By Nik Carney
Hey, what’s up my web slinging slashers! It’s your main man, Nik, with his FIRST official game review.
We’re going to be looking at a modern take on a classic, the new game “Marvel’s Spider-Man” (because they ran out of names there’s been so many). Once again, we have an entirely new Spider-Man because Tobey Maguire is old, Andrew Garfield is bad (as Spider-Man; I liked “Hacksaw Ridge”) and Tom Holland is dust somewhere in space. But unlike those, this is, one, a game and, two, not an origin story so let’s hop right into it.
Plot
You play as the caped crusader Batman… in “Arkham Knight” but in this game you play as (unsurprisingly) Spider-Man who has been in the crime fighting game eight years now and has spent a lot of his time trying to take down Wilson Fisk, a man with a lot of dime to his name and the army of gangsters willing to defend it. He’s just an overall kingpin (nudge nudge) and big boy.
Now you might think that the game’s main antagonist is Fisk himself, but it seems that most of the game is spent cleaning up the mess he left behind. This includes but is not limited to: men in purple shirts trying to break him out, Chinese gangsters called Demons with superpowers trying to steal his stuff (we’ll get to these guys later), a menagerie of villains that use Fisk’s downfall as the right time to kickstart their hipster vegan coffee shop but with murder, and paramilitary company who are your buds at one point but turn against you like Brutus when Caesar used all the salad dressing. Not to mention our boy J. Jonah Jameson screaming that you’re a menace on his podcast no matter how many kittens you save from trees.
Gameplay
Gameplay is one of the best parts of the game by far with a semblance to the combat system of the 2004 Spider-Man 2 game (except with less pizza time). This consists of jumping around punching guys maybe even punching them 50 feet off the ground or off a building because Spider-Man isn’t afraid to just straight up murder a guy and I can respect that, not to mention the new cutting edge system of (drumroll) throwing things. Yep, now you can hit the baddies with trash cans, mailboxes, and even each other if you get the right upgrade.
And let me tell you something: you have not lived until you beat a guy to death with 15 trash cans. The web sling also calls back to Spider-Man 2 in the fact that you actually use the environment instead of the sky like Gods using you as a cat toy.
Like all self-respecting sandbox games, this one has quite the amount of collectables. From pictures of buildings to… secret pictures of buildings. There’s not a lot of actual collectables, but there are his old high school backpacks and I’d just like to point out that his man cannot pay his rent, yet can afford buying 56 backpacks because he’d just drop one somewhere and not only forget where they are, but also forget that he put a tracking beacon on them.
Dislikes
Now this game is overall pretty swell, but then there are the Demons (see, I told you I would get back to them). These guys are bad news because not only do they have guns, they also have SUPERPOWERS, which doesn’t sound bad until you realize that one of them is to break the game.
For example, the beef boys, who you can’t punch unless you web them up or hit them with an aforementioned part of New York’s garbage problem. But, ohhh, they can punch you with an attack I like to call “HOW DO THEY DO THAT THAT IS SO STUPID I HATE THIS GAME ARGHHH” or just “How” for short. They do a high damaging punch where you can only dodge in a certain heat-seeking way, and they do it three times in a row.
Conclusion
“Marvel’s Spider-man” is a great start to the storm of good games we’ll be getting this holiday season. with its funny and dynamic characters, immersive plot, heartbreaking reveals, and beautifully written dialogue (though consisting of mainly the same three one liners).
If you love Spider-Man, and Marvel in general, I suggest picking this game up.
Final Verdict
5/5 – Mr. Stark, I don’t want go and stop playing this game.
