This review contains spoilers
They really nailed the feeling of swinging in this game. That is the highest compliment I can give, because it does really feel fun. In fact, I actually did feel like Spider-Man! A hell of a lot more than I felt like Batman in the Arkham games. Because of that fact alone, I enjoyed my time playing. But I have a lot more to say.
The mythos in the game generally feels like they took a bunch of different ideas from different Spider-Man runs and mashed it together. For the most part, this works well. I like that Miles is in this, I like using a relatively new character for most fans (Mr. Negative), I really like how they make you care about Dr. Octopus (who's often seen more as a joke character). Not everything works though, this version of Mary Jane isn't very interesting to me. Some parts of the story are also really obvious while playing - even a casual Spider-Man fan knows that Dr. Octopus is a villain. Not that Spider-Man stories need to be subversive to be good (we certainly don't need a Matt Reeves version where we dick around with the possibility of Uncle Ben and Aunt May being bad guys before it's revealed they were still saints), but I wish we could have seen what it looked like if Peter had cured or helped Dr. Ock. Instead this version of finding out he's evil lands in a lukewarm way, it's neither surprising nor that interesting. I hope they eventually adapt the Superior Spider-Man story, at least that would salvage it a bit and make me care more about Dr. Ock once he heel turns. Also, I don't think they came up with this idea but making Jonah have a podcast was a pretty brilliant decision, one of the rare times where modernizing a character makes perfect sense and doesn't feel like a hamfisted political statement.
Another thing I liked about the game is that it made it more believable why Peter would still live as Peter, as opposed to being Spider-Man full time. This is one thing I really didn't like about the MCU movies: the drama with Peter and his friends not getting into university because of his ties to Spider-Man just felt silly. Dude, you're Spider-Man and you have connections with Tony Stark, who the fuck cares about university??? You're wasting your time going there. Here, we see that Peter is motivated to work with Dr. Octavius to build technology that could possibly improve more lives as a whole than what he could do as Spider-Man - that makes sense.
However, there were some questionable gameplay choices made during development. The sections in the game where you play as other characters are baffling, particularly the Mary Jane parts. I don't think playing as other characters was a bad idea, but who the fuck decided to make several parts of the story require the player to wade through that slogfest? Playing as a defenseless character who does little in terms of gameplay is the exact opposite of what I want to do in a Spider-Man game. That's like if the Batman game had mandatory Alfred gameplay where you wash the dishes and prepare Bruce's meals. Maybe this could have worked if the sections were actually interesting to play, but instead you have to deal with janky, laughably easy stealth areas. It's too boring to be fun, and yet not nearly interesting enough to be subversive or make some sort of statement. To add insult to injury, there's a part in the DLC where you can ask Black Cat to take down enemies for you, but you can't play as her. Let me play as Black Cat! That would have been way cooler than playing as watered down MJ with her magic stun gun that knocks out even the strongest men in one hit. To be honest, MJ's characterization in this game at times felt like it was written to try to piss off the anti-SJW crowds of a few years ago. In the main campaign, she has an argument with Peter about not being treated as equals after he gets worried and warns MJ not to try to defuse a bomb in a situation where terrorists have taken people hostage. Could they not have come up with a better scenario? He's fucking Spider-Man! He has super-powers! You have a Bachelor's in Arts. It would be crazy if he just let you go try to defuse a bomb!
The issues with AI in the game are not only related to stealth though. Like most open-world games, the world doesn't fully feel alive. Swinging across Manhattan is great, but I don't feel like the NPC citizens are really... people. It's a game where the AI is designed around the assumption that the player is always adhering to the missions and getting from point A to point B. If you stand in traffic for 10 minutes, the AI will not move their cars. This is a pretty hard thing to get right in games (GTA V is the only one that comes to my mind as having made a world full of NPCs feel real), so it's hard to get too mad at them. I think that's a running theme in the game, where it would have been really good if they had many more layers of complexity that probably weren't realistic for development. I saw a good YouTube video by TheGamingBritShow where he says that he wished the player could have chosen which tasks to prioritize in the story and received the consequences, such as choosing to go on a date with MJ over stopping a crime or whatnot and facing issues as a result. While that would definitely have made me feel more like Spider-Man, that would probably be too unfun for too many players.
