Welp, after a solid 27 hours and 97 percent completion I’ve finished the base-game of Spider-man Ps4/Remastered. It is still the most OK superhero/open-world/action game I have ever played. The perfect candidate for a 6/10, 7/10 sometimes. Though I assume this score comes a lot from my personal biases. personal biases aside in this critique I’ll try to explain my issue in this excruciatingly long text post. Anyhoo let’s start with the Spectacular to get some positivity in before the middling and maddening.
The Spectacular:
This should go without saying but the best thing about this game throughout my 28 hours of play was the traversal. Not a single moment went by while playing where I found any major fault with traversing its beautiful game world. There’s minor faults like slow wall crawling being an absolute afterthought, no running down buildings and Spider-Man’s height being a bit finicky to control due to the swinging system being as automated as it is. But in the heat of the moment it’s a delight to control, watch and feel.
Another thing that brought me great enjoyment without fail was the game’s simple but excellent photo-mode. A lot of the game was greatly improved by snapping a quick shot here or there and pausing boss fights during tense or cool looking moments for great shots was awesome. The custom lighting options are an excellent way to add way more flair and professionalism into your photos and it means you can take excellent photo’s anywhere as long as you have a fundamental understanding of proper lighting.
all the screenshots from my playthrough here all screenshots
A thing this game also really succeeds at is having some stand out moments, stuff like Peter falling back into a bit of his teen angriness and angst after fucking up with mj. The two Demon setpieces, the helicopter chase and the truck chase, any interaction Peter has with aunt may and the slow decline of Otto being definitive highlights. I wish this game had more of these moments, especially on the set piece side as they were a treat when they did come up.
The last spectacular thing is a thing that is complicated to put into a singular category and that thing is combat. The combat in this game has excellent mechanics, I love the way Spidey moves, the punches have impact,base webbing is useful and doesn’t exist as flavor and the focus on aerial combat lends it this acrobatic feel that’s perfect for Spider-Man. But, and this is a rather large piece of manhandled ass meat stuck in tights, the balancing of the gadgets, lack of enemy variety and weak combat encounters severely bring this system down. Let me explain myself starting off with the gadgets.
The Serviceable:
The Web-gadgets are an unbalanced mess that should have been more carefully reconsidered. The very first gadget you get, the impact web, instantly takes down any regular enemy with the exception of sable goons who haven’t been electrocuted and brutes when near a wall. this is insanely overpowered when you realize how to properly use it. The shock blast absolutely annihilates any challenge if yer fighting on a rooftop or a surface that’s about 2 cars high as it blasts enemies off buildings and instantly takes them out, start to notice a theme yet? The spider-drones should’ve just stayed as a suit-power as sending all of them out means you’ve won most smaller battles as they relentlessly attack and interrupt enemies, they are too powerful and are a win button in fights up to 10 enemies. While on the complete other spectrum you’ve got the web-bomb, suspension matrix, tripmine web and the electric web. Who are so situational that they’re practically useless for large swaths of gameplay. Tripmine is fun in stealth situations, but when stealth is already a braindead affair there’s little use for it. Electric web is only used at the start of sable encounters and the other two are just inferior versions of an airlaunch punch and the impact web. Overall I wish these gadgets were better balanced so you’d have a reason to use them all in combat rather than just one or the other.
But where do you do this combat, in the open world of course! which has a variety of activities ranging from fun side quests with new yorkers to landmarks (busywork), backpacks (busywork), taskmaster stealth and combat challenges (busywork), pigeon catching (busywork), random crimes by all factions (busywork) and last but not least evil bases from the 4 enemy factions. It’s a shame that the open world only has a few interesting things to do outside of swinging for fun, well the rest feels desperately tacked on to pad out the game time and to justify an open world this big, because the size sure as hell isn’t being used for the story.
