Marvel's Spider-Man
I can see why this game is a PS4 fan favorite and a must-play for many. I’m not usually into superhero games, but I bought this one years ago to play with my nephew and finally got around to platinuming it—four years later.
If you own a PS4 (or even if you don’t!) I highly recommend giving this one a shot.
Story
The story isn’t super special but there’s enough substance here that it serves for a good bit of entertainment. It’s not super deep and it’s pretty easy to guess where the story is going.
One thing I will say is that it’s easy to sympathize with the main villains as taking down a corrupt president is a pretty easy thing to get by.
Combat
The combat is the star of this game. It feels smooth and there’s a lot of cool stuff you can do to decimate the enemies.
The combat encounters are varied enough that it doesn’t become stale as new enemy types start showing up as you progress to the game. The environments feel good to fight in with lots of different options for approaching the fight, you can stealth the enemies or just go all out guns blazing and beat the shit out of all the enemies.
You can drop scaffolding on the enemies for instant kills, set down trap mines where an enemy patrols, or even stick them directly onto an enemy and watch them slam into walls, or into others lol. There’s even an achievement for this.
The gadgets you get are all very nice to use. I think the star of the show is the impact web gadget which is very powerful and will help you instantly kill a lot of enemies as webbing enemies to walls or the floor will instantly take them out of the fight. No matter the type of enemy.
The web bomb is also fun because a lot of the time you’ll be overwhelmed by groups of enemies and you can absolutely just destroy them with one of these bad boys. If you’re lucky you’ll even stick a few of them to a wall which is very nice.
In general even on the hardest difficulty the game is fair and the enemies have a fair amount of health (unlike another game… iykyk).
Perfect dodging is super duper satisfying and very rewarding to pull off which is good. Though it’s not hard to pull off.
Though I will say some of the enemies have really annoying patterns… well I say some but it’s just the fat guys—those guys will just keep doing attacks over and over again, the same attack actually. And it has gotten me killed more times than I’d like to admit. I don’t think it’s bad design per se but it is definitely weird and annoying especially when fighting groups of enemies. You don’t really get an opening to attack the other enemies because of the fat guys.
That’s what makes perfect dodge so good though as it will incapacitate them for a little bit which allows you to maybe get one of the other enemies in the air, after which you’re free to do whatever you want as the Enemies can’t do shit while you’re in the air. The only exception to this are the enemies with guns, which are very powerful… they do a lot of damage. Snipers are definitely the worst and the enemies I usually end up taking down first as if you don’t do it you’ll just get one shot by them basically. That’s where stealth comes into play I guess you’re supposed to stealth takedown the snipers before fighting.
The suit powers are awesome and a lot of them do cool stuff. But I don’t think they’re super balanced. The first suit power you get is the best up until you unlock the Taskmaster challenges, after that the quad damage suit power is just the best option for every encounter really. Being able to one or two shot every enemy makes clearing groups so fast that it might as well be NECESSARY to complete some of the Taskmaster challenges lol.
And the suit upgrades you get don’t fare much better in this area either, there are only a handful of good ones because all the rest are outclassed by the good ones. The one that gives you more EXP from combat is a must have, I got it and then didn’t take it off until I was max level. And the other two slots—I only ended up using two abilities. Extra damage… and extra damage.
Full Charge Capacitors: Increases damage when your health is above 100.
Discharge Power Cells: Perfect Dodge temporarily increases damage.
Combat Analyzer: Increases XP from defeating enemies.
In the late game, the first suit power you unlock in the game, battle focus, becomes one of the best in my opinion as the Sable guys’ armor make the quad damage a suit power—along with most of the other ones obsolete. However with the battle focus suit power you can get up focus bar quickly and focus on performing finishers on the armored Sable guys. This is aided by one of the abilities you unlock in the skill tree that allows you to do another finisher for free.
The Web Blossom suit power also becomes way more useful in the late game as you go around stopping every crime in all the districts. It’s very time consuming but the Web Blossom power allows you to bang some of them out very quickly as the enemies tend to bunch up a lot.
Spider Drones are also incredibly useful for dealing with large groups of enemies which is… every encounter lol. They’re also every economic as if they kill an enemy you get another spider drone so you can unleash hell on everyone :D.
Story Missions
The story missions are not the most interesting in terms of gameplay. A lot of them are also boringly slow. I would argue that some of the side content has better gameplay than most of the story missions. That isn’t to say they’re unfun, but they can have unfun aspects to them. It’s decently varied but it all ends up boiling to go to place, find out clue about X person or organization. Go to other place… save this guy.
Obviously it’s more complicated than that but that’s generally how it goes. The missions are fun nonetheless though and as explained above the story is actually quite good.
There are some missions where you get to play as characters other than Spider-Man, mostly as MJ. But there are some where you get to control Miles as well. The MJ missions are short enough and focus on stealth. But they’re not difficult or really have anything that can be called riveting gameplay. It’s just sneaking from one place to another.
That being said there are a lot of cool set pieces. One of my favorite ones is in the mission “Collision Course.” Which was super awesome and had great story implications as well.
Side Content
There are a lot of collectibles. And I don’t think that’s an understatement. In order to 100% the game you need to collect, a total of 358 collectibles (including side-quests)
- Backpacks: 55
- Side Missions: 16
- Landmarks: 47
- Fisk Hideouts: 6
- Demon Warehouses: 5
- Sable Outposts: 4
- Prisoner Camps: 4
- Research Stations: 17
- Black Cat Stakeouts: 11
- Pigeons: 12
- Taskmaster Challenges: 16
- Thug Crimes: 45
- Demon Crimes: 40
- Prisoner Crimes: 40
- Sable Crimes: 40
That is a lot of side-content. Though most of it can be done pretty quickly, there are some challenging ones, namely the Taskmaster challenges which are pretty fun for what they are. Thankfully the game takes a sensible approach to the collectibles. It doesn’t shove them down your throat all at once as all the collectibles are unlocked by progressing through the story. The research stations cannot even be 100% completed before finishing the main story as the last research station is locked until the end of the game… because of story reasons. There’s some dialogue that wouldn’t make sense otherwise.
A lot of the collectibles offer unique challenges which is very nice. Especially the research stations.
I had fun doing the research stations as they have decently varied gameplay. The thing that surprised me is that 2(?) of them required either story progression (electric webs), or a specific skill (ground pound). I think it’s odd that only two of them required specific skills or progression. The last one you unlock after completing the main story, I wouldn’t count as it’s a bit special.
The Taskmaster challenges are also a lot of fun, they’re the most challenging of all the side content as it does take a few attempts to get a high score on them. Though not required for 100% getting a high score is pretty important as you need a lot of challenge tokens in order to craft all the suits in the game, which is required for an achievement.
There are a lot of hard Taskmaster challenges, not uncharted crushing difficulty level of hard but there were a few that gave me quite a bit of trouble. Notably the combat challenge in Central Park was definitely not a breeze. The terrain there was annoying and I think it took me like 10 tries to finally get the score needed for ultimate level lol.
The game turned into a collect-a-thon for me near the end. I had already done all the other side content while progressing to the game, so all that was left at this point were the newly unlocked Sable and prisoner outposts, along with the crimes… which took way too long to do and was a boring process but I managed to do it. By this point I’d gotten burnt out on the game but I pushed through since I only had a bit longer till I could finish getting 100%.