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This is a game that narrowly avoided having a year in its title. Previous Spider-Man games were based off movies; The most prolific one being Spider-Man 2 based off the Spider-Man 2 movie. It had a lot going for it: Movie tie-in, released on a ton of consoles, an actual good game. I might have my nostalgia goggles on for the last one. My experience is with the Playstation 2 version, which was an open-world (open-city, more like) action game with RPG-like elements. The feature that made the game was the web swinging. Spider-Man would shoot out webs that must connect with a hard surface to swing from. I spent a lot of time in the game trying to jump off tall buildings to attach a web to a helicopter flying overhead, and it would actually work. Other games simply have Spider-Man shoot a web up into the sky that attaches to nothing, giving the impression of swinging. I’ve never played a Spider-Man game that uses the “fake” swinging. What’s the point? Part of being Spider-Man is that he has these limitations but uses his powers in creative ways to get around them. Only 2 games have the “real” swinging system, Spider-Man 2 and Marvel’s Spider-Man.
Swinging is actually the first thing the game teaches you about, as it should. Every game needs to be made with the consideration that this might be the player’s first game. The first button the player presses is the swing button, then how to leap off that web, and the player already knows how to shoot a web. Bam. Web swinging. The transition to gameplay is outstanding, there’s a great soundtrack and it’s seamless from the cutscene camera. I like how we see more of these transitions in games. It’s due to technology getting better, no cut to black means there isn’t a need to load things, and the desire to be more cinematic while increasing immersion. What I think we lost is the very explicit transition a cut offers. With a seamless transition you might find yourself holding the desired input while the camera is transitioning but before the game is done going into “game mode”. Cutting from black is both obvious and jarring, “game mode” is on after the cut, unambiguous. It’s fine though, I still prefer the seamless transition as it is easier to parse the location of things relative to the player. Throughout the game the player learns more moves to traverse the city efficiently and skillfully. You want to move around like Spider-Man, and the game gives you the tools to do so. The game feel of the swinging is the best you can get. Now, if they only made it a VR experience, we could all BE Spider-Man.
While I think the core gameplay, the swinging and combat are good enough to make this game a must play. I do have some nitpicks with the game. When the game pauses and a tutorial panel is given, the tutorial will describe what the purpose of the button is and what it does, but not the actual input. After the tutorial panel is dismissed (the only prompt in the tutorial panel is cross to dismiss), then the input is shown front and center for the player to use. Why? This threw me off a few times, because these tutorials will appear at highly relevant times: Like the game teaching you how to dodge right when you would like to dodge. You can have both in the game, the prompt being on the tutorial panel and when the game resumes.
There are some minigames that are required to progress the game. While I understand players would rather be Spider-Man swinging around protecting the city, I think they are fine as puzzles and for pacing. The initial implementation is a little questionable. They are right after the beginning of the game, and OK they want to front-load the features. By this point we haven’t guaranteed players have fully absorbed the core gameplay, it’s right after the intro! Having the player engage in a totally isolated sequence risks the player forgetting what they learned in the intro. A player might also forget how to play the puzzles the next time they encounter them. The rules, input and their solutions have to be so well designed that the player can immediately remember what to do and how to do it even after not seeing one for so long, and so delicately balanced or risk frustrating the player. Too difficult and the player gets frustrated that something unrelated to the core gameplay is blocking their progression. In this case, it’s better to err on the side of making it too simple. Now that I think about it, clever use of the puzzles would be to hide a load screen but this isn’t the case as most puzzles take place in a small pre-loaded map.
A recent phenomenon in console games is using a stand-in cursor that mimics a computer pointer, controlled by the left or right analog stick. Why? Just have a menu that is navigable without a pointer. A lot of games have and still do this. If you think of console menus, they can be interpreted as cursors that are locked to go to very specific points. Why do I want a cursor that navigates so much dead space? It’s not like it adds precision.
I will have endless praise for the web-swinging and giving the sensation of what it feels like to be Spider-Man; I do not think the small movements are as precise or fluid as it could have been. Crawling on walls feels a bit too slow, but doing the wall run is not precise when covering short distances. Imagine traversing the entire city perfectly, you are Spider-Man, but you miss your destination and shoot past. Doing this last leg of the journey never feels good as everything that came before it, and you just feel so clumsy and think to yourself — ‘What happened to me, I was just Spider-Man, now I have two left feet.’ I think the default crawl and walk speed should have been a bit faster, pressing R2 to make Spider-Man run can remain.
In the game there are snipers and their bullets can only be evaded by the dedicated dodge button. What I find a bit silly is that their bullets track Spider-Man even after they have been fired. That is unacceptable. It does not make sense. Those bullets can hit you even if you are web-swinging at max speed! I couldn’t believe how much they tracked and got hit a lot. In the end I accepted that I had to press the dodge button. Pressing the button while the laser is still tracking Spider-Man does nothing. It has to be when the bullet has been fired but before Spider-Man is hit. I understand why they made this decision, because if the bullets didn’t track, Spider-Man would never get hit. Part of the Spider-Man’s coolness is his Spidey Sense that lets him evade danger at the last moment. Other moves that can be avoided with the dodge button can also be avoided by simply moving away, so if the player has been using that as part of their defensive options, the game is reneging that lesson. It never feels good when a game does that, because then it becomes impossible to tell what rules apply to what. Maybe what they could have done is made the gun shoot a hitscan bullet instead of a projectile (Hitscan is when there is no projectile, rather a ray is shot from the origin along a trajectory, damage is applied if this ray connects with Spider-Man when the enemy executes their attack). The player’s job is to then dislodge the sniper’s tracking, with the perfect dodge being to dodge the hitscan bullet. Of course, hitscan doesn’t work that way, so a bullet visual effect would have to provide a temporary projectile while the game is slowed down during the perfect dodge.
There’s a bit of the narrative that I’d also like to praise, and criticise. Towards the end of the game, Spider-Man (and the player) start fighting bigger and badder dudes. I’m not too familiar with the Spider-Man lore, but if he has the Spidey Sense, wouldn’t he never get hit by anything? Otto Octavius is in this game and he has this character quirk that he records audio journals for himself. After he becomes the bad guy, he continues to do so. I guess it’s already a habit for him, so it makes some sense. Provides a good excuse for the game to exposit to the player. The way the recordings are written could be interpreted as Otto speaking directly to Spider-Man, Peter Parker, or even the player, which is a very nice touch. There’s also a dream sequence that does a clever job of hiding the load screens with “dreamy” transitions.
This is my favourite game from 2018. The team at Insomniac really perfected the core gameplay. Of course it isn’t without its faults, there were a few times dudes spawned behind collision and under the floor so I had to restart the mission, but is overall a very polished experience. I haven’t even mentioned what kind of technical wizardry they had to accomplish so that players can traverse this virtual world seamlessly at high speeds. You can even see the inside of buildings through windows! There are little objectives sprinkled throughout the map that offer navigation or combat challenges. The reason it’s been so long since there’s been another Spider-Man game with swinging like this is because the Spider-Man 2 Video Game did not sell as well, so they cut that feature moving forward as the management team believed it wasn’t such a big deal. Now that the series is being worked on by Insomniac, they’re in good hands. If this is where they’re starting from, I can’t wait to see what the sequel has in store.
