Tuesday, March 31, 2020

Spider-Man - Thoughts


[contains minor spoilers]

Spider-Man is a better game than it is a story. It may be because I've immersed myself in good comics lately, but I was expecting more from a non-adaptation video game of New York City's favorite webslinger. Thankfully you don't need to have a strong plot to have fun—Insomniac's forte has always been delivering a colorful city for the player to feel like an empowered god in, and it's no different here. And while the combat system wears its Arkham Asylum inspiration on its sleeve, the pendulum-based traversal is the freshest, most exciting way to explore an open world game to date.


Spider-Man ends on a whimper. That's about as spoilery as I'll get for this article. It includes a lot of interesting villains from the series but focuses on two of them, telling a surprisingly somber story about betrayal... which would be right down my alley, except that it doesn't say anything meaningful. I came away from the plot thinking "wow Spider-Man did not have fun" rather than "wow, what an amazing tale!" A greater contrast could've been drawn between the villains, or better yet, a redemptive arc added to the most sympathetic of the two. It could just be that I was expecting more literary analysis out of a story concerned first and foremost with high-stakes drama, but that doesn't stop me from feeling like I was told a video game story from the early 2000s.

Thankfully that's the only truly outdated aspect of the Spider-Man. The biggest surprise for me was how nice it felt being able to swing around a realistic portrayal of Manhattan—or as realistic as a yokel like me could decipher. It's great being able to gawk at the breadth of architectural variety as you zoom between buildings, down congested streets, and fly over roofs hundreds of feet in the air. Like with Assassin's Creed, being able to vertically scale a digitally rendered version of a city is fun in and of itself, without any combat, objectives, or skill trees to meddle with. Occasionally I'd linger over a ledge, spinning the camera around, wondering how both humanity and Insomniac made all of this. And including multiple times of day is the icing on top of this beautiful cake.


But the web slinging! What a cool system! It takes a while to get comfortable with, but once you become familiar with Spider-Man's physics, it's a surprisingly deft mode of travel. The way you can masterfully weave around buildings and rocket from zip points to maintain speed is riveting; slinging around the city keeps the player constantly engaged, even when they're not on a mission. I never played Spider-Man 2 on PS2 so you can only imagine how impressive I found all of this. Not once was I impelled to use fast travel, simply because it was so fun and freeing to be this fast, this nimble, this graceful.

The combat—while fun—is noticeably less impressive. While the "press button when light above head goes off" is straight from Batman's playbook, what I didn't expect was how fundamental the gadgets would be to Spider-Man's repertoire. I was slow to adapt to the combat because I paid little mind to my toolkit in the beginning, earning myself a good butt-whoopin' most of the time. When I finally decided to buckle down and rotate through abilities, I was alarmed at how easy the game became. Spider-Man carries with him multiple tools to disable swarms of goons, and even well-armed foes are no match for a morally questionable kick off a roof (which, no joke, nearly made me laugh every time). In a way there's almost too many tools, making the hardest part about the combat determining how next you'd like to dispose of your enemies.

That may not be a bad thing however; at its heart, Spider-Man is all about empowerment. Every side mission grants a different type of currency upon completion, of which you'll need multiple to unlock improvements for your gadgets and new suits (there's also a skill tree but it isn't really worth mentioning). The side-missions vary in type and rarely repeat, which is a delight (well, barring the active crimes, which are everywheeere). One moment you'll be clogging up holes on water towers, another you'll be taking on waves of enemies in a melee arena, and sometimes you'll pivot away from an armed robbery just to chase after a pigeon. The abundance of side missions with no fighting or timer adds a chill buffer to the main story's combat & stealth focus. And speaking of which: the stealth sections are joyless—their only upside is that it shows you how much it sucks to not be Spider-Man.


It doesn't take a rocket scientist to guess that pairing Insomniac up with the world's most popular super hero would produce a damn good game. It probably won't blow your socks off unless you're a big fan of Peter Parker, but it does a good job of showcasing why it's so fun to don the blue and red and go crime fighting. The missions are rarely stale, the combat is decent, and being able to leap off of a roof and swing through a narrow alleyway, your toes skimming across the hot concrete, provides a thrill I haven't experienced before. If the story was stronger, I'd be more star-struck with Spider-Man—as it stands, I'm mostly walking away pleased I played it.

(Oh, and making J. Jonah Jameson a Glenn Beck-esque fear peddler is a brilliant touch.)

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