Marvel's Spider-Man (2018)

So this has finally released on PC - has anyone decided to pick it up despite already completing it on playstation?

I love this game and it's currently on sale for £38. Just trying to decide if it's worth paying that much for a game i've already completed. I'd be purchasing it purely for photo mode, mods, and some casual swinging about.

The City that Never Sleeps has some truly enjoyable moments mixed in with some of the lower points of the series. While I did have fun playing it, I have to admit that I’m walking away uncomfortable with the following pattern across the two games and DLC:

Character of colour that uses lethal means to pursue and stop a bad-guy = villain that Spidey tries to stop.

White character that uses lethal means to pursue and stop a bad-guy = hero that Spidey teams up with.

There’s obviously more nuance to this critique, but the pattern that Insomniac has set up isn’t my favourite. I think I have very high hopes for the next game but I am have a lot of concerns and reservations.

I slept on it a bit and still come to the conclusion that what the game did with Yuri does fundamentally bother me. On the one had I appreciate that there is a potential for a critique of the police and abuse of power, but given Pete’s close cooperation with the police that critique risks being pretty toothless. Yet, once again a character of colour is largely defined by a link to violence and revenge.

This is exacerbated by the fact that Yuri is essentially underdeveloped to begin with. Unlike Martin Li and Phin Mason, we don’t get to spend a significant portion of time with her personal story. Her story is mostly pieced together through sound bites and telephone calls. For the most part Yuri is a plot device, a character almost exclusively designed to advance the action in the base game. To develop her character in a direction that leads to yet another revenge plot reduces her to a trope that Insomniac has leaned on far too many times over the course of the two games.

I should stress, there is nothing wrong with POCs cast as villains, but to cast a significant portion of the only POCs with generous dialogue and screen time in the same mould, the trope of the wronged who is seeking revenge through problematic means, strips all of them of their uniqueness as characters and reduces most of the game’s racial representation to that of what the game paints as unjustified violence and vigilantism.

This is something I think Insomniac sorely needs to work on and remedy in the next game. How they handle this in future might affect my ability to enjoy the stories they tell. It’s already affecting my ability to enjoy the first game’s DLC.

Screwball missions are so much like Sunset Overdrive missions that I want to skip them entirely. They were cute for a bit, and at first they made me miss Sunset Overdrive. But by The Heist they overstayed their welcome and just like a lot of the bloat in Sunset Overdrive they make me want to avoid them altogether and power through the main story content instead. I once said that Insomniac took all the good from Sunset Overdrive and transferred it to Marvel’s Spider-Man but now I realize they also took some of the bad.

I’m really sad how much the DLC content is starting to diminish my experience of this game. This is why I’m worried about the potential for excessive content in Spider-Man 2. Sunset Overdrive is far too large a game with too much content that feels better to skip than complete. The base content of Marvel’s Spider-Man was pretty close to perfect. Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales hit the ideal sweet spot of content and length. The DLC content of the first game overextends the game in ways that force me to question whether they contribute to the game in meaningful ways. If Spider-Man 2 is even longer I’m afraid of the kind of burnout I experience with other big AAA games. One of the things I love about Insomniac, aside from great mechanics and gameplay, is manageable length. They have shown a tendency to keep things reasonable. I hope that’s not changing.

I’m excited for Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 because Insomniac knows how to take conventions of AAA games that I typically find tedious and infuses them with fun. Yet, despite my excitement I do have a laundry list of things I’d love to see Insomniac change, remove or include in this sequel:

1. A reduction in the staggering number of side missions and collectables that were present in Marvel’s Spider-Man. While I’ll admit that I thought the first game handled this well, my recent stint replaying the game immediately after replying Miles Morales revealed a game that is too bogged down in meaningless side activities that detract from the strengths of the game. While Insomniac has a talent for making all of the content count, they arguably did a much better job balancing the side content with the main content in Miles-Morales. Furthermore, Miles Morales’ side content is frequently deeper, more meaningful and contributes to Miles’ overall growth in ways that the first game simple doesn’t muster. A lot is taken for granted about Peter, and his growth as a character is typically only the stuff of main missions, with side missions contributing little to his personal growth as a character. There are exceptions, like Howard’s pigeons and Harry’s research stations, but the latter feels excessive in repeat play-throughs because it barely grazes the surface of Harry’s story, and his relationship to Peter. Marvel’s Spider-Man is best when it’s exploring real character connections and this feels like lip service to Harry. Similarly the Task Master challenges feel like mechanical relics of older open world games matched with Marvel’s need to shoehorn as many characters into a property as possible. Compare this to activities like collecting sound samples with your Uncle or postcards and audio messages from your dad in Miles Morales. These activities are central to Miles’ development as a character and add depth to the overall game. They are joyous to interact with because they add that depth while not simply meant as busywork. That content pairs up with main story content in a perfect balance that never leaves the game activities feeling tedious or excessive.

