Review: Spider-Man

Spider-Man was recently released on the PlayStation 4 and has received large amounts of praise. I was a week late getting my hands on a copy but I finally completed my playthrough, ending up gaining the platinum trophy pretty easily by the end of the game.

This Spider-Man is pretty well seasoned. He’s fought a few of his enemies in his rogues’ gallery and got them locked up in the raft. He has a great sense of self and is always ready with his quips. His suit and arsenal are ready for just about anything, but the game leaves you with just enough room to learn a few new tricks and create some new gadgets to play with. The unfortunate problem I ran into was that I didn’t need to utilize his arsenal of gadgets much at all. Sure I had the favorites that I’d use occasionally, but they never really seemed necessary. That isn’t to say that’s a bad thing, the gameplay still felt fun and enjoyable but if they had an extra little umpf I might have used them more. The feature I found more important was gaining skill points to upgrade my abilities, and some of these abilities seem like much more of a priority than others. By mid game, you’ll probably end up with everything you care about and fill out the rest of the skills near the end.

The supporting cast in the game is great as well. If you’re a casual Spider-Man fan you’ll see the standard familiar faces and if you’re more seasoned in the spiderverse you’ll definitely catch some others. The game does a great job of telling the story that’s happening with Peter, his friends and family, and the city at large. They also leave the story pretty open so we can see any number of potential sequels, any of which I’ll be excitingly looking forward to. With all that said, this is definitely a game Spider-Man fans should check out, as well as just open world sandbox fans in general. This is absolutely one of the best games released this year on PlayStation 4 or perhaps any platform but with that being said, let’s get to my gripes.

My playthrough started out flawlessly, I thought this was a perfect game. I had my annoyance like the constant epic music that plays when you start to swing on your web, it just felt out of place and it seemed weird that criminals only commit 5 crimes per city section, but I guess that’s your standard sort of quota for clearing out sections in these types of games. On the topic of crimes, completing the first 45 was ok but the next 80 just seemed stale and tedious. Side missions and other activities were also a little awkward in that they would sometimes change the time of day, thus more days would pass in the actual game but it wouldn’t affect the story progress. As I continued playing though I started to encounter more bugs. The first I encountered was when I attempted to start a mission when I was still wallcrawling, the mission decided to just load me into the wall instead forcing me to restart. Later on, I unlocked a new activity type but the markers refused to display on the map until I actually completed the mission I was on. I also had two missions I ended up having to restart from the beginning due to enemies spawning inside of the terrain, and I’ll tell you this, it’s not too enjoyable getting all the way to stage 6 of a camp just to have to restart.

Even with this problems though, I have to give this game 9.5 out of 10. Its performance is strong enough that they far outweighed the minor bugs I encountered.