Greetings Ladies and Gents! It is I, The Shaman of Animation back with a new installment of Shaman's Thoughts. In case you all have been living under a rock for the last 3 weeks, Marvel's Spider-Man is finally released; and from the moment the first trailer for this game was released back in 2016 during Sony's E3 conference, I was excited. And as more was revealed about it, everything pointed to it being a slam dunk, which also made me weary, this game had a lot of hype surrounding it, surely it couldn't live up to it and all its expectations right? Yes. Yes it could.
The first compliment I have to give this game is the fact that Peter Parker's been Spider-Man for nearly a decade; and it wasn't until I played this game and had an interaction with someone on Twitter did it dawn on me just how refreshing it was to have a Peter Parker outside of the comics not be in high school. This isn't me bashing Tom Holland or any one particular version of Spider-Man, it's just that with so many new iterations in the last decade focusing on him in high school and learning how to crawl, having a Peter Parker that's been around the block is a nice change of pace, one that Insomniac uses to great effect for this game's story and universe.
I'm sure if you've seen or read any review for this game, the phrase 'It makes you feel like Spider-Man' has popped up once or twice. But to me, the biggest strength in the game's story is that while yes, you do feel like Spider-Man playing it, it also makes you feel like you're Peter Parker. Whether it's you talking with Aunt May, struggling to pay bills or reconnecting with Mary Jane, you're taken on this emotional roller coaster ride with Peter as his two worlds come into conflict, hitting him, and you the player with a lot of heavy, emotional stuff that admittedly got me choked up in some parts.
While the writing for this Peter is excellent, I don't think a lot of it wouldn't have hit as hard as it did had it not been for the performance of the man you see above, in the worst possible picture I could've chosen for him, Mr. Yuri Lowenthal. Until this game, for me, I always thought of Yuri Lowenthal as being the guy who voiced the young coming-of-age kind of heroes like Simon from Gurren Lagann or Ben Tennyson from Ben 10, but here he was voicing a superhero who had to worry about having to pay his rent. I didn't doubt his Spider-Man because he's a great actor, but when it's a scene where Peter's out of the costume and the game is quieter or when there's a more intense scene is where he blew me away because he takes it to a whole other level in those scenes, delivering lines in a way that I personally had never heard him deliver lines before.
I could go on all day about how great the story to this game is, but it is a game so we should probably talk about actual gameplay and let's get one of the most obvious things out of the way: the web swinging. It is a ton of fun. It's so fluid and it feels absolutely exciting and really simple to pull off, being relegated to a single button (Of course there's a little bit more to web swinging than that but the basics is just that one button). One of my favorite things to do in this game is just jumping off a really tall building and firing a web to start swinging. New York is truly your playground.
And speaking of New York, there's a ton of collectibles, side missions, and crimes to do throughout the game, earning you experience which in turn gives you skill points to put into new skills and tokens used for upgrading and/or buying gadgets, along with suits to buy. My favorite of the collectibles in the game are the backpacks, as collecting one gives you a little bit of dialogue where Peter reminisces about past experiences that really help in fleshing out this world and this iteration of Spidey; and while the side missions are nothing new in the grand scheme of open world games, the web swinging is so good, it never feels like a hassle to travel to most of these missions and do them...key word most.
Howard and his pigeons can go fuck themselves.
Web swinging and collecting stuff isn't all you're doing in this game, as the main story and other small crimes sprinkled throughout sees you taking on crooks and enemies from Spidey's rogues gallery, which brings us to the other obvious thing to mention is the combat and how yes: it is very similar to the Batman Arkham games. But in its defense, I would argue that Spider-Man's combat isn't a knock-off, but rather an evolution of the Arkham Games as the combat is faster paced, and there's a lot more variety to it, especially when you level up Spider-Man's skills and gadgets throughout the game. Sure, you can settle things with plain old fisticuffs, or you could use one of the many web gadgets Spidey has and web up enemies to walls, you can use your webs to grab objects from the environment (or enemies themselves) and throw them at other enemies. This game gives you a ton of diversity in how you can face enemies.
While I can't say Marvel's Spider-Man is the best Spider-Man game because the only Spider-Man games I've played is some of Ultimate Spider-Man for the PS2 and The Amazing Spider-Man 2.
And after TASM 2 you can only go up...
But for me, as a Spider-Man fan, I couldn't have asked for a better game. From the opening minute of the game you can feel that there was a ton of love put into this and Insomniac's desire to make this an amazing (Ha Ha!) experience for fans of the web head and considering the reception and the number of copies sold, I'd say it did its job as intended. This game really takes everything that's great about Spider-Man and Peter Parker, boils it down to its essentials and crafts an awesome AAA game that the character deserves. If you're a fan of Spider-Man, you owe it to yourself to play it. If you're someone who never really got the character's appeal, give this game a shot and maybe you'll get it. If not, at the very least, you'll get a fun game out of it.
But that's all for this post Ladies and Gents. Til next time I'm The Shaman of Animation and hopefully I'll be back with something animated next time.
Take Care...
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