Marvel's Spider Man
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 Be Greater.
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Marvel's Spider-Man (also referred to as Spider-Man PS4) is a action-adventure game developed by Insomniac Games and published by Sony Interactive Entertainment. It was released on September 7th 2018 for the PlayStation 4. A remastered version was released for the PlayStation 5 as a launch title for the system through a two-game bundle that also contains Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales. A PC port is releasing on August 12, 2022.
A spin-off/sequel titled Spider Man: Miles Morales, released on the PlayStation 4 and 5 on 12th November 2020 to coincide with the PlayStation 5 launch. A direct sequel, titled Marvel's Spider-Man 2 (set after both this game and Miles Morales) was released exclusively on the PlayStation 5 in October of 2023.
Premise
23-year-old Peter Parker, who has been Spider-Man and the protector of New York for eight years, struggles to balance his role as Spider-Man and his normal life as a college intern when a dangerous biological weapon is discovered that various high profile criminals intend to release upon the inhabitants of New York City.
Why It's Greater
- For starters, the game is huge improvement to the both movie licensed games by Activision, as this time, the story is more original, with improvement such as gameplay and graphics.
- Solid acting performances from some familiar actors (some would reprise their roles) like Yuri Lowenthal, Laura Bailey, Josh Keaton, Travis Willingham, Fred Tatasciore, Dwight Schultz, to name a few.
- Plenty of humorous dialogue thrown in for a good few laughs, particularly the "Spider-Cop" bit, which is a nod to RoboCop.
- Plenty of unlockable suits for Spider-Man, all of them having their own unique abilities that can be shared to other suits once unlocked so if a suit you don't like has a useful perk you want, you can give that perk to a suit you do like.
- The Marvel Cinematic Universe suits from Spider-Man: Homecoming (Homemade and Stark Suit), Avengers: Infinity War (Iron Spider), Spider-Man: Far from Home (Stealth and Upgraded) and Spider-Man: No Way Home (Intergrated and Black and Gold) are included.
- The Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse suit is available as DLC.
- It also has Sam Raimi's suit from the original Spider-Man movie series was available in an update, and it's free!
- The suit from The Amazing Spider-Man movies was finally added in 2020 and it's also free.
- Unlike most modern AAA games, unlockables, skills, and character customization aren't locked behind micro-transactions. Instead, they are tied to natural progression at a comfortable pace.
- Amazing graphics with an extremely accurate portrayal of New York City with a few creative liberties taken here and there, and exceptional levels of visual detail. The PS5 Remaster ups it even more with improved visuals and to be to play at 4K 60fps. Even better, the developers introduced a patch called Performance RT which, like its successor Miles Morales on the PS5, allow the games to run at 4K with Ray Tracing effects at 60fps!
- This extends to the sound design as well; in fact, some of Spidey's dialogue was recorded multiple times to fit the scenario, whether he is fighting, swinging, or just standing around.
- A good and interesting plot; unlike past Spider-Man games, this one benefits from not having ties to a comic or film, being a completely original story instead. It is also the best story in a Spider-Man game since Spider-Man: Edge of Time.
- The web-swinging mechanic is well made and surprisingly better than the other mechanics in the other games combined, even Spider-Man 2 (2004).
- The combat is also really fun and gives you plenty of options for combat yet it still has actual difficulty and a huge variety of enemy types. It makes you feel like Spider-Man (fast and nimble), just like how the Arkham trilogy made you feel like Batman (heavy and powerful).
- Another page inspired by the Arkham series is the use of gadgets. Spider-Man has access to eight gadgets, each upgradeable a number of times.
- Web Shooter: At its most basic, a single shot from the Web Shooter is an effective means of momentarily staggering an enemy. A few consecutive shots can also be used to ensnare a target and make them available as a weight to swing around and knock over other enemies. If an enemy is close to a wall, firing multiple webs at them will cause them to stick to the walls, incapacitating them. The Web Shooter is the most effective way of taking down brutes, who need to be webbed up before they can take damage from hits. It can also incapacitate enemies by webbing them to the ground after they've been knocked over. Can regenerate its own ammunition over time without the need for Spider-Man to perform special takedowns.
- Impact Web: Has the same effect as multiple shots from the Web Shooter, except that is fires a more intense projectile. Impact Web webs enemies faster; on most normal-sized enemies, this means being bound instantaneously. Shooting Impact Web on foes that position themselves by a wall surface, or ones that are not on their foot, will often result in easy webbed knockout.
- Spider-Drone: Stuns enemies with a beam of electricity, rendering them defenseless for a short while, as the drone will head into waves and stun them at Spider-Man's request. It is helpful for fighting large groups of enemies.
