About a month before news first broke about Insomniac’s new ambitious Spider-Man project, I was talking with a good friend about how awesome it would be if Marvel made their own version of the excellent Batman Arkham games, but with Spider-Man, because he’d be such a great fit for that style of gameplay. Lo and behold, a short time later, the world was introduced to this latest entry in the web-head’s ever growing game catalog. Unfortunately, the world also suffered from massive hype overload, as it often does at the announcement of pretty much any new AAA title released these days. Because of this, and past instances, I distanced myself from almost all news stories regarding the development of this game. No game can possibly live up to the hype the world pours onto it, before release. And I wanted my opinion to be untainted by such things. So, going in fresh, I can safely say that Marvel’s Spider-Man (MSM) is indeed an excellent game. But it, like all games, suffers from many flaws, some of which stopped the action dead in its tracks at times. But it was, overall, a mostly great experience. So, let’s get to it.
MSM wastes no time getting the player right into the thick of things. You’re introduced to a Peter Parker who (thankfully) has been at it for quite a while now. This is (mostly) not an origin story, which was an incredibly wise move. If I had to see Peter get bitten by a radioactive spider one more time I might have just shut off the game and never turned it back on again. That said, not all in Peter’s well known life has been established in the ways you might think. Peter is now working for Otto Octavius (Pre Doc Ock), having left the Daily Bugle. Speaking of which, J. Jonah Jameson has also left the Bugle, doing his own personal podcast show of sorts (which players can be entertained by while swinging around the open world of Manhattan, but more on that aspect later). Norman Osborne (Pre Green Goblin) is the Mayor. And Peter’s long term relationship with good old “MJ,” Mary Jane Watson, is kaput. It’s very obvious that Insomniac wanted the players to experience a new kind of Spider-Man. They’ve kept the old familiar characters, but put their own unique spin on things. This works well, at times, extremely well. But it can also fall flat, very flat, when they try to change too much, and in general, try to do too much.
But the point is, this is a very lived-in version of Spider-Man, and when the player takes control, the game wastes no time getting you right into the action. Right off the bat, the player is introduced to the open world of Manhattan (from what I’ve read, it’s a remarkably accurate depiction of the city, with some obvious changes for copyright issues, Easter eggs, and game play purposes). The player is also immediately introduced to web-swinging (or is it web-slinging…? Whatever…). Swinging around New York is just about perfect. If there was one thing in a Spider-Man game that needed to be perfect, it was this. Even if the rest of the game was flawless, if traversing around New York wasn’t amazing, then the game would have been written off as a failure. Fortunately, it is very obvious that Insomniac knew this would be the case, and they made sure to get this down to a science. I’m normally not a proponent of open world games (they often bore me to tears, as I’ve said in the past). An open world game needs to have some sort of hook, something very special to keep me invested. And for MSM, that hook was its means of traversal. There is just something so liberating, and inexplicably fun about swinging around the city. It just feels right. Along those lines, wall climbing, wall running, and parkouring all feel great as well. Moving around in this world is great, no matter how you’re doing it. Unless, you’re in central park… Then you’ll feel Tom Holland’s Spider-Man’s pain in Homecoming, when he ran through that golf course…
Of course, you aren’t swinging around the city for too long, as the action ramps up, and Spider-Man is sent to Fisk Towers, to take out the Kingpin once and for all. In MSM, Spidey works closely with a Police Captain, Captain Wantanabe. I’ll admit, I’m unfamiliar with most recent comic books (I prefer the tried and true classics), so I’m unsure if this is an established character in Spidey lore, or just a character who was created specifically for the game. At any rate, though, Capt. Wantanabe is constantly in touch with Spider-Man, relying on him to get the jobs done that normal police officers can’t do (off the record, of course, as Spider-Man is technically a vigilante). The whole thing gives off a very Batman-esque vibe. Wantanabe is the Jim Gordon to Spidey’s Batman (I’ll be comparing this game a lot to the Batman Arkham games, so settle in).
