4/5 ★ – TNGLiam's review of Marvel's Spider-Man: The City that Never Sleeps.

Platform: PS5 (via Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered) Time Played: 10.5 hours Status: Completed ⟳ I remember playing each chapter of the Marvel’s Spider-Man: The City That Never Sleeps DLC back when they came out and was kind of underwhelmed by it. I felt like the overreliance on the side content to make up for the small amount of story included made for what overall felt like an extended side quest that wouldn’t really amount to much of anything in the future. I recall really wanting to see where the story with Black Cat would go after those brief side missions with her in the base game despite you never actually meeting her, and I still felt like that going into this DLC now. What kind of blows for me is that Black Cat really only participates in the story during the first chapter, The Heist, and then disappears for Turf Wars, and only shows up again for one minor scene in Silver Lining. Her character was so interesting in The Heist, so to see her thrown to the wayside to focus on Hammerhead and the Magia, a character who is only teased briefly in The Heist and is only seen twice during Turf Wars was a bummer. I remember not liking Hammerhead as a character when I first played this DLC back in 2018, but playing it now I think he’s a pretty decent villain, being a street-level villain that gains the power to potentially take over the city if gone unchecked, and having the Sable gear be what he uses to obtain that potential power is a pretty good usage of plot points left over from the main game. And having Hammerhead utilize Project Olympus to turn himself into a genuine supervillain requiring Silver Sable and Spidey to team up to defeat him is pretty cool and turned him into a threatening villain while also bringing Silver Sable back into the story in a meaningful way that not only expanded her own story but set up the building blocks for MJ’s investigative journey in Symkaria for the Bugle, allowing her to become an even braver hero in her own right in future installments; just an overall great use of the character. I mean, that scene in the abandoned mansion at the start of Turf Wars established him as a menacing antagonist pretty well, but this cyborg Hammerhead did end up being pretty cool. One of the better parts of this DLC was Yuri’s character arc, turning from a detective genuinely doing her best to help her city only to fall and become someone who kills violent sociopathic criminals in the name of true justice. Her hatred of Hammerhead and the magia, along with them killing one of her officers at the start of Turf Wars, creates this perfect setup for her to kill him at the end of the story for that part of the DLC, and having her arc take somewhat of a side seat as you track down all of the clues that she left behind before killing a violent hitman creates this mystery as to how much of a lethal protector she has become, a great set up for an inevitable side story in Spider-Man 2. The only issue I have with Yuri’s story arc is just that it felt like this turn came too quickly? She spends the entire first game helping Spidey through thick and thin, knowing that his protection and heroism are keeping the city safe even in the toughest of crises, and then all of a sudden she’s already become this angry and hateful cop the second she shows up in this DLC whose funny bone established near the end of the base game is immediately stripped away. I just think that if they introduced this character arc for Yuri during The Heist instead of Turf Wars, then maybe the arc would feel more justified by the time it reached its conclusion and not feel as rushed, and even when playing all of the side content in the middle of each chapter’s playthrough it still felt a little too short of time to let the arc simmer. If these things applied to this story decision, I think that this great aspect of the overall DLC would’ve been a lot better. I understand that this DLC started just one month after the base game’s release, but the side content that takes up a majority of its playtime ends up feeling maybe a little bit too recycled. Of course there are the five crimes in each of the key districts used in the DLC with the magia or Hammerhead’s goons, but there are also the enemy strongholds that had the same issues as the base game, but those goddamn minigun brutes that they introduced here are INSANELY annoying as they deal so much damage and take so much damage to defeat AND it takes your entire Web-Shooter gauge to web them up to go in for an attack, and even then they break free from the webs before you can even finish a basic combo. But then there are the Screwball challenges, which I know everyone hates, but they’re honestly not that bad, just somewhat repetitive. I found the Photo Bomb system that racks up extra points for a better end grade to change up the pace of things a fair bit and immediately sets these challenges apart from the base game’s Taskmaster challenges. My favorite of these challenges were the Gadget Challenges which force you to only utilize two specific gadget combos against a swarm of enemies; utilizing these gadgets to their fullest, like having enemies float in the air and then blasting webs at them flinging them into a wall was really satisfying, and I only wish that the base game had challenges like these so that players could get a feel for how to combine these gadgets instead of just ignoring their usefulness until realizing it during these challenges. My least favorite of these Screwball challenges were the Stealth Challenges; the Photobombs don’t always happen when the enemies near them are anywhere near being safe to takedown, and that makes for a more unpleasant, stressful feeling trying to get the enemies into a safe position to takedown in a time that will still land you a good rank by the end of the challenge, it was really the only time where the Photo Bomb mechanic didn’t really work for me like it did when it wanted you to defeat enemies in certain parts of the arena during combat and gadget missions or performing tricks during the bomb missions. I think that the extra suits that they added through this DLC were also pretty good choices, and a lot of them being suits that a lot of people were really hoping to see in the base game like the Kane suit, Spider-Armor Mk I, and even the Mangaverse suit, and having the Into the Spider-Verse suit release as a part of the Silver Lining DLC that released the same month as the movie was a good choice. One last thing I wanted to discuss was the small subplot with Miles that is sprinkled throughout the DLC. In between main missions, Miles constantly calls Peter begging to get back to Spider training, but Peter dealing with all of Black Cat and Hammerhead’s bullshit doesn’t allow him to have time for that, but at the very end of the DLC, we finally see Peter take Miles out for his first session of web-swinging training, which was a really nice scene to end the story off on while also setting up for Miles own solo adventure in the future. Overall, Marvel’s Spider-Man: The City That Never Sleeps was a pretty good DLC; of course having the basic gameplay of the base game is automatically going to make this experience a good one, but the absolute strength that the base game had with its powerful story and great side content didn’t entirely translate over to this expansion. Out of the three chapters, my least favorite is probably Turf Wars, which was just not as enthralling as the other two parts storywise and also in terms of side content; the opening mission in the abandoned mansion was pretty cool and was a great set piece, but that’s really it. In the middle would be Silver Lining; as the culmination of the past two chapters, it felt like a pretty decent inclusion, and as I mentioned before, the reintroduction of Silver Sable provided some great insight into her character and laid the groundwork for future storylines and character moments with MJ and also served as a true redemption of her character from the base game, not to mention that the side content in this chapter was the best out of the three chapters. My favorite chapter was The Heist, the side story with Black Cat from the base game finally had its payoff here and it felt really cool to finally see these versions of Spidey and Cat interact in a true sense, and the shenanigans that ensue, along with the missions where both Spidey and Black Cat team up for stealth and combat, were just really cool. It just sucks that they didn’t really utilize Black Cat during the rest of the DLC because I’m sure that would’ve strengthened the other chapters. Regardless, this was a pretty fun DLC, but I think that whatever DLC or expansions that are released for Spider-Man 2 won’t be released in an episodic fashion in order to focus on a greater whole product instead of one split into sections, causing things to feel slightly less connected.