There are a lot of positives to take away from this game which is (was) the talk of the town when it came out in 2018. Every corner of this 50-hour adventure screams attention to detail and love for the character. Every quest has been designed to show off how it is to be Spiderman for a day, the whole map is a play-house to role-play as Spiderman in whichever direction you please. But the one place no love was shown, no attention was given, is innovation. You might even think this game reminds you of a certain caped crusader dressed in black with long horns on his cowl. Because it’s his game that has been copied and pasted from start to finish and given a new identity. Then again, maybe it is a love letter to that franchise as well.
From the opening scenes, you will be thrown into the middle of a web-swinging session that will teach you all you have to know to get around New York, teach you all the controls and all the mechanics that are very intricately mixed together to make web-swinging as fun as it can possibly be. This opening scene only manages to dump a lot of information about the mechanics but it takes hours before you get all of them together in your subconsciousness and zip around effortlessly. After hours of practising swinging will become second nature to you and all the complex controls and scenario-specific buttons will become as one as you will find yourself gliding through the air like nothing else matters in the game. This is where the game shines, especially after the remaster where the NY skyline looks absolutely gorgeous during the day and the butter-smooth animations drive our webbed hero forward from one skyscraper to the next. It becomes so addictive that the fast travel system in the game will be only an afterthought, only present when you have to jump into one of the many excellently written story missions immediately after completing one of the many side activities around the city. The next best part of the game is definitely J. Jonah Jameson’s podcast which plays itself every now and then describing your last big actions in hilariously biased ways which only he can pull off. I think they give you an option to turn off this feature in the beginning but you will be a fool for doing so as some of these short clips will make you burst out laughing hysterically at one of Jameson’s tirades against the titular hero. Not being present in any other form in the game, Jameson’s personality shines in a very unique way. While you are webbing your way to and from the main missions you will be busy doing one of the many optional activities around the city which will test all aspects of the games’ mechanics – combat, traversal, puzzles, and stealth and each activity will have a story interwoven into it so that completing quests don’t sound like a bore. In most cases, these little stories are well thought-out and give you enough to go on, be it catching pigeons for an old man or collecting tapes to discover the next move of a killer on the loose. There is a pattern to these activities as each act of the game, including the DLCs will have its own side-quests and by the time you are at the very end, they might sound tedious considering how many times you will have to repeat the same mechanics over and over again just to see the end of the story or get a trophy for your efforts. But credit where it is due, none of them are tedious on their own rights and take up very little time individually. The map is open for exploration at all times but not too big compared to the open-world games of today and merely traversing will land you in the vicinity of a quest that can be completed within a few minutes. This makes the map not feel empty and dense with things to do in your off-time when you don’t feel like progressing the main story.
Coming to the main story, Spiderman has been immensely popular of late ever since the movie came out in 2002 and most people who will be picking this game up will be familiar with most of the characters and their motivations. There isn’t anything strikingly new in the character designs or the general story but how incredibly well-acted they are. Each character is fleshed out fully in both their facial expressions and voice acting as performance capture reaches a new standard in video games. In addition to the presentation, each character has been given their own time in the spotlight and story arcs which makes them feel very real with real emotions right from the start to the end. It would not have been difficult to sell Wilson Fisk as Kingpin considering how well acquainted we are with just his silhouette but the care he receives in his portrayal is striking even though short. It is at this point you realise that not just the characters but the entire game world has received the same amount of love from the developers as each cut scene is beautifully rendered and the indoor environments look remarkably well designed right down to the point where one shelter for homeless people almost feel real and right out of a documentary. This kind of love for details for both the world and its characters makes the story compelling although it’s on autopilot for most of the time if you are briefly acquainted with the characters from other Spidey-associated media. One person deserves a special mention – Dr Otto Octavius who is so well-acted, voiced and well-written that his eventual transformation into a villain still feels like a betrayal to our collected consciousness. The story does rush the final arc where things go full-on crazy with multiple villains out in the open who don’t get individual attention but the conclusion is still very satisfying, an absolute cinematic marvel high on emotions. Even the 3 DLCs are well thought-out and the interweaving story although linear and predictable, gives us a very comic-bookish villain and some exciting moments of gameplay involving characters who were not in the mix of the main story. Comics with double features have been a thing for years and it’s rare that the supplementary story adds to the main story by creating its own space. Miles Morales gets a great development arc from the main story to the DLCs and the ending sets up the sequel in promising fashion. On its own, the game is a must-play for any comic book fan and a fan of the open-world-action game design.
But unfortunately, the game doesn’t exist in a vacuum and its “influences” can be seen right from the beginning. It starts out feeling as though it borrows the combat mechanics from the Arkham franchise but eventually even mission designs are pretty much the same as the Batman games. One particular find-the-recording is such a throwback that I remembered the exact mission from Arkham Knight involving Zsaz. It, however, doesn’t only borrow from Batman but might have actually improved on the combat with each gadget being equally useful in certain situations and pulling off gadget combos are extremely satisfying. Having a generous buffer time for combos also helps to get the scores as high as possible. The equivalent of predator missions is here and Spiderman doesn’t feel as natural as Batman stealthily taking out goons one after the other but the mechanics are done nicely. It sucks to see that they only developed a tried and tested formula instead of making something new on their own but seeing how polished the final product is, it’s barely a negative.