Insomniac Games & Marvel: Spider-Man (PS4)

[Jane]

Announced like an hour or two ago at Sony's E3.

Termi and I are very excited.

[Old Man Jenkins]

Now that's fucking amazing, spectacular even.

[crushingmayhem]

Looks impressive. I've only played one Spiderman game but this one has potential.

[Jane]

My pre-order ships in a few days!!!

[Jane]

So I'm about done with it. 

It's a fantastic game and it's exceeded my expectations. I'm proud of the team over at Insomniac.

 

I wasn't expecting the story or characters to grab me, but they have. The writing and story is genuinely fantastic. It's compelling, heartfelt, funny, full of twists and turns, and at the end you come out caring about all of the characters. This is easily Insomniac's best written game since A Crack in Time, and probably rivals that IMHO.

The character animations are beautiful, continuing Insomniac's trend of great art direction and animation. Everything moves fluidly and is expressive. The lighting during cutscenes is incredible, and at times the game looks astonishing- like a pre rendered CG movie, it rivals some of the Raimi movies IMO.

 

The attention to detail's fantastic, I love all the easter eggs (of course there's a reference to Greg Miller's friend, Shirtless Spiderman, and some Ratchet and Clank references thrown for good measure), J. Jonah Jameson's Alex Jones-type radio show is hilarious and I went out of my way to activate all the towers and find backpacks. The devs did a really great job compelling me to search for every nook and cranny.

Web slinging is incredible, and just FUN. I can easily spend several minutes just zipping around the city and throwing webs, it just feels gratifying.

Now I only have two real complaints- the combat, and some of the gameplay.

The combat's a little repetitive IMO, and there's a ton of combos and gadgets that aren't always necessary, and I think the devs could've gone out of their way to encourage more use out of them. I also frequently am getting my ass kicked by the enemies, when I'm only on normal difficulty.

 

And the gameplay is usually top-notch, but as Colin Moriarty put it in his review, the game falls into a Sonic like trap. When you're not traversing or running quickly, Peter handles incredibly stiffly and it's hard to manuever finely. I also didn't care much for the basically walking simulator moments as Miles and MJ, and I end up skipping a lot of the puzzles.

 

That said, fantastic game. They're obviously doing a sequel. I'm excited for the DLC, and what they do with Spiderman 2, and maybe even a new Ratchet? Who knows, because there's a lot of gameplay elements in here that could fit R&C IMO.

[Old Man Jenkins]

Played through this game on Spectacular twice already, did and collected pretty much everything, and finally earned my platinum today (would've gotten it like a week ago if I remembered to back up my previous save file when I traded in my old ps4). Great gaming experience for much of the same reasons Jane mentioned. The people grumbling about the whole situation regarding Spider-Man and cops need to loosen up and really educate themselves on both Spider-Man and gaming as a whole, as well as actually pay attention to the game itself. Can't wait to see where this series goes in future installments.