2. Focus on character interaction and relationships rather than rote action. Marvel’s Spider-Man thrives on its characters and their relationships. Although swinging through town is incredible, even better are the moments when Pete’s actions drive character development forward rather than simply driving plot alone. Again Miles-Morales enacts this and balances it with the main story much better than the first game. I hope Insomniac has learned from both Miles-Morales and Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart and brings a similar increased emphasis on character to Spider-Man 2.

3. A humble more mature Pete. Despite Pete’s difficult childhood, he remains a man of certain privilege and that is painfully obvious in the first game. Sadly it’s not something I think Insomniac set out to critique. But with some of the nuance employed in Mile-Morales I’m hoping they are more aware and willing to explore maturing Pete. His willingness to work with the police is born out of this privilege, and I’d like to see Pete recognize that and reject the power structures that enable the status quo. If he is fighting for the people he needs to fight the status quo. I hate that something that is often the burden borne by minority communities is thrust upon Miles while Pete is blissfully ignorant. Miles already carries the weight of fighting the status quo alone, and it would be nice if Pete is able to take responsibility for his own part bolstering existing power structures. I’d like to see Pete reject institutions like the Police. I’d like him to question many of the assumptions he blindly makes in the first game about criminality, crime, drugs and other things his privilege has led him to pass judgment upon. I’d like the game to explore Pete’s relationship to power structures and institutions of authority in ways he fails to do in the first game, and ways that Miles automatically challenges in his game. At the very least I’d like a return of community over authority as represented by the Friendly Neighbourhood app in the second game. No more Spider-Cop because Spider-Man should be a member of the community that is working with the community, not policing it.

4. A more nuanced exploration of authority and policing related power structures. Both of the first games use mercenaries to stand in as representative of corrupt power and institutions. Sable and Roxxon mercenaries are the bad cops. I want to see an explicit critique of regular municipal police forces and abuses of power. I don’t want the cops exempted from that, I want the game to rightful include them among the groups that threaten the community, as they do in real life. I hope Insomniac has it in them to critique power structures and the status quo maintained by police forces rather than pinning everything on one bad-guy or one bad private corporation.

5. Mainstream minority characters, especially BIPOC members that are not always relegated to the role of vengeful, retaliatory villains of colours and that are often depicted as ignoring the people they care about due to personal trauma, or are fridged or killed off as motivation for other characters. Both Spider-Man games contain a host of visible minority characters, yet less than a handful have pivotal roles within the story. Martin Li is a central villain in Marvel’s Spider-Man. His back story is that trauma inflicted on him by Norman Osborn leads him to kill his own parents and then eventually risk all the good he’s ever done for revenge. Phin Mason is the central villain in Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales. Her back story is that trauma inflicted by the murder of her brother by Simon Krieger leads her to risk all the good she’s ever done for revenge. Both Martin and Phin choose to harm everyone close to them in a crusade against one man. Both disregard the fact that a Spider-Man would probably help them bring the subject of their vengeance to justice. I know this is a common trope among comic book villains, and we see this with Octavius in the first game, but the fact that two of the few Black or Asian characters in the game are given this treatment ties a great deal of the villainy in the games to racial minorities. Second to that is the death of Jefferson Davis, a Black character that sticks around for one and a half main story missions in the first game before dying to advance the plot. Both games don’t have the best track record for characters of colour that aren’t either villains, dead or relegated to minor roles like Yuri Watanabe.

6. Equal screen-time for Miles and Pete or the ability to choose Miles for the bulk of the game. I either want something structured like Rift Apart where you alternate between Mikes and Pete or have the ability to pick Miles for all content save for some key story missions that require Pete.

7. A shorter game. I know it won’t be as short as Miles Morales, a game that basically hits the sweet spot of story and length, but I hope that Insomniac trims a bit of the excess of the first game.

8. Keep and expand on the mechanical improvements made in Miles Morales a game that vastly refined almost every aspect of the first game for the better.

9. Spider-Gwen. This might seem like a pipe-dream addition but it isn’t such a far fetched idea. Gwen doesn’t need to be from another universe. Comic book miles is from Earth 1610. In that universe Parker is dead and Miles is the only Spider-Man. Marvel’s Spider-Man takes place on Earth 1048 where Morales and Parker are both Spider-Man. Spider-Gwen is from Earth 65 where Parker is also dead and there is no Miles. Insomniacs decision to set the game in Earth 1048 means that there is no established canon and they can essentially play with character backgrounds. So if both Miles and Peter exist on Earth 1048, so can Spider-Gwen. And if that’s true Insomniac can replicate what they did with Miles in the first game, introducing Gwen as a regular character and slowly foreshadowing her eventual powers. Then boom, we get Marvel’s Spider-Gwen.