Starting off, I give Marvel’s Spider-Man a 9/10. Growing up I was really into comics. I’ll actually read any issue I could possibly get my hands on even if it didn’t really make any sense out of context. I would see these tiny slices of heroes fighting off giant villains and trying to save the world. It got me invested in the idea of the fact that heroes have to be humans first. Batman, Iron Man and Superman; these are all giant figureheads that are constantly trying to go throughout the universe and preserve peace and the balance but at the end of the day, they do have to take that costume off.
Some of them don’t ever really stop being heroes. Someone like Iron Man, even when he takes off his suit, isn’t really being a normal person though he’s still in his mind Iron Man first and foremost. Which is why I was immediately drawn to somebody like Peter Parker (Spider-Man.) Yes, at night it’s true Peter Parker becomes Spider-Man but first and foremost he’s just a regular kid. It is something that I’ve always thought was really cool but I was disappointed because it’s something that’s never shown up in a perfect way in video games.
Normally they just focus on the aspect of getting to swinging around the city and elbow drop somebody from 80 stores up and that’s cool but where is the aspect that shows the true yin and yang of Peter Parker as a hero? Well, finally we have that in Marvel’s Spider-Man (PS4). This game really blazes into all new territory by introducing so many concepts that are way beyond any other Spider-Man project has ever tried. There are a ton of villains, there are cool power struggles, there’s so much going on and in fact, you don’t just play as Peter Parker himself.
So I want to try and avoid going too deep into the story itself because there are great twists and turns in this story and I don’t really want to ruin it. Just as a brief overview, essentially the thing that starts everything off is that you [the player] have been trying to hunt down the character Kingpin for years and years. He is a very bad guy but he actually serves an important purpose. Kingpin is obviously a very evil villain but he’s so dangerous that he keeps all the other bad guys in check.
Every gang in the city reports to him directly when Spider-Man manages to arrest him. Now, there’s a vacuum of all these smaller bad guys who suddenly want to try and fill that role and the big tribe that showed up to try and actually dominate to where he’s gone is the demons, these are the primary force that you’re going to be up against throughout the game. Sure, you’re going to be stopping random robberies and beating up random bad guys throughout the town but the main people who are showing up and causing utter chaos are these masks two mysterious guys who have some sort of strange power that lets them actually control energy that Spider-Man has never seen before.
What’s really key here isn’t just swinging around and trying to physically stop these guys, it’s also trying to work together with different people throughout New York City and preserve the peace. By working together with police officers or doing an investigative piece into science that’s actually about pollution in the city.
You can figure out what’s going wrong in the town in more ways than just trying to basically punch that next big bad guy. That’s where I think that this game is truly the most unique. It’s something that I’ve truly never in any other game.
Which is where exploration is kind of the point of the entire experience. So let’s talk about travel because in general game-play is key for any game obviously and in this game, it means web-swinging a lot. Spider-Man at this point in the game has been around for many years he’s had lots of time to try and experiment with the best tactics to try and take people down without actually raising any alarms. This is all unveiled just by general exploration. By hacking into different networks you can actually reveal sections of the map and see all sorts of collectibles to upgrade your suit or just fun side quests to do. All of this is really cool and it furthers establishes the fact that Peter Parker is the hero.