Which brings me to the story and characters, overall this story is fine. Though I think it could’ve used a bit more meat on its bones for the sinister six who weren’t Martin Li and Octavious. As right now they’re more like tools for the game to use rather than believable and fun characters to fight against, doesn’t help that for the 2/3rds of the game the main evil you’re fighting against is Martin Li and his demons making the sinister six feel unbelievably tacked on at the end. This complaint of not having enough screen time also extends to aunt may, who could’ve used some more scenes during the middle and latter half of the game. But overall this game succeeds with the main dynamic of Otto and Peter and the downfall of Martin Li, though I bet this Peter is gonna feel real stupid in the future for saving Norman Osborn up to 3 times in this game alone. The game does have a few badly written moments though, the worst being the part where Scorpion injects you to have an arkham-esque hallucination sequence. I think this part is awfully written because it shoves the themes and main conflict in your face as if it doesn’t trust the player to see those things for themselves. Spider-Man even talks to himself to even explain it further and it was a really annoying endeavor. This would be cool if the hallucination was inventive and creative but it’s a really boring poisonous city coupled with floating debris in an orange void. real shame. One thing I didn’t mind like everyone else where the non-Spidey stealth sections as MJ or Miles, they showed the world from a non-superhuman perspective and
I thought most of the characters were written well. Mr. Negative got to actually be cool because he wasn’t written by Dan Slott. Otto was an absolute highlight and I like his large inclusion in the story. I don’t like this portrayal of Mary Jane on a conceptual level, as she’s just Lois Lane but a redhead, but I can’t deny that she was a fine character overall and her changes to the character didn’t detract from the story. Miles could’ve used more screen time but he was good too. It’s a shame that they chose all the Spider-Man villains that have power-armor and then make their designs look shite. Only exceptions being tombstone, taskmaster and fisk. Overall a decent story with some great characters.
Speaking of these bosses, the Boss Fights themselves were mostly serviceable, simple but fun affairs. I wish they were more challenging and involved more of the actual combat rather than just dodge punch, web up punch, or throw things at boss punch. But they did what they had to do. Shame it didn’t have any stand out bosses -and this is the only time I’ll compare it to Arkham- Like Poison Ivy near the end of Asylum. Ra’s Al Ghul, Mr. Freeze and Clayface in Arkham City. Deathstroke, Firefly, Bane, Killer croc, Deadshot and Mr. Freeze in the dlc in Arkham origins. Professor Pyg, Jason Todd, Alber King, Killer Croc, The Joker dream sequence and The Riddler in Arkham knight. Bosses that really made a statement and made something so much memorable and poignant due to the tough fight you had to go through. In spider-man the only bosses that do that are the second Mr.Negative encounter, Electro & Vulture and Doc Ock and even those are still too simple for their own good. Because they lack attacks, most of the bosses have one or two attack strings they’ll repeat ad nauseum and I think some bosses like Scorpion only have a poison spit attack and jumping. While other bosses like Taskmaster, Mr.Negative, Kingpin and Tombstone are reskins of regular enemies with one or two new attacks. They should’ve had more time in the oven.
Here’s my boss ranking of all base game bosses:
- Mr. Negative (Oscorp facility)
- Electro & Vulture
- Doc Ock
4.Tombstone
5.Taskmaster
6.Rhino & Scorpion - The Shocker
- Wilson Fisk, Kingpin
- Mr. Negative (train)
The last serviceable thing I want to talk about is the alternate costumes. It’s a good selection and I like that they chose the non obvious suits, but there’s way too much spider-armor and having 4 mcu suits is just awful. Speaking of awful, let me segue to all the bad I had with Spider-Man.
The Awful
The biggest problem with this game is all the repetition. The amount of same encounters this game throws at you, especially in the open world gets really tedious in the later half. Where you already know what’s gonna happen from a mile away. Even in the story most missions consist of arriving at a location, stealth encounter, combat, bit of exposition and walking before another combat section. There are some variants but it’s usually that rigamarole over and over and over again. What also doesn’t help is that the game is too easy.
I played this game on the second highest difficulty, Amazing, yet my deaths were very few and usually occurred during sniper crimes where I got one shot by 12 snipers at once. The easiness of this game really robbed me of any tension during combat and the story. It felt each time that Spider-Man failed in the story it was in a cutscene and not me struggling during gameplay. Encounters were fun but that was due to me stringing together combo’s up in the hundreds without much difficulty, bosses ended far too quickly and robbed those moments of struggle of tension. It’s a shame but I hope if I feel like replaying the game in new game+ on Ultimate difficulty that I get the challenge I desire.
The easiness may also come from the extreme lack of enemy variety. I think this game would have benefitted from more enemies that required a specific gadget or combo string to defeat. As now you can ignore the special requirement on shield, whip and sword enemies in the late game due to your upgrades making you stronger than the requirements. The only enemies that are immune to this are the easy brute enemies that only really need an impact web or regular webbing before throwing them at a wall. I wish this game would’ve put up more of a resistance to my dominant strategy of air launches into webbing into perfect dodges with more difficult enemies. I hope the dlc changes this.