So, off to Fisk Towers, the player is next introduced to the other main gameplay mechanics of MSM: Combat and Stealth. At it’s core, Combat feels extremely similar to Arkham. You fight in melee range, you can dodge (which is indicated by your Spider Sense, aka, a white flashing over Spidey’s head), you can perform finishing moves (once unlocked), and you can use Spidey gadgets such as web shooters, spider drones, web bombs, etc.
Mechanically speaking, fighting feels great. The combat is fluid. The gadgets can be very useful when used strategically (gadgets have limited ammo/uses, and recharge over time, so using them strategically is a must). It’s fun. However, fighting is also very poorly balanced. And it remains this way from the very first fight, to the very last. As I said, there’s a lot one can do in a fight. And it’s a lot to take in, especially in your very first fight. This is in no way helped by the extremely poor way the game attempts to teach you. Text boxes that freeze the action, and can easily be skipped by mistake. Add on the fact that this first fight (and pretty much all subsequent fights) will overwhelm you with way too many enemies that hit way harder than they should (even on the easiest setting), and you’ve got yourself a very bad learning experience.
I personally felt overwhelmed in that first fight. The game was info-dumping way too many combat mechanics at me all at once, and the enemy numbers were too overwhelming to ever let me feel comfortable learning these many, many moves. Of course, over time, I improved, but it would have been a much better experience overall if they had balanced the enemies better. And I mean that in the entire game. There were many combat scenarios where I was overwhelmed with far too many enemies, many of which were attacking from a range with pistols, snipers, and rocket launchers. And no matter what I upgraded (more on that in a bit) they always seemed far too powerful, taking huge chunks of my health with every hit.
Thankfully, the game has a mechanic known as a focus bar. The focus bar fills with every attack Spider-Man makes. And that bar can be used at any time to refill a portion of your health. I used that feature a lot. However, the focus bar has one other purpose (because of course it does). When full, the focus bar can allow Spidey to perform a finishing move, instantly knocking out a single enemy. This, unfortunately, gave the focus bar more strategic use. Do I use it to heal? Or do I use it to even the odds? Both of which can be viable uses in certain situations.
Moving on to the other major mechanic introduced very early on: Stealth. I wish I could tell you that MSM succeeds at creating stealth focused gameplay in the way that Arkham did. I wish I could tell you that. Unfortunately, when it comes to stealth sections, MSM is nothing more than a cheap imitator. I was thrilled to see Spidey crawling into an air vent to sneak around Fisk Tower. I was elated to see that stealth take downs were a thing. I was ecstatic that I could web up enemies from high perches, like the famous perch takedowns from the Arkham games. But my joy soon faded as I saw that the game’s stealth sections and gameplay in general were just very poorly designed.
Firstly, there is no real way to “sneak around” in stealth areas. Unlike in Arkham, you can’t crouch to move slowly or quietly. If you want to take out a guy from behind, you just waltz right up to him. Most of the time this worked okay. Other times, the enemy would turn around without warning, and alert everyone in the area.
The areas themselves were also just extremely poorly designed. Just bad level design. Very few areas to hide, except for the occasional high lamp posts, roof top, or other “perch.” Ventilation shafts were rarely used, and only ever really used for narrative purposes, moving from one section of a level to another. They couldn’t be used strategically for cover or hiding from alerted enemies.
What’s worse, once your cover was blown, that was it. If it was a narrative mission, that usually meant game over, try again from a checkpoint. If it was a side quest, then it meant the stealth was over, now it was just a straight up combat mission. Which sucked. But most egregiously of all, is that the stealth specific side missions (called bases), are hardly stealth focused at all. Once you clear out a base, even if you do so stealthily, without ever being caught, then the mission immediately turns into a severely combat heavy, multi-round brouhaha. Your cover will be immediately blown, and you cannot get it back. The only way to finish the mission is to fight. A lot. Considering fighting is pretty much 80% of the side quests anyway, this seemed like unnecessary overkill.
