Insomniac's Marvel's Spider-Man

Not actually an innovation. It’s been around for a while, at least since the 00’s. Obviously they’ve figured out a way to make it cheap, though, to use it on so many windows (and on a console.)

Well, whoever came up with it is really smart and I like Insomniac’s take on the idea.

It’s bananas how gorgeous this city is.

Fun game too!

My new favorite thing is doing the landmark photos mid-swing without stopping. It feels like a very Spider-Man thing to do.

I’m still a little bothered by the uncanny valley on about half of the human character models I see though—I mean major characters in cutscenes, not random pedestrians—with Peter Parker being the worst.

My son is playing this one before me due to time constraints on my part (and someone had to play it first) and he had an interesting take on the story. He said he wasn’t really enjoying it much, or I should say it’s not really grabbing him, and he think’s it’s because of his comic book knowledge, ironically. Sounds like a lot of the story is “just who is this mysterious villain” and he knew going in who the bad guys are. Like “man, that Green Goblin sure is crazy, I wonder who it could be under that mask? Any ideas, Norman?” or if you were expected to somehow NOT know Lex Luthor was a bad guy going into a Superman story.

Anyone else know what he’s talking about? Has this made the narrative a less “wow I can’t wait to see where this goes next” type of story?

Everything about the story and “cast” is a disappointment after the awesomeness of the most recent Spidey movie. Specifically, Aunt May. But everything about the gameplay is treeeeemendous. It’s a fair trade.

That seems reasonable. His problem was he played a bunch Saturday and Sunday and was having a tough time getting back to it, having experienced so much of the gameplay already. I suppose hour 15 is a lot different than hour 1, in terms of how fresh and awesome swinging around and taking down enemies is.

That’s always been the case with both Spider-Man games and Insomniac games. They usually hit a point about ten to fifteen hours in where there is no more paradigm breaking happening and the story is usually just ok so you’ve now got to grind it out to see the end.

I know all of this too, haven’t played the game though but I don’t see how this is a problem? Basically every game, movie or series created where you’ve already seen the movie/read the comic/read the book won’t hold any real surprises. But it can be great nonetheless :)

I don’t think he presented it as a “problem” so much as the reason he’s not getting into the story. I know I for one would have preferred a new story where the “mystery” or the driving reason to keep unfolding story beats isn’t one that every comic book fan already knows. They could have done lots of different things to keep interest going from boss fight to boss fight aside from gameplay, but it’s a bummer they didn’t.

This is only true if said movie or game is based on existing source material. I certainly wouldn’t complain that the animated adaptation of Batman The Dark Knight is not holding any surprises for me. Is this game based on an existing comic book story? He didn’t mention that specifically it was, so I don’t believe that’s the case, but I could be wrong.

The driving reason to keep unfolding story beats in Spiderman is to unlock new stuff.

That’s probably true, but I think my son has unlocked almost everything at this point. He’s probably almost done with the game though, so maybe that will line up well. I still think everyone here would agree a stronger and more compelling story is a good thing, and it’s a bummer the story isn’t much to hang a hat on.

A bummer, but hardly a surprise. Open world stories rarely are good. I wasn’t expecting the story to be any good when I bought it. It’s not like the Arkham stories are good either.

It’s somewhat off-topic, I realize, but it would be cool if Insomniac had some something like the two seasons of Batman that Telltale did. Those games took established characters but tinkered with their backgrounds and motivations to create a twist on existing mythology.

Right, with all the hype going on and the raving reviews, I bought this game on whim and gave it a go now!

Just finished the intro and managed to send Fisk to jail. I’m having fun, but I have to say I’m REALLY not used to these combo fighting games. Generally I just end up button mashing the enemies until nobody is left standing. Also when the game tells me to press the triangle for some combo thing, I still have to look down to see which button it is and the moment that I needed it for generally has passed by then… (playing on easy obviously!)

Overall the vibe seems nice and I suspect I’ll get a feeling for the swinging, but maaan those fights are just chaos! Hope I’ll get a hang of things.

It definitely gets more manageable after a while, though if you’re at the looking down to check buttons stage it might be quite a while. One thing I like about the combat is that it gives you more options than Arkham, which other than the stealth takedowns mostly wanted you to do things in a particular way. But the flipside is that there’s a lot of things to remember at first. I’d suggest as a way to get a handle on things focussing on getting a single enemy up in the air (hold square) and killing them, while watching out for your spidey sense, before moving on to the next one. Early on it works on pretty much everyone. Once you get that down pat you can branch out into throws and other moves to mix things up.

The game story isn’t really expecting you not to know who these guys are, it’s saying, “You know where they end up - but how exactly did they get from point A from point B?”

In the case of Otto Octavius I think the game does an excellent job of charting the character’s journey and I’m really looking forward to him coming into his own.

The game suffers from what I think of as Prototype (the game) syndrome: it throws so many moves, gadgets, etc. at you so fast and frequently that you get backlogged and end up not trying/using a lot of them.

It could really use a training mode, where you could fight guys without worrying about failure - and more importantly without reloading the city and making you find another crime before you try some more moves.

Is Spider-Man the most significant console exclusive between Sony and MS in this generation? It sounds like it’s off to an 🕸Amazing🕸 start, and off the top of my head I can’t think of a Sony or MS exclusive that’s had a higher profile and wider appeal. My memory is short though, what am I overlooking?

Yep, I’m running into this problem as well. I’ve probably played 5 hours and there have been so many upgrades to powers, suits, etc. that I can’t remember how to use them all so I stick with the few that I got the first hour or two.