- Web Bomb: Upon detonation, the Web Bomb explodes webs that trap nearby enemies. Throwing a Web Bomb into large groups of enemies can tie up more than one of them, rendering them unable to fight back – and when enemies are covered in web, the option to spin them around and launch them into others becomes hugely advantageous.
- Trip Mine: Fires a small device that attaches to a wall or enemy, which upon detecting an enemy nearby, will hit them with a web and pull them towards one another, causing them to slam together. It is meant primarily for large groups of enemies. The Mine only has a few charges, so players need to be careful where and when they use them.
- Concussive Blast: Emits a powerful sonic wave, causing nearby enemies to tumble backwards with great force. This is ideal for clearing rooftops or scaffolding of enemies, as it can send them flying over the edge, instantly knocking them out of combat. The gadget is also highly useful in situations where Spider-Man finds himself surrounded by a large number of enemies. The blast also disarms most enemies off their weapons; while they can pick it up later, it gives the player a lot of room to take them down with greater ease. The disarming effect also applies to Sable units' protective energy generator; this makes said units vulnerable to regular webbing effects even when not catching the disabling effect of their own hacking grenade.
- Suspension Matrix: When deployed, the Suspension Matrix creates a gravity field that affixes enemies into the air, leaving them helpless and allowing easy air combos until the effects wear off. The gadget has no effect on brutes until it has been fully upgraded. Other upgrades for the Suspension Matrix include increasing the duration of the effect as well as its radius, allowing for more damage to be inflicted while the gadget is still in force.
- Includes a plethora of villains such as the Shocker, the Kingpin, Mister Negative, and many more. It also gives light to Mister Negative and Tombstone who are much more obscure villains and it's nice to see them in a Spider-Man game.
- Venom also makes a cameo appearance and the reveal of Spider-Man 2 proves this to be foreshadowing for the next game.
- Spider-Man's web-swinging finally attaches buildings again. The Amazing Spider-Man games, despite having fantastic web-swinging, suffered from not being too realistic with it. Here, however, it goes back to the webs attaching to buildings instead of the sky. Just the act of swinging alone feels exhilarating with how fast you can go.
- You can visit many locations from the comics similar to Ultimate Spider-Man, such as the Avengers Tower, the Wakandan Embassy, Doctor Strange's Sanctum Sanctorium, and even the Nelson and Murdock Law Office.
- While they can get repetitive there is a reason for doing side missions as these will give you tokens in order to craft various items, such as gadgets and suits. There are six different types of tokens, each with their own collection requirements.
- Backpack Tokens: Located in Peter's hidden backpacks found throughout New York City, these are the easiest to obtain. Opening a backpack will award tokens and usually some sort of memento that relates to Spider-Man lore.
- Base Tokens: Are obtained by clearing enemy bases of major villains, such as Wilson Fisk. They are thus more difficult to obtain.
- Challenge Tokens: Are obtained by completing Taskmaster Challenges in the base game or completing Screwball Challenges in The City That Never Sleeps downloadable content. Many late-game items require Challenge Tokens to craft, making them important to obtain.
- Crime Tokens: Are obtained by interrupting street crimes that Spider-Man comes across on various missions.
- Landmark Tokens: Are obtained by swinging to a notable landmark and taking a high-quality enough picture. These tokens are easy to obtain, but the use for them is relatively small.
- Research Tokens: Are obtained in three ways. The first is by completing the projects puzzles in Otto Octavius's lab. More of these projects are added throughout the game, and six are obtained this way in total. The second is completing various tasks at Research Stations (two tokens obtained per task), and the third is by capturing pigeons. Research Tokens can be more complicated to obtain.
- Stan Lee makes a cameo as usual, but this time it's genuinely charming and sweet as he is the owner of a pizza place and tells Mary Jane how her and Peter are his favorite customers.
- Jonah J. Jameson is also in the game, as a radio host with his own show called "Just the Facts", which has a lot of funny moments in them since he acts like the equivalent of the game's Alex Jones as he's always coming up with a bunch outrageous accusations and conspiracy theories about Spider-Man's actions.
- You can play as Mary Jane Watson and Miles Morales in certain parts of the game, and these sections aren't too intrusive to the overall story.
- The City Never Sleeps DLC works well as a post-game plot with the game bringing Black Cat into the fray after it was hinted that she was onto something in the main game, Yuri Watanabe being given a bigger role, and this time following a storyline related to Hammerhead.
- It also hints for what's to come next with Yuri quitting the police force to become a vigilante (possibly as Wraith) and the post-credit scene showing Spider-Man training Miles Morales who is wearing a Spider-Man mask, leading into Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales.