This game also really suffers from having a really short final act that rushes to wrap everything up too quickly. I felt that i spent most of my time in regular new york fighting against Martin Li and his demons before oopsie daisy every prisoner is now on the streets of new york, sable has turned into the third reich and started detaining innocent people and the sinister six is loose. And then without 4 missions you take out 4 of the 6 sinister six without them really making an impact at all.
I feel this game wanted to make its cake and eat it too. They wanted a storyline about the awful things Norman Osborn has done to Martin Li and this city but they also wanted a recognizable spider-man villain as the main antagonist so at the last moment Li is quickly wrapped up so Otto can steal the show. And I don’t mind that as much as I should but I feel they should’ve chosen between either giving Mr.Negative the spotlight and highlighting him a bit more or they should’ve gone all in on Otto. Because right now it all feels too convenient to have Otto go evil just as Martin Li starts showing the city how bad Norman is. And would you look at that Otto and Norman have history wowwww.
This also feeds into the trend of every Spider-Man villain is the effect of Norman Osborn and Oscorp existing which is a trend I supremely dislike. As it makes all the bad guys feel homogenized and from one faction when they should and could have been all their own people with their own agenda. Instead of the two main antagonists wanting revenge on the same guy. But that at least gave the writers an easy time of making Li and Otto team up for the Sinestro Corps. While the other 4 of the 6 were given one sentence to explain their reason for joining which all boils down to; I’ll fix ye up real good laddie trust me, then jerking their abilities off for 3 more sentences. Real shame.
Which brings me to my final point of contention, I fucking hate the design for nearly every villain in this story which really takes me out of enjoying the story and threat they set up with them. I think Rhino’s design in this game is the stupidest he’s ever fucking looked. For one it’s a mechsuit with nuts, bolts, plates and goddamn open spots for fucks sake. Yet his motivation of wanting to be freed isn’t changed while his design obviously has easier ways to free him than Otto’s experimental corrosive. It also has fucking gaps in the suit, so why doesn’t someone with proper fucking aim shoot there. Last time I remembered the Rhino skin isn’t impervious like Tombstone’s. Why doesn’t any shoot at his fucking ribcage and make him bleed out. I know Silver Sable has no problem with killing, how hasn’t she killed this dumb russian yet.
I am also amazed insomniac managed to fuck up a design as simple as Electro, he looks like the standard face slider’s in any game where you can customize your character with some electrical scars representing his starfish mask. But his suit is bland as all hell and also falls into the same techno-hell as most other suits.
I don’t mind if you give people mech suits, but every mech suit in spider-man blends together due to them all using the same level of detail, shapes and visual language. Now they should still look like they come from the same line but this level of pseudo realism on every suit makes them bland to look at and denounces every villain of their personality. I’m ragging a lot on Scorpion in this critique, but his suit is a prime example. The spikey, harsh green look with vibrant orange glasses do not match the small snippets of personality we get of him at all. It only obviously spells out danger danger danger, which is vital for a villain costume but if a character has a personality I would love to see it shine through in their choice of attire. I think sticking more closely to the classic design would’ve fit his sarcastic, torture enjoying ps4 version more. With the black around the eyes and more rounded shapes. I get lore-wise the new suits were all made by Octavious to convince them to join. But man Otto, despite your suit being one of the few good ones you should not design costumes. To conclude this rant about costumes I wish Insomniac used a little more style and less pseudoscience realism to design most of these villains. It probably also didn’t help that all the villains were either dudes in armor (most of the sinister six,taskmaster) , or regular people (Kingpin, Tombstone, screwball, Mr. Negative).
There’s some small abhorrent things like the minigames for science, lack of setpieces in the latter half, most drone challenges focusing on the point launches rather than your swinging ability and most of the chases not being with villains but with regular vehicles which is a shame as i would’ve loved to use the swinging system to catch villains like electro while they were speeding through new york at 400 mph. But all these minor gripes are too small to talk about at length.
Which leads me to the end of this review/critique/rant. Did my replay of Spider-Man make me see some more good things than I did than that first playthrough all those years ago. Yes, I think it did. But I also realized why I thought it was a very flawed video game that wasn’t as good as other superhero and action game contemporaries. Now I’m heading into the dlc, which I haven’t played yet. So I wonder how good and long those 3 dlc packs will be.
anyway thanks for reading all of that, have a good one.
and for those who didn’t read it here’s my TLDR:
I’m biased and prefer Batman Arkham lol.