Everyone at some point in their life has dreamed of being a superhero. This fantasy of ours tends to manifest in moments of fear or despair – where we have no control over the situation we face and are helpless. Therefore, we dream of a situation where we can do the impossible and stop others from ever experiencing that sense of helplessness that we had to live through. Be it flying, visions or super strength, we’ve always lived in awe of superheroes – no matter how dark some of their actions can be (looking at you, Batman).
I grew up on superhero movies and have had a steadfast obsession with mythology (I’ll talk more about that when I cover God of War), so tales of people doing the impossible have always fascinated me. Out of all the superheroes, Spiderman was one of the most interesting to me. Putting aside the overplayed origin story – Uncle Ben, bitten by a spider, endless on and off again relationship with MJ etc, he has always been more appealing to my generation, partly due to the fact he is still in education in most of the stories surrounding him and partly due to his abilities. The reflexes alone would make sure you never dropped a plate again!
When they announced Spiderman for the PS4, I was both ridiculously excited and terrified. There hadn’t really been a good game about our web-slinging hero for a long time, with Spiderman 2 released in 2004 is called the only “good” Spiderman game. For a Spiderman game to be deemed good by both fans and critics, it must nail three different elements – web-slinging, combat and personality. He’s a funny guy, being able to mock his enemies with sharp quips in the middle of a battle – even whilst hurling them across a room.
So, first things first, is the web swinging good? The answer to that is a solid yes. About thirty seconds into the opening of the game, you immediately start swinging through Manhattan, watching with awe as our masked hero flips and twirls effortlessly through the air, changing direction and increasing speed in immediate response to your input as the player. Unlike a lot of games, that restrict your powers to specific scenarios or only enable you to climb specific rocks (looking at you Horizon Zero Dawn), the web swinging is your main mode of getting around the city. Yes, you can unlock fast travel to the different police precincts and key locations in the world, but you rarely want to. If I know anything about video games, if you are rarely wanting to use fast travel to get from mission to mission, then you have done something right as a developer.
Next up, combat. Spiderman as a superhero isn’t what you’d call a “head-on” fighter. His insane agility and reflexes enable him to dodge smoothly past the flying fists of his enemies and strike before they are sure what hit them. The developers at Insomniac Games have done an incredible job of incorporating the verticality aspect of Spiderman’s combat – after all, if you can swing on a web at high speed, why not be able to boot an enemy combatant off a building? You can swing in and out of combat at any time, launch yourself off walls and hurl basically anything that isn’t tied down at your enemies (including other enemies).
Then there are the gadgets. Spiderman is most well known for designing his own gadgets – from web bombs to drones to electric webs, the game doesn’t hold back in providing you with endless tools to add to your combat repertoire. It even encourages you to experiment with different combinations, as seen in the endless challenges presented to you by the infuriating Screwball, some of which restrict you to only using two or three gadgets to take out waves of enemies. For example, if you manage to electric web several enemies and then throw a web bomb at them, you can catapult a handful of them into the wall, effectively removing them from combat.
Last but by no means least, the personality of the game and it’s characters. There is a tendency with voice acted games, for some of the character’s to not have as much “life” in them as we’d expect from a living breathing world. Yet, Spiderman takes the well-known humour of the web slinger and cranks it up to eleven, with hundreds of quips and sarcastic comebacks delivered with phenomenal comedic timing. The characters feel real, their relationships and emotions clear both in the voice acting and in the animation of their character models.
The city of Manhattan reacts to the events unfolding within it and the running commentary from J. Jonah Jameson provides a slightly different tone of humour to the game – the well-known Spiderman hater occasionally making a valid point about the state of the city they live in, alongside his ridiculous claims that Spiderman is eating pigeons. Also, as a big fan of the comics and older movies, it’s nice to see the occasional nod and reference to past instalments in the franchise, without restricting access to new players who have no idea about the rich lore of the Spiderman universe.
Despite a game with a focus on combat and the occasional stealth segment (if you don’t take the approach that I do and try to stealth web everyone to the wall), Spiderman is a relaxing game to play. It’s not a majorly long game, with the campaign taking about 20 hours, but I invested about 60 hours into the game – completing side quests, collecting the various tokens scattered around the city and stopping every crime possible.
I’m a bit of a completionist personally, striving to get that 100% on my save file and the ping of the achievement for collecting every little item possible. However, I rarely replay games immediately after finishing them. Normally, I wait a few months till I’m in the mood for the game again. With Spiderman, the moment I unlocked the game’s “impossible” difficultly, I launched a new save file, determined to conquer it once more and get every single possible achievement. When the DLC’s were released, I came back to the game again, seeking more story and enjoying settling back into the world that by this point, I knew inside out.
Any game that can evoke such a sense of replayability and continued enjoyment, even after completing basically everything it has to offer, holds a soft spot in my heart. It’s honestly one of my favourite games ever made and was my game of 2018 – beating even Red Dead 2 (sorry cowboys). If you haven’t given it a try or picked it up but never got into it as deeply as you could’ve, give it another look. The DLC’s are well worth it and even if you have already finished the story, go try out some of the new suits – which range from gorgeous to terrifying.
Till next week,
CaitlinRC.