It would be unfair to write off the stealth sections completely, though, as they do get a few things right. When there are areas to access, like perches, getting from one to another is a breeze, thanks to a simple web-zip. It, obviously, felt a lot like Batman’s grapnel gun. Speaking of perches, one feature that I found very helpful, was added to Spider-Man’s scanner. The scanner works a lot like Detective Mode, from the Arkham games, only less broken. Because it couldn’t be kept on. Activating it performs a quick sweep of the surrounding area. Enemies are highlighted in red, while story specific objects light up as yellow. This, in and of itself, is very useful. But what’s better, when in a stealth area, activating the scan will show a bit more information. Any enemy caught in the scan will show whether taking them out is safe, or if other enemies will notice. This was a fantastic feature to add in, and made the stealth sections so much more manageable.
Moving on from that, let’s talk about the game’s unlockables and upgrades. As I mentioned earlier, Spidey has a lot of gadgets at his disposal. And the more you level up, the more gadgets become available to you (eventually you’ll reach a point where you’ll wonder if ol’ web-head hasn’t been chatting with Rocket Raccoon). But gadgets aren’t the only unlockables. As Spider-Man levels up, the player can spend points in three different skill trees. The organization of these skill trees was rather confusing to me. The abilities of one didn’t seem to differ too greatly from another. Meaning there were offensive and defensive abilities in all trees. I suppose it doesn’t really matter. But it was a little odd, to me.
You can also unlock new suits (which I was grateful for because that white spider symbol suit is garishly ugly, in my opinion). Suits are not just a cosmetic unlock, though. No, no. With each new suit, comes a new “power.” These powers vary greatly in their abilities and effectiveness. One suit might allow you to be temporarily more stealthy (ha ha…), another suit might equip Spidey with a powerful shock wave AOE move that is incredibly useful for knocking out a group of enemies on a rooftop, and so on. Not only, is this just an interesting idea, to give new abilities with the suits, but Insomniac was brilliant enough to allow the player to choose which ability they wanted, regardless of the suit they were currently wearing. For example, I’m a big fan of the Noir Spider-Man one off from a few years back, and I love that suit. But the power it comes with is rather lackluster. Luckily, I could swing around New York as Noir Spidey, with any suit power I had unlocked. I wasn’t stuck with the one I unlocked with that specific suit.
Another aspect of suits were the suit mods. The suit mods are buffs that the player could unlock, and equip, regardless of suit or suit power. While there were easily over a dozen suit mods, only three could be equipped at any given time. And while some of the mods were useful for extremely specific situations, I saw little reason to change out most of the mods I had equipped right from the get go (those mods being increased melee and ranged defense). So, while I appreciated the extra help, this portion of the unlockables seemed almost unnecessary, as only three mods could ever be equipped at one time. It was also, admittedly, a bit confusing in the menu’s UI. Each suit mod and power would explain specifically what it did. But in the bottom right corner of the screen, there were a set of stat bars representing offense, defense, traversal, and stealth. Highlighting a specific mod, would show what change the stat bars would experience if you equipped the mod, but it wasn’t clear what that meant. Did equipping an offensive mod really increase my offensive power overall? Or did it just give me the ability described in the mod? I’ll never know, I guess.
Since I’m talking about unlocking and upgrading, I might as well discuss how that all happens. This game, as I’ve explained, has a lot going for it in this department. Almost too much. Unfortunately, to unlock all these suits and powers, and to upgrade all these gadgets, you need “tokens,” the game’s currency. The problem with this is, that there are far too many different types of tokens. This being an open world game, there are, naturally, many things to do within it, in other words, side quests. These side quests take on many forms: Collectibles in the form of finding old backpacks of Peter’s. Performing research quests for the environmentally minded Harry Osborne (who is missing in the game). Stopping random crimes breaking out in New York. Clearing out the aforementioned stealth/combat bases. And completing broken tasks set out by Taskmaster (and I do mean broken; these are the only side quests in the game that are ranked [bronze, silver, and gold], and to get the highest rank [and therefore, the most tokens], you need to be absolutely perfect, something that I have found to be impossible in some of these missions; they are poorly balanced, and total garbage, in an otherwise amazing game).
