17/11/2023
From the perfectly Spider-Man opening scene of Peter bumbling around as a teacher, to the race with Miles to catch up to a Sandman kaiju in the middle of a sandstorm, The game’s tutorial boss fight teaches you all the new mechanics for each character and slowly unravels everything you need to know about the world and lore, It’s the perfect tutorial level, and I was just amazed by it. I spent a lot of time playing Spider-Man remastered on stream recently, So small things about the swinging mechanics and maneuverability of your character were instantly noticeable to me. It felt like the leap from the mechanics of Spider-Man the movie the game to Spider-Man 2 the movie the game. It feels like you’re less on rails when web swinging or wall crawling, and when you’re using the web wings, the maneuverability and freedom you feel is massive. I kept saying this over and over again on stream, but it’s like Insomniac accidentally created the PERFECT flying mechanic for a Superman game. But praise aside, the game isn’t perfect. Or at the very least, the maneuverability still isn’t as good as Spider-Man 2. Another surprise was how much inspiration the game takes from Web of Shadows, There’s even a Web of Shadows easter egg on Osborn’s piano, The giant symbiote next spirals are the most obvious bit of influence Web of Shadows has on the game, But seeing that kind of thing in general just wasn’t what I expected A surprise but a pleasant one to be sure I’ve done a lot of videos recently, where I knock other modern comic book games So it really restored a lot of my faith in the games industry to see this game fly so high and achieve most of what the community had hoped it would Obviously, this is a game that’s gonna hold up way better than games as a service bu****it like Avengers, or Gotham Knights, but how does it stack up against other Spidey games? The way the physics and traversal of the city worked really felt like a step up from Spider-Man 1, It felt like the leap from the first Spider-Man movie game to the second in an odd way. The city of Spider-Man 1 was neat, but never really convincing. The city of Spider-Man 2 feels a lot more real and lived in, it’s a much more believable backdrop than the original, Stuff like the Baxter Building’s giant 4 not being finished painting feels really significant, or the eviction notice where Nelson and Murdoc was in the last game, Comparing the game to Web of Shadows and Ultimate Spider-Man specifically, I feel like it ups Web of Shadows on every conceivable level, The only thing Web of Shadows has on SM2, or any Spider-Man game really, is the air combat and wall crawling combat.