- A really sad and heartbreaking ending. Peter has the choice to cure May now and let thousands of people die from the Devil's Breath, or let the scientists use the entire antiserum to replicate a cure to give to everyone, allowing his aunt to die. Yuri Lowenthal's acting is heart-wrenching as you can see Peter grappling with the choice to be selfish for just this one time, but in the end, his strong morals won't let him do it. All he can do is hold May's hand and cry as his beloved aunt passes away.
- Meta example: The game's critical and commercial success solidifies that quality, passion for the craft, and consumer goodwill do eventually lead to long-term success.
- Amazing soundtrack that fits the tone of Spider-Man and sounds more like a movie soundtrack.
Bad Qualities
- The side missions, similar to any open-world Spider-Man game before it, suffers from getting extremely repetitive at times.
- The QTE's are overused during boss fights, but luckily the game lets you turn off QTE's.
- Once the game is completed, there would be little to do outside of late-game clean-up.
- Weak boss fights that are standard fare; they offer no real challenge and each boss don't have much variety on how they're defeated.
- The stealth sections as Spidey are way too easy since a lot of the enemies are placed in such a way that its makes it hard to fail them.
- For whatever reason, the game takes a note from Ubisoft's open world games and has you use towers to unscramble the map.
- Despite being able to play as Mary Jane and Miles being a good idea, the execution isn't that good since they're mainly linear stealth segments with you having to avoid enemies no matter what.
- In relation to WIR#6, the plot can be easy to predict at times. Examples being Jefferson Davis' death and Otto Octavius' revelation.
- The PS5 remaster changes Peter's face to a Tom Holland-esque face, that looks inferior to what it originally was (an example of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it"). It was said that the reason behind the change is so that Peter's face was remade to look more like his voice actor, Yuri Lowenthal, but that's not a very good excuse to change the face. Thankfully, in the PC version, there's a mod where you can use the original peter model.
- Fans also criticized the face swap by saying that Peter looks too young compared to the original.
- The PS5 remaster is also exclusive to the PS5 ultimate edition of Spider-Man: Miles Morales (with the ability to upgrade if you own the standard edition for a small fee tho), so you need to buy that game first to play the remaster.
- Screwball is a very bad villain and becomes an annoying character since she's the one behind the DLC challenges, which were getting harder the further the DLC went. She was so hated many players were hoping any further story DLC didn't involve her and her challenges.
- Silver Sable is a very horribly hateable villain with no redeeming qualities here what so ever, and would have been so much better without her.
- Miles's skin tone is just mediocre.
- Executive Meddling:
- A humorous example, but despite the free reign Insomniac had with the game, Marvel just refused to allow Peter or Mary Jane to say the word "balls".
- As with several other recent Marvel products before 2019, there are no explicit references to X-Men and Fantastic Four for this reason. At the time, those franchises were embargoed as per Disney and Marvel's licensing issues involving movie rights to those franchises.
- Look close enough though, and you might see slight subversions to this in regard to the Four's leader Reed Richards. Scenes involving Spider-Man and Otto quickly breeze over post-it notes to contact a man called "R.R" for materials and "Suit fabric ballistic".
- Subverted with Deadpool (granted Deadpool 2 released the same year and was very popular with the MCU crowd, prompting Marvel to promote him). One of the backpack collectibles is a piece of paper that includes a mask similar to Deadpool's angrily crossed out as Spider-Man and Deadpool are not on good terms. Enemies may also claim Spider-Man has a skin condition under his suit, much like Deadpool who has very ugly skin.
- Yuri Lowenthal revealed in a GameZone podcast that Marvel executives were very much against the idea of killing off Aunt May, and fought against the idea for months before finally relenting. Of course, Marvel not allowing Aunt May to die is nothing new, so the fact they allowed Insomniac to go through with it is impressive.
- Recycling:
- The game has many striking similarities to the various Spider-Man films from both Sam Raimi, Marc Webb, and even the MCU. There's Spider-Man established to have been a superhero for a while like the MCU incarnation, though longer, making him more like the Sam Raimi incarnation, the story features Dr. Otto Octavius creating his Doc Ock tentacles like Spider-Man 2 (though initially funded by Norman rather than Harry), Spider-Man tries to stop a subway train like in Spider-Man 2, halfway through the plot switches to one involving the main villain planning to poison the city from a tall skyscraper with an antidote that Spider-Man needs to disperse to cure it like The Amazing Spider-Man and its game, and even pulls in some influence from the Netflix Daredevil show with Wilson Fisk resembling that show's version of him both physically and in terms of how much power he apparently has in New York City. Hell, even the ending dialogue with Octavius is near-identical to the dialogue with Green Goblin from the first Spider-Man movie. There's even some scraps of what Sony planned to do with Spider-Man as a franchise after The Amazing Spider-Man 2 by having the Sinister Six in the game. However, the game does its best to mix things up.
