Spider-Man [Remastered for PS5]

Soaring through vibrant NYC is exhilirating and iconic. Peter Parker is endearing, as are his sidekicks. And the HDR, 60 FPS, and ratytracing goodness in the PS5 remaster are superb. But is this a good game?

In some ways it's truly great, even groundbreaking. In other ways it treads stale water and frustratingly avoids innovation.

Spider-Man is primarily an action game, so it would live and die by its controls. Considering the ambition, they are quite good. Spidey has a manageable plethora of exciting moves, attacks, gadgets, and powers (why powers?) that when chained together can produce very satisfying tactical choreographies. Some, however, require precise aiming that is easy to miss. In normal difficulty a mistake can lead to an unexpected and cool outcome, but when you get to the timed "challenges" it can be frustrating. There are also stealth elements, which add a nice extra dimension without complicating the basic scheme.

The open-world formula is taken for granted here. When you're not soaring through the city you're in marked-on-the-map missions. The vast majority are of the combat-centric defeat-the-enemies variety, but there are also search missions, timed challenges, and even mini-game puzzles. That sounds like a nice variety, but after a few of each type it can get repetitive. Like many open-world games there's a lot of copy-paste filler content. Completionists: get ready to work.

The story in the main game has several nice narrative moments, but all in all is too ambitious and bombastic. By the end there are just so many plot threads and plot twists and events going on that you have to wonder not if but how much cocaine the writers were doing. It could have used some discipline and restraint. It works as a whole but it's a bit much.

Finally, let's talk about the true star of the game: NYC. Its presentation is a jaw-dropping technical achievement. You'll spend the first hours of the game amazed, wooshing over rooftops and swooping through alleys with your webs, stopping to look at pigeons in Central Park, or to listen to New Yorkers gossipping in line for a museum, or to watch people hailing cabs outside a bodega. Many famous sites and monuments are here with charming little flourishes. And then you can climb up the Empire State Building and see Manhattan glowing beneath you at night. All of this happens without ever going through an immersion-breaking load screen or having objects "pop in" in the distance. Add PS5 ray-traced reflections and it's stunning.

But it's also, from a gameplay perspective, disappointing. The whole city is window dressing. Outside of main story missions you can't walk into shops or restaurants or apartments. The buildings' doors don't work. You can't talk to people, and though they interact with you, their behaviors are procedurally stiff and unconvincing. The scripted elements fill in very little of this city-sized void. All in all NYC is just a beautiful backdrop for missions and does not feel like a lived space.

Perhaps there was no choice. The genre demands big save-the-world action, not little New York stories. And so even if Spider-Man is a great superhero game, it's a just-fine, not-very-special action adventure.

DLCs

This bonus storyline feels very underwhelming compared to the bombastic main story, but that's not the worst part. Worse is that it adds a large number of new "challenges" that add an incredibly annoying twist: randomization. Otherwise the DLCs raise the difficulty level, which is satisfying, but it's easy enough to do by just throwing more and stronger enemies at you.

All in all they don't feel like a necessary addition, especially considering that the next Spider-Man game was already on the hiorizon.