Marvel’s Spider-Man’ video game review
By Chandler Walter, Contributor
5/5
This game is seriously fun.
That’s honestly the best way to describe it and it’s honestly what a Spider-Man game should be.
While the other A-list superheroes may show their grittier sides from time to time (think Iron Man, or the always broody Batman), Spider-Man has consistently been displayed as the web-slinging, clever-quipping, downright friendly superhero we’ve all come to know and love (no, I’m not counting Tobey Maguire’s Spider-Man 3, I’m just not), and that’s exactly the guy that we get to play in this newest addition to the franchise.
Marvel’s Spider-Man makes the much-appreciated move of placing the player in the suit of Spidey eight years into his illustrious career of fighting crime in New York City. A bold move to make, to be sure, with the worry that the player will be overwhelmed by all of Peter Parker’s already-available abilities, yet the storyline and seemingly infinite collectables work to ensure that many of the cooler, more difficult manoeuvres are locked away for later in the game.
By difficult maneuvers I don’t mean just combat, either—though there are plenty of combos, stunts, and attacks to master that are just so badass it hurts (the bad guys, that is)—I also mean that additions to traversal abilities are unlocked throughout the game. While the web-slinging, skyline-hopping, skyscraper-sprinting travel system is already amazingly fun off the get-go, the unlockable moves mean that getting from point A to B really doesn’t ever get old.
What’s also cool about the story taking place eight years after Peter first donned the red suit is that there is some serious backstory that the player gets to discover throughout the course of the game. Questions are brought up and eventually answered, bad guys appear who have it out for our masked vigilantes, and Peter has some hilarious insults to shoot the bad guys’ way because he’s already been fighting them for years.
I haven’t finished the game yet—I’ve probably only clocked about 10 hours in the three days since the September 7 release—but I like where the storyline is heading. Honestly, even if the story was lacklustre (which it’s not), or the combat was slow and boring (again, it’s not), the game would still be seriously fun to play simply for the web-slinging traversal system alone.
Which is probably the most important thing about a Spider-Man game, when it really comes down to it.
