In the last few years, I’ve noticed an ongoing trend within Sony’s Worldwide Studios. All of their first-party developers have been stretching their narrative muscles in ways they haven’t been known to, before. Guerilla Games with Horizon Zero Dawn, Santa Monica Studios with God of War, Naughty Dog with The Last of Us are all studios that have delivered amazing stories in ways nobody expected of them. It is that kind of story that the team at Insomniac Games has told within their magnum opus, Marvel’s Spider-Man. And the world is better for it.
The best thing I can say about Marvel’s Spider-Man is that it ‘gets’ Spider-Man in a way I haven’t seen before. None of the shows and none of the films – even though a lot of them have been great – have understood the character as deeply, and portrayed him as honestly as it’s done in this game. This is made clear to you in the game’s opening moments, kicking off early morning in Peter Parker’s apartment as our hero wakes up to his police scanner informing him of a raid on his eight-year nemesis, Wilson Fisk. At the same moment, a note slides under his door informing him of his overdue rent. In the very first scene, Peter has a dilemma between not getting evicted and taking down one of his worst enemies. If that’s not the most quintessentially Spider-Man thing of all time, I don’t know what is.
The second most immediately beautiful part of the game shows itself soon after the opening scene where Peter, choosing to put aside his rent to take down Fisk, jumps out his window and you’re immediately given control of him, soaring through the Manhattan skyline as “Alive” by Warbly Jets plays in the background. Let’s stop and talk about this for a second. In this Spider-Man game, the very first major moment is underscored neither with any of the hero’s classic themes nor with the excellent new one composed by John Paesano (Daredevil, The Defenders). Spider-Man’s opening hero shot of the game is accompanied by a punk rock ballad from 2016 and again, if that’s not the most quintessentially Spider-Man thing of all time, I don’t know what is.
The opening mission is bombastic and exciting, full of one epic set-piece after another and culminating in a bone-crunching boss fight against Fisk himself, but its best part is the story it sets up. With the Kingpin gone, a power vacuum has formed in New York’s crime world and a new gang of masked criminals known as the “Demons” is rushing to capitalise on it. I don’t want to spoil too much of what ends up being a surprisingly nuanced and somewhat heart-wrenching tale. But like the best Spider-Man stories, it has our main characters dealing with the unforeseen consequences of a few people with great power, trying to do the right thing. It culminates in what will undoubtedly go down as one of the best Spider-Man stories of all time. I really hope the team at Insomniac Games are proud of themselves.
If it looks like I’ve been banging on about the story for four paragraphs without mentioning gameplay, it’s because I really don’t know what to say about it. There have been endless amounts of trailers, demos, and promotional materials to tell you that the gameplay in Marvel’s Spider-Man is excellent. But let’s start with traversal. The R2 trigger on the controller is basically your ‘Go’ button. On foot, it functions similar to the older Assassin’s Creed games, making Peter free-run and parkour over walls and low obstacles. Holding R2 while airborne shoots out a web you can swing from. Swinging is primarily physics-based, so letting go of the web at the base of a swing will give you a speed boost while letting go at the peak will give you more height.
In addition to swinging, there are perch points scattered around the environment for you to zip to, similar to the grapple in the Batman Arkham series. Except, if you hit X just as you reach a perch point, Spider-Man will launch himself off of it to get another burst of speed. This system will be instantly familiar to anyone who played Insomniac’s previous game Sunset Overdrive. It’s actually kind of surprising how much of Sunset’s traversal system has made it into Marvel’s Spider-Man, but it’s an excellent system so you won’t hear me complain. Chaining web-swings, wall-runs, and point launches into each other makes for a glorious ballet of movement that you have to see in motion to fully appreciate. It sounds a bit overwhelming when reading it like this, but when you get the controller in your hands, the controls just make sense.
This emphasis on free-flowing movement also translates into Spider-Man’s combat style, which also ended up being the most surprising element of the game for me. From the looks of it in demos, the combat bore a blatant resemblance to the system seen in the Batman Arkham games, but in practice, it plays nothing like it. For one thing, enemies don’t stand around waiting to attack you one by one, and connecting attacks doesn’t play out canned animations. Your opponents are swift, have no qualms about attacking you all at once, and there’s a great emphasis on moving quickly and positioning yourself efficiently around the arenas.
Mashing square does a basic 4-hit combo and holding it launches an enemy into the air. Pressing circle when your spidey sense tingles will make you dodge around incoming attacks. You can also dodge over or under enemies to attack them from behind. Pressing triangle will auto-aim a web to zip you to the nearest enemy, and like the swinging system, you can chain these three elements into strings of beautifully choreographed attack moves. If I had to compare it to another game, I’d say it plays a bit like Devil May Cry, with an emphasis on dodging around aggressive mobs of enemies while focusing on style and motion.
Where the combat really goes from a low-key DMC mashup into a full-on Insomniac Games joint is with the introduction of gadgets. Insomniac are known for creating bizarre weapons in games like Resistance and Ratchet & Clank, and they’ve created some truly bonkers weapons for Spider-Man to deploy in battle. You have normal web-shooters that function like a semi-automatic pistol, and an impact web that’s kind of like a shotgun web. Web bomb just sprays webs all around, sticking up enemies in your vicinity, while trip mines can web enemies to the ground, to walls, or even to each other. A Spider-Drone attacks enemies with electric shocks, but you also have a taser web for that function. You can mix these gadgets into your combos at any point, which is what takes a great combat system and makes it a truly transcendent one.
