Vidjama Gmaes Work

Do you know why they call him Peter?

100% main story completion, that’s what I did last week. Now I beat Spider-Man a very long time ago, but I wanted to go into the DLC missions and then move on to Miles Morales which I got free with my PS5 and haven’t played yet. Trouble is I don’t remember anything about Spider-Man. So the natural order of things would be to play the entire campaign from start to finish and learn everything over again.

That’s natural, right?

Spider-Man was a fantastic game when it came out in 2018 and it still is today. It’s not without its problems, but it genuinely felt like they grabbed the combat system from Batman: Arkham Asylum and retrofitted it to match Spider-Man’s lighter frame rather than Batman’s bulky build. And yes it does suffer somewhat from feature creep where the more you get in and unlock suit powers and gadgets the more susceptible the game becomes to cheesing combat.

But that’s entirely your own decision to use those tools.

But the further I got into Spider-Man, the more the game tossed into the world and the more the game seemed to randomly break. Enemies spawning inside geometry, abilities just not working, animations being bugged, missions breaking, etc. By the time I finished with the campaign I was pretty much ready to put the game down and just say screw it on the DLC. And I still might.

I started Spider-Man on the second lowest difficulty setting and ended up turning it down to the lowest in the final 5% of the game, after the city goes to shit and everyone starts trying to kill you at the same time. Nothing against the people who enjoy the brutal difficulty of playing this game on extreme mode, I already beat Spider-Man on normal mode once and I’m just looking at reliving the story and relearning the mechanics.

I completely forgot about the plague storyline in this as well as Aunt May. Goddamn.

I really hated the enemies going into the final chapter of the game because Spider-Man played its hand and just kinda laid everything bare on how convoluted some of the characters were to make them “work.” Like taking multiple swings at a dude with a sword and having Spider-Man just punch through them while the game goes “nah bruh, he’s invulnerable now” doesn’t make for compelling gameplay. I need some visual feedback.

The absolute best parts of Spider-Man came from the boss battles, and those just highlighted how tedious the random thug fights were and how much the game suffered from a massive grind with the crime tokens just going from encounter to encounter taking on the same small groups of thugs and Sable agents. And I won’t even go into the worst part of the game; the Miles and MJ stealth sequences.

Those sequences get much better when MJ gets a stun gun and Miles is escaping Rhino. I don’t hate stealth games but MJ contradicts herself when she complains to Peter that she’s not some helpless glass figure when she is literally completely helpless throughout most of her missions. It also brings the momentum and excitement to a screeching halt when you whoop some ass as Spidey only to have the camera shift to MJ.

I guess I did go into it anyway. Because I’m a liar.

I love how nobody in the Spider-Man universe has peripheral vision, given I can populate a room with a rather low ceiling with a dozen hanging bodies and the people below don’t see anything. Or maybe they just realize that it’s better for their physical health if they pretend to not see anything. Like the thug in Batman: TAS who sees Batman sitting in a dark room and just keeps walking.

Next up is The Heist, Turf Wars, and Silver Lining. Damn I hope there aren’t any stealth MJ/Miles missions in these. I haven’t looked ahead, don’t spoil it for me.