One of the worst aspects is how crimes or side-side-missions are handled in this game. It says a lot about how much I initially loved the game that I actually did a bunch of these crimes and didn't even get annoyed until several hours in. You stop the same crimes over and over, and they repeat this with different gangs about 4 times in the main campaign. By the time the prisoner and sable crimes started, I stopped caring, which is a shame, because that seemed to be the most impactful use of them in the story - the city becomes so crime-heavy that it actually does feel like there was a prison break.
The combat in this game gets more boring as the game continues. It's your Arkham style combat where you lock on enemies, press B to avoid hits, and stack combos and use gadgets. I will say though, at least it makes sense why the player sees that warning appear when an enemy is about to hit Spider-Man, since he has the spidey sense and all. But it just doesn't make for very skilled combat, and it gets old quick, since the enemy variety in the main story stops innovating like, halfway into the story (something the DLC improves on). They really need to make a superhero game with more rewarding combat for skilled players, something like Platinum Games style combat. A soulslike game would be awesome, but probably something that would only be done with a more niche character.
The lack of difficulty or interesting decisions in combat extends to the boss missions. Each boss is fairly boring to play, because they're too formulaic. You dodge an obviously choreographed attack, throw something or web the guy, go in for some hits, and repeat until they're down. I understand this is still something kids should be able to beat, but I think kids aren't that stupid. When you make bosses this easy, there's not much of a feeling of accomplishment.
The Arkham games have probably been a large net-negative to gaming overall.
Nitpicks
It's fucking bullshit that when you reflect rockets with your webs they hit back like NERF pellets. Was reflecting rockets too much against Spider-Man's code or something? You can throw people off buildings!
The decision to redo Peter's face to make it look more like Tom Holland is stupid. They can say it was to look like the voice actor, but c'mon. It's clearly Tom Holland. Which just makes more problems for the story because he looks notably younger, more like a high schooler than a university graduate. This makes the parts with Black Cat particularly awkward since she almost looks like a predator in comparison, and also makes it harder to believe that this Peter had the Kingpin on the ropes. This must be how comic fans feel whenever they rework a character to look like the movie adaptation.
The mythos in the game generally feels like they took a bunch of different ideas from different Spider-Man runs and mashed it together. For the most part, this works well. I like that Miles is in this, I like using a relatively new character for most fans (Mr. Negative), I really like how they make you care about Dr. Octopus (who's often seen more as a joke character). Not everything works though, this version of Mary Jane isn't very interesting to me. Some parts of the story are also really obvious while playing - even a casual Spider-Man fan knows that Dr. Octopus is a villain. Not that Spider-Man stories need to be subversive to be good (we certainly don't need a Matt Reeves version where we dick around with the possibility of Uncle Ben and Aunt May being bad guys before it's revealed they were still saints), but I wish we could have seen what it looked like if Peter had cured or helped Dr. Ock. Instead this version of finding out he's evil lands in a lukewarm way, it's neither surprising nor that interesting. I hope they eventually adapt the Superior Spider-Man story, at least that would salvage it a bit and make me care more about Dr. Ock once he heel turns. Also, I don't think they came up with this idea but making Jonah have a podcast was a pretty brilliant decision, one of the rare times where modernizing a character makes perfect sense and doesn't feel like a hamfisted political statement.
Another thing I liked about the game is that it made it more believable why Peter would still live as Peter, as opposed to being Spider-Man full time. This is one thing I really didn't like about the MCU movies: the drama with Peter and his friends not getting into university because of his ties to Spider-Man just felt silly. Dude, you're Spider-Man and you have connections with Tony Stark, who the fuck cares about university??? You're wasting your time going there. Here, we see that Peter is motivated to work with Dr. Octavius to build technology that could possibly improve more lives as a whole than what he could do as Spider-Man - that makes sense.