All of your moves – both combat and traversal – can be upgraded using the game’s skill tree. However this isn’t an RPG, so by the time you hit the level cap of 50, you will have unlocked every single ability on the skill tree. In addition to those, you also have suit mods that apply buffs like added health, increased protection from bullets, etc. You can equip two mods at a time and switch them out at any point. Over the course of the game, you unlock many different suits from various versions of Spider-Man, each suit with its own power that you activate by pressing both sticks down. The beauty is that once you unlock a suit and its assigned power, you can mix and match them as you please. So if you want to classic suit’s power with the Infinity War suit, you can do that with no penalties. It’s a fantastic system that never gets overwhelming.
Of course, all of this swinging and fighting wouldn’t mean much if there wasn’t a great world to swing and fight in. Thankfully Insomniac Games have created an absolutely stunning facsimile of Manhattan. The city is large, but not overwhelmingly so, and the skyscrapers lend it an impressive sense of verticality. Swan-diving off Avengers tower only to shoot back up into the sky is a process that never gets old. Strewn across the city are some predictably run-of-the-mill “open-world activities™.” You have backpacks you can collect, research stations and challenge levels that bring their own different twists to the core gameplay loop, and even towers that unlock sections of the map.
Now before you start groaning at the thought of towers, an open-world collect-a-thon is only as good as the traversal system; and the traversal in Marvel’s Spider-Man is an absolute blast. Any other game could just leave it at that, but Insomniac has gone the extra mile to provide canonical reasons for why you’re doing any of it. Some are silly, like you have so many lost backpacks to collect because Peter once won a lifetime supply of them. Others are grounded within the main plot in ways that I won’t spoil here, but suffice it to say you will always have a good reason for doing what you’re doing. If the narrative reason doesn’t justify you, the things you unlock through these activities definitely will.
Visually, Spider-Man is an absolute stunner. Insomniac Games have eschewed a dynamic day-night cycle in favour of changing weather and time-of-day between story missions, where it stays consistent until you trigger the next story event. While this may rob you of the joy of watching the sunrise over the Manhattan skyline in real-time, it means the art team behind the game could buckle down and make sure every available time and weather condition looks absolutely perfect at all times. So when it’s dusk, you can bet it’s the best dusk you’ve seen in any game this year. And when it rains, there are puddles everywhere. Glorious, reflective puddles gloriously reflecting everything. It’s gorgeous.
Once you leave the skyline and get to street level, you’ll find it positively bustling with life with large crowds of civilians and tons of cars on the roads. Insomniac has also implemented a very cheeky way of drawing in LODs, where instead of cars popping into view as you move, they drive into the frame from parallel streets off-screen, making sure the game never drops its verisimilitude while maintaining performance. Spider-Man himself is meticulously animated as he fights and moves through the city, and the main cast of characters all get glorious bespoke facial animations in cutscenes. The secondary and tertiary NPCs you encounter in side-missions aren’t animated as lavishly, however. I also had a few issues with the camera during combat, in that it seems to have trouble transitioning for cinematic takedown animations back to normal in tight environments, but at this point, I’m just nitpicking.
The sound design is uniformly excellent, with the wind brushing past your ears as you soar through the sky, and sounds of traffic and people rushing to meet you as you dive closer to the ground. If you listen closely, you can even hear people talking, cheering, and whistling as you swing past them. Combat sounds are satisfyingly crunchy, and the *thwip* of Spider-Man’s web-shooters never gets old (which is good because you hear them constantly throughout the game).
The story cutscenes are also backed up with a phenomenal voice cast. Laura Bailey’s MJ is appropriately determined and brave, and has a sweet sense of humour. Tara Platt is excellent as Watanabe, the badass Japanese-American detective who just quit smoking and doesn’t laugh at Spidey’s jokes. Stephen Oyoung’s Martin Lee is gentle and mild-mannered, and absolutely menacing when he turns into Mister Negative. But the real star of the show, unsurprisingly, is Yuri Lowenthal who portrays Peter Parker and Spider-Man with a deft hand. He delivers every quip and every heartfelt moment with equal sincerity, at once more mature than any Spidey we’ve ever seen, yet still holding on to the disarming adorkableness that we know and love. Lowenthal is immediately iconic in the role, and given the near unthinkable emotional beats he has to play later in the game, I can’t imagine a casting more perfect. In the coming years, every time I read a Spider-Man comic, it will be his voice I hear in my head.
I think that about covers the essentials for Marvel’s Spider-Man, though I could honestly go on for five more pages. About how you can mash square at civilian crowds to interact with them, and how they seem to have their own secret handshake with Spidey. I could talk about the in-game Twitter feed where Spidey interacts with people as @NYCWallcrawler. I could talk about J Jonah Jameson’s hilarious Alex Jones-esque podcast, though his tone is a bit too close to the real thing to be funny to me.
There’s so much to be said about this game because it really, truly is a special game. But the most important thing I can say about it is that everything about the game that makes me go “that’s so Spider-Man” also makes me go “that’s so Insomniac Games”. From the movement to the combat to the earnest sense of humour, to the gentle, wholesome way in which the sarcastic characters all care for each other, this game is bursting at the seams with Insomniac’s DNA. It’s the kind of game you get when a team of talented, passionate individuals is given the time and budget to tell the story they want to tell in a universe they care about. This studio was born to make this game, and I’m incredibly glad they managed to do so on their terms and in their own voice. Because if that’s not the most quintessentially Spider-Man thing of all time, I don’t know what is.
This review was originally published on PC Mag Middle East.