It’s an unnecessary amount of currencies. And it bogs the game’s progression down. And due to the unbalanced Taskmaster side quests, there were some gadgets that simply never got upgraded, because I wasn’t willing to drive myself insane trying to get gold on broken quests. The biggest problem is that the tokens are set. You cannot replay old bases to get more base tokens (if you’ve already performed all the tasks associated with the base to get all three tokens available). You cannot simply get silver over and over in the same Taskmaster challenge to get more challenge tokens. Nope, if you want every upgrade and every unlockable, you’d better be a perfect player.
I’d like to now take a minute and discuss the story mode of the game. Normally I try not to focus too much on narrative as these are gameplay analyses. But I feel like I should address it this time. MSM, for the most part, does a phenomenal job at telling a very compelling story. I felt just as invested in the moments I was playing as Peter Parker as I was Spider-Man. They got Peter right. And that is a crucial element to who Spider-Man is. I especially loved his wit. Any time “Spider-Cop” made an appearance, I was having a very fun time. The story itself, while overall great, did suffer from some odd pacing issues.
The game wasted no time getting me right into the action. It set up a unique, engaging story, focused on Mr. Negative. A lesser known villain, who I’d personally never heard of. But In chasing this Mr. Negative all over the city for pretty much most of the game, the game seemed to drag in the second act. Because the narrative was so focused on Mr. Negative, we got to see tragically little of Spider-Man’s other much loved villains. Spidey easily has one of the best “rogues galleries” in the Marvel Universe. Sadly, aside from fighting Kingpin in the tutorial, and the Shocker very early on in the game, most of the first 2/3’s of the game is spent fighting Mr. Negative and his goons. I will say though, that the end of act two rectifies all of that with a climax akin to the best story elements of the Arkham games. I just wish we could have gotten to that point a lot sooner. Because that’s what I wanted all along. That’s what a player wants to experience. And because of that, the third act felt way overcrowded, and the whole story they were trying to tell falls to the wayside, for a much better story, which is what the devs should have been focusing on all along.
Aside from a rather overly long, and dull second act, the game also falters in a few other areas. Mainly, any time you aren’t playing as Spider-Man/Peter Parker. I’m not sure what inspired the devs to create sections of the game forcing you to play as Mary Jane Watson or Miles Morales, but it was a bad choice. These sections are boring. They are unnecessary. They stop the action dead. They’re just awful. They’re also stealth focused. Because powerless, boring humans can obviously do nothing but sneak around. And as I’ve said before, the stealth in this game is so very poorly designed. And when you’re a boring, powerless human, multiply that poor design by ten. I get that they were trying to mix up the narrative by telling it from other character’s perspectives, but this could have easily been accomplished by a cutscene. I’m playing Spider-Man, let me be Spider-Man. Peter Parker is what sold this game for me, don’t take him away for some repetitive, dull gameplay featuring uninteresting characters…
Another area where the action is forced to a halt is when Peter needs to do “science.” There are two forms of bizarrely implemented minigames that have Peter figuring out chemical compounds and working with circuit wiring. In a gameplay sense, this means matching up lines, and making paths from point A to point B. Yup, it’s as amazing as it sounds…
And finally, my last major complaint is with the third act itself. As I said before, it feels too overstuffed. They spend way too long on something that really doesn’t click, only for everything to go haywire in the third act. Where there were virtually no boss fights, suddenly you’re fighting two bosses at once. This was a poor design choice. It felt like each boss should have had its own time and place, instead of being mashed together to save time. What’s worse, in the third act, like I said, literally everything has gone haywire. The city is under siege, massive prison breakouts, a rogue private army, and a plague have over taken New York. What does this mean? It means that Manhattan is suddenly worse than Gotham City in Arkham Origins (which is saying something). Snipers and rocket launchers populate every rooftop and every street corner. Remember what I said about swinging around the city and how amazing it was? Yeah… it’s not remotely fun when you’re literally being shot at every two seconds. It turns the game’s biggest joy into the game’s biggest pain. And it doesn’t go away until after you beat the game… Just a very poor design decisions.
All that said though, the game’s final moments were some of the most powerful scenes I’ve seen in a video game in a very long time. In spite of its faults, MSM is, overall, an excellent game. And I definitely had a great time playing it. Except for those few times when I hated it…