- Otto's role in the plot is almost identical to that of Curt Connors from the first Amazing movie in that both are looking for a cure to a condition they have (neurological disorder/missing limb, respectively), both act as mentors to Peter who ends up inadvertently helping turn them into villains, both have their work stolen by Norman Osborn after working for him (directly/indirectly) who's seeking a cure for a family condition (Harry's/his own), both go insane after gaining their powers, both poison the city for vaguely well-intentioned reasons, both have almost the exact same climactic battle on top of the OsCorp building (complete with spire), and both end up in jail at the end rather than being killed.
- Becomes hilarious in hindsight with the first Amazing Spider-Man movie's suit getting added into the PS5 remaster.
- The remaster was completely unnecessary as the game is backwards compatible with the PS5, had come out only 2 years prior and still looked good, all of these changes could have been added in an update
Reception
WatchMojo ranked this game the 1st BEST in the Top 10 BEST & WORST Spider-Man games.[1]
Critical reception
Spider-Man received "generally favorable" reviews, according to review aggregator Metacritic. The game received praise for its gameplay, graphics, story, characters, voice acting, and soundtrack while being criticized for familiar open-world tropes and lack of innovation. Critics have called it one of the greatest superhero games ever made and the game improved the reputation of both Sony and Insomniac. It currently holds an 87/100 on Metacritic and an 89.84% on GameRankings, making it the highest-rated Spider-Man game ever and is one of Insomniac Games' best-rated titles. Unlike EA's poor handling of the Star Wars IP, this game shows that a stellar licensed game can amass critical acclaim when put into the hands of a competent studio and publisher. Before release, there were concerns that the game's visuals were noticeably downgraded from the demo at E3 2017. However, when Digital Foundry did their technical analysis of the game, those concerns were laid to rest when they confirmed it was an improvement from said demo.
Sales
Spider-Man also broke several sales records for not just Marvel, but also Sony themselves; these include the fastest-selling Spider-Man game, fastest-selling Marvel branded game of all of time, and fastest-selling game in Sony Interactive Entertainment's 24-year history, selling 3.3 million copies in just three days, and outsold the Batman Arkham series to become the best selling superhero game of all time in the US. As of July 28th, 2019, the game has now sold 13.2 million copies worldwide. With the massive success for both Sony and Insomniac, this resulted the former to buy the latter as a subsidiary of SIE Worldwide Studios (now PlayStation Studios), after over 20 years of the continued second-party developer. They finalized the merger on November 15, 2019.
Tips
Before doing anything, repair the Oscorp Towers. If you don't, then your map won't function properly.
Trivia
- Contrary to popular belief, the decision to make this Spider-Man game exclusive to PlayStation 4 wasn't because of Sony's ownership of the Spider-Man film rights. Instead, Marvel approached Sony Interactive Entertainment directly and asked them to have one of their teams or partners make a game based on one of Marvel's own characters, and for Sony to treat it as if it was one of their own IPs.
- The credits of the DLC, The City Never Sleeps, pays tribute to Stan Lee who passed away two months after the game was released.
- The Last of Us Part II sold more than four million copies in its release weekend, dethroning Marvel's Spider-Man as the fastest-selling PlayStation 4 exclusive.
- The black symbiote suit was considered as an alternate suit, but was scrapped as the game's director decided that it deserved to have a bigger role than just an unlockable outfit.
- At the Fisk construction site, Martin Li would be the one escaping in the helicopter, as seen in the 2017 E3 demo. This was later changed to just a bald generic goon.
- Concept art of Miles Morales hints that his story arc would've taken a more somber tone with him likely obsessively trying to track down the whereabouts of Martin Li after his father's death.
- Early on in development, Miles was apparently only ever meant to cameo in the post-credits scene rather than be a full-blown supporting character. Their decision to have Miles gain his powers led to necessitating his role in the story expanding to better flesh him out.
- Yuri Lowenthal and Nadji Jeter almost didn't reprise their roles of Peter and Miles, with AJ Locascio and Zeno Robinson being some of the respective, potential candidates.
- As revealed in the files, there was going to be an unlockable Spider-Cop suit in the game, and its abilities were to summon backup cops and a donut drone to help in combat. While the suit is fully-modeled, it doesn't have any animations.
- The final boss against Doc-Ock was initially planned to have you fight him all over New York, however to cut back on crunch and to have it resonate harder, it was scaled back to simply fighting him on top of the Oscorp building.
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