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Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered review: a fun hero epic that takes the wall-crawler to new heightsKing of the swingers
King of the swingers
Spider-Man Remastered Lets You Build Your Perfect Spider-Man | My Fav Thing In… (PC Review)Watch on YouTube
Spider-Man Remastered Lets You Build Your Perfect Spider-Man | My Fav Thing In… (PC Review)
Port AuthorityI played almost all of this game with a controller. I persevered with the M+K controls for a few hours, but my right hand actually started to hurt during combat and swinging. Some games just work better with a controller. Not a good thing, not a bad thing, just a thing. I didn’t run into issues unless it was raining, at which point my PC (and its GeForce GTX 1070) struggled, and things got a bit framey.
Not that this is the case every time you’re grounded, though. In combat Spider-Man ain’t so friendly, and the game does a great job of making you feel agile, using your speed and wits against huge groups of enemies or dudes who are way bigger than Peter Parker. Combined with unlockable suits and gadgets, and levels where you’re sneaking around on beams and high ledges doing spidery stealth takedowns, and you sometimes feel more like Batman than the wall-crawler. That’s not bad, though. It makes you feel smart, combining your Arkham-esque dodging and punching with instant takedowns and stun grenades. You can take down the first wave of a bunch of baddies without them knowing you’re there, trigger your suit’s special ability to make decoy holograms, pull a fusebox off the wall and throw it at the group of thugs on your left (electrocuting them all) and then start performing swing kicks, web yank and air-juggles. And at the end, if you do it all right, it feels like a ballet.
Around this is an original Spider-Man story, with all the ingredients you need. It’s classic stuff: Supervillains! Stopping break-ins! He has a girlfriend - or does he!? He’s late for dinner with Aunt May! Betrayal! Be-who-al? Marvel’s Spider-Man takes the wise step of skipping all the origin story and what have you, starting us in media res. Peter is older now, having graduated and started work for Dr. Octavius as well as volunteering at the local F.E.A.S.T. centre for helping the homeless and awkward backronyms. There are dramatic, eight-legged twists that you can see coming a mile off, but that’s a large part of the pleasure. The game knows you know, and it takes enormous fun in pushing and pulling that tension.
Spider-Man has a lot of that kind of hero busywork to do, as it turns out. Cat Woman has left some dolls for you to photograph, some dude has lost his homing pigeons, Harry Osborn wants you to check out a bunch of mobile science labs, and for some reason you really want to collect all your old backpacks that you left webbed around the city years ago. When you zoom out on the map there are a lot of icons, and I imagine it felt a little dated even in 2018. Luckily the web swinging is so fast and fun that I cleared a load of these collectibles sort of accidentally - which is good, ‘cos they’re the in-game currency to unlock new suits and upgrade gadgets. Those are some of the most fun bits, so it’s a shame that they’re so intimately tied to basically doing Spider-Man chores. But it does lend the unlocks themselves a sense of greater worth, I suppose.
Mister Negative is one of the villains you come up against, and is your classic bad-guy-with-understandable-motivations. Of the game’s rogues gallery, I think I enjoyed him the most.
Elsewhere in the game you see a lot of fun, world-building details that have a much lighter touch. There’s a sort of version of Twitter that you don’t need to look at at all, but if you do you’ll see people sharing tips on how to dissolve Spider-Man webbing if any of it gets stuck on your car. Pete himself is really well written - quippy, but nottooquippy, and he just seems like a nice, relatable dude. Marvel’s Spider-Man also has a few bits where you play as the non-superhumans Mary Jane and Miles Morales, which I did findslightlyannoying - but they also added some nice character building and set up for the next game.
The existence of Spider-Man: Miles Morales is kind of shame in the context of this review. Marvel’s Spider-Man is a great game, and this version comes packaged with all the extras. Were it not for the existence of Miles Morales, I’d have no qualms recommending you getthisSpider-Man right now. But I am cursed with the knowledge that Miles Morales exists, is a bit tighter, cleaner, and more dynamic, and is coming to PC very soon. I don’t think you’d regret getting Marvel’s Spider-Man - it is, I must emphasise again, a quality game - but, look. If you can only get one…