However, there were some questionable gameplay choices made during development. The sections in the game where you play as other characters are baffling, particularly the Mary Jane parts. I don't think playing as other characters was a bad idea, but who the fuck decided to make several parts of the story require the player to wade through that slogfest? Playing as a defenseless character who does little in terms of gameplay is the exact opposite of what I want to do in a Spider-Man game. That's like if the Batman game had mandatory Alfred gameplay where you wash the dishes and prepare Bruce's meals. Maybe this could have worked if the sections were actually interesting to play, but instead you have to deal with janky, laughably easy stealth areas. It's too boring to be fun, and yet not nearly interesting enough to be subversive or make some sort of statement. To add insult to injury, there's a part in the DLC where you can ask Black Cat to take down enemies for you, but you can't play as her. Let me play as Black Cat! That would have been way cooler than playing as watered down MJ with her magic stun gun that knocks out even the strongest men in one hit. To be honest, MJ's characterization in this game at times felt like it was written to try to piss off the anti-SJW crowds of a few years ago. In the main campaign, she has an argument with Peter about not being treated as equals after he gets worried and warns MJ not to try to defuse a bomb in a situation where terrorists have taken people hostage. Could they not have come up with a better scenario? He's fucking Spider-Man! He has super-powers! You have a Bachelor's in Arts. It would be crazy if he just let you go try to defuse a bomb!
The issues with AI in the game are not only related to stealth though. Like most open-world games, the world doesn't fully feel alive. Swinging across Manhattan is great, but I don't feel like the NPC citizens are really... people. It's a game where the AI is designed around the assumption that the player is always adhering to the missions and getting from point A to point B. If you stand in traffic for 10 minutes, the AI will not move their cars. This is a pretty hard thing to get right in games (GTA V is the only one that comes to my mind as having made a world full of NPCs feel real), so it's hard to get too mad at them. I think that's a running theme in the game, where it would have been really good if they had many more layers of complexity that probably weren't realistic for development. I saw a good YouTube video by TheGamingBritShow where he says that he wished the player could have chosen which tasks to prioritize in the story and received the consequences, such as choosing to go on a date with MJ over stopping a crime or whatnot and facing issues as a result. While that would definitely have made me feel more like Spider-Man, that would probably be too unfun for too many players.
One of the worst aspects is how crimes or side-side-missions are handled in this game. It says a lot about how much I initially loved the game that I actually did a bunch of these crimes and didn't even get annoyed until several hours in. You stop the same crimes over and over, and they repeat this with different gangs about 4 times in the main campaign. By the time the prisoner and sable crimes started, I stopped caring, which is a shame, because that seemed to be the most impactful use of them in the story - the city becomes so crime-heavy that it actually does feel like there was a prison break.
The combat in this game gets more boring as the game continues. It's your Arkham style combat where you lock on enemies, press B to avoid hits, and stack combos and use gadgets. I will say though, at least it makes sense why the player sees that warning appear when an enemy is about to hit Spider-Man, since he has the spidey sense and all. But it just doesn't make for very skilled combat, and it gets old quick, since the enemy variety in the main story stops innovating like, halfway into the story (something the DLC improves on). They really need to make a superhero game with more rewarding combat for skilled players, something like Platinum Games style combat. A soulslike game would be awesome, but probably something that would only be done with a more niche character.
The lack of difficulty or interesting decisions in combat extends to the boss missions. Each boss is fairly boring to play, because they're too formulaic. You dodge an obviously choreographed attack, throw something or web the guy, go in for some hits, and repeat until they're down. I understand this is still something kids should be able to beat, but I think kids aren't that stupid. When you make bosses this easy, there's not much of a feeling of accomplishment.
The Arkham games have probably been a large net-negative to gaming overall.
Nitpicks
It's fucking bullshit that when you reflect rockets with your webs they hit back like NERF pellets. Was reflecting rockets too much against Spider-Man's code or something? You can throw people off buildings!
The decision to redo Peter's face to make it look more like Tom Holland is stupid. They can say it was to look like the voice actor, but c'mon. It's clearly Tom Holland. Which just makes more problems for the story because he looks notably younger, more like a high schooler than a university graduate. This makes the parts with Black Cat particularly awkward since she almost looks like a predator in comparison, and also makes it harder to believe that this Peter had the Kingpin on the ropes. This must be how comic fans feel whenever they rework a character to look like the movie adaptation.
fancyynancyy
8 months ago