Marvel’s Spider-Man review: Insomniac’s web-slinging open world brawler is Spidey at his absolute best
There’s a very simple recipe for making a decent Spider-Man game, or at least there seems like there is to people who think that making games is simple. First, it needs to be open world. Not even open world, just open Manhattan, a city that has been accurately recreated in games so many times now that I know it better than the inside of my own mouth.
The game should also recreate the three things that make Spider-Man cool and interesting: his ability to swing around on his webs like an urban Tarzan while rousing music plays, his penchant for making lame jokes during fights with disgruntled scorpion-men, and his habit of webbing up entire school buses of orphans mere seconds before they careen off the side of a suspension bridge and into a barge full of oblivious, sightseeing nuns.
With the exception of the nuns (and that’s only barely), Insomniac’s new Spider-Man game nails all of this. Marvel’s Spider-Man is, pretty effortlessly, the greatest Spider-Man game ever made, a superhero game that makes you feel like the guy on the box, and at long last superseding 2004’s Spider-Man 2 as the franchise highlight in an otherwise stinking morass of cash-grab movie tie-ins.
This is the most acutely Spider-Man feeling game ever made. Swinging down narrow boulevards and along avenues is a primally satisfying form of nerdy wish fulfilment.
The studio’s commission could not have been under more ideal circumstances: the game doesn’t coincide with the release of a movie. Instead the franchise has been gifted to a proven talent of the genre. Californian developer Insomniac is the team behind 2014’s under-appreciated open world stunt-shooter Sunset Overdrive on Xbox One, and before that the beloved Ratchet & Clank series. Unshackled from time constraints, the studio has had all the bandwidth needed to make a genuinely good Spidey experience.
A lot of that time, I suspect, was spent on making sure moving around Manhattan feels good. This is the most acutely Spider-Man feeling game ever made. Swinging down narrow boulevards and along avenues is a primally satisfying form of nerdy wish fulfilment. Swandiving from the top of an apartment building and firing a web at the last second to skim along the tops of taxi cabs is such a basic pleasure that, even after hours of play, you’ll still find it mildly thrilling just getting from point to point.
It’s a simple thing, but one that if Insomniac had got wrong, would have shot the game in the foot. Drop down to the street and you’ll delight in details another developer would have overlooked. Pedestrians stop to ask for selfies or shake your hand. You can press square to say hello or shoot them a thumbs up. You are the friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man, doing whatever a spider can, as long as it’s one of a rotation of four or five greeting animations.
Combat is snappy and complex, and where Spider-Man’s most hand-wavey superpower comes most into play. Your spider-sense – the unspecific feeling of dread that Spider-Man gets right before a girder falls on him or a cup of tea spills on the floor – glows above your head split-seconds before an enemy attack is about to land. Dodge in this moment and you can counter-attack with assorted spider-punches and spider-kicks. Leap into a wall and you can springboard into more melee attacks, building up combos and focus as you do. Your webs can be used to pull you towards enemies, yank weapons away or splooge them (technical term) onto nearby walls.
Fighting isn’t as everyone-take-turns as Arkham Asylum. In this game different enemy types tend to pile in at once and force you to crowd control, either with a series of gadgets – web bombs and electrified webbing, things are largely web-themed here – or most often by using your webs to hurl bits of scenery at them. As you play you level up, unlocking new skills, new suits and better versions of your existing gadgets, but the strong fundamentals of timed dodging and deft retaliation hardly changes. Avoiding combat altogether is sometimes also an option, at least at the outset of many missions, with the ability to lurk in the rafters and snatch patrolling goons when they’re out of the sight of their friends. Arkham Asylum is a strong influence.
Where Marvel’s Spider-Man is less surprising is in its endless busywork between missions. Insomniac is happy enough to resort to some dull genre conventions in this regard, littering New York City with an interminable number of collectible backpacks, sightseeing landmarks, randomly generated muggings and police towers to liberate. The studio has, at least, given these distractions some fun rewards. The backpacks each contain a piece of Spider-Man memorabilia, and all side-missions reward you with the currency needed to upgrade your suits and unlock new ones. Seeing the game’s map sprinkled with glowing dots is still dispiriting though, like looking at an endless to do list.
The main thread of the plot is pretty much as to be expected, and while about as benign as Marvel’s shareholders ever allow, it’s an engaging enough story that sees the city itself transforming around the player. Peter works for one Doctor Octavius, a kind scientist whose increasing obsession with prosthetic limbs is surely foreshadowing something. Mary Jane is a smartly written secondary character, with some missions allowing you to play as her as she sneaks about behind crates investigating crimes. Everything is remarkably well-acted and choreographed – the game also looks sublime inside cutscenes and out – and when things start exploding and helicopters start falling out of the sky, the big ticket, on-rails action sequences could be mistaken for (or perhaps even are) the output of Marvel’s own directors.
Spider-Man games are a veritable rogues gallery of crud, so it’s no great praise to confidently call this the best of that sorry brown bunch. But with Marvel’s Spider-Man, Insomniac has hit upon the recipe for a successful superhero game, one that captures the essence of the character through emotionally charged storytelling and the peculiar mechanics of how they navigate the world. Set aside some of the reheated trappings of the open world genre, and Marvel’s Spider-Man is a lesson in how to make a player feel truly heroic.