in some ways and not in others. As Peter becomes an adult that worries about rent, work and family, his arc surprised me fairly well. The game tries more often than not to make you think about how someone given superpowers as a teenager might not exactly grow out of the tendencies he formed during his initial few years and how those fare with the cast staples of Mary Jane and Aunt May isn't always rosy. How Peter learns to accept the changes that come as part of getting older and taking on more responsibility is just one part of this, though.
The actual part where it's a comic book story has Peter working at a science reserch facility early in the days of one Otto Octavius. Between balancing his life and work to help Dr. Octavius crest on a new scientific discovery; he gets wind of a new faction entering the Manhattan crime scene after the arrest of a major crimelord in the game's opening. Like any good New York-type story it becomes a tale of the city itself; the inner struggles and how each character deals with the events and outcomes. The realization of the stakes are metered out slowly through the Norman Osborn reelection campaign and the power struggle in the criminal underworld, all the while taking place in a city where each week the new bad guy's got a new gimmick and only Spiderman's got what it takes; or so Peter tells himself. And that's what is so frigging neat about that story, especially as someone who isn't majorly into that license.
The only knock I would have against Spiderman are in it's mandatory stealth sequences and how parts of the open world unfold itself to build up experience and currency to purchase upgrades.
The stealth sequences are substandard sneaking around as various non-Spiderman characters. You can cause distractions, hide behind cover but whether it was a personal issue I'm not sure; these sections felt sketchy with enemy vision and player visibility. There were times I was seen seemingly out of nowhere by offscreen enemies or even as I was traversing to areas that would have taken me out of those spaces. One of the final sections involved me climbing a wall to escape to which an enemy had seen me after climbing the wall. Which, in turn, reset my progress by a few hours.
There's a lot here I haven't touched on as I feel if you're on this sight reading a review for the three year old game, you'll likely know what to expect from an open-world RPG-lite with outposts, towers and collectibles. If anything of what I've said above sells you, I say go for it; get it on PS4/PS5 and enjoy. I'm someone who has fallen out of love with that format of game so hard over the last few years and all it took was being a BIG FUCKING RIPOFF OF SUNSET OVERDRIVE INSOMNIAC I'M COMING FOR YOU, YOU LOMBAX FUCKS