5/5 ★ – pinksteady's review of Marvel's Spider-Man.

Another outstanding Playstation exclusive I had a blast playing this game. It’s not up there with the likes of God Of War, Last of Us and Uncharted, but it offers a really solid gaming experience that is slick, challenging and just... fun. At its core Spider Man is your typical big budget semi-open world game. It takes place on Manhattan Island, and you get to swing around the entire city, choosing whether to do a story or a side mission, or just explore and find random encounters. There’s a smattering of bad guys, and some really great characters (acting by Doc Ock is fantastic). As you progress, you level up and unlock new moves, suits and gadgets. Combat is Arkham-esque - if you can dodge the incoming attacks at the right time, you can build up combos and continue unleashing the beatings! What really struck me about this game was that it didn’t feel like a super-hero game, in the sense that I didn’t feel like I had to buy in to all the Marvel/DC megabucks over-the-top franchises to enjoy this). Spider Man exists on its own, and can be fully enjoyed without any prior experience of, or opinion about, super hero movies. Also refreshing was that zero time was spent exploring Peter Parker’s done-to-death origin story - you just jump right in, with the ability to shoot webs and swing around treated as a given. It meant I could instantly focus on just enjoying being Spider Man. The other major element of the game that cannot go unmentioned is the quality of the city. The environment is absolutely gorgeous. You can effortlessly swing to the highest skyscraper and soak in the city, often basking in morning or afternoon oranges, or fight baddies in splashing water reflecting night-time street lights. It is just a brilliantly realised environment, only possible I suppose due to the budget a game like this is afforded. The cityscape could only be appreciated of course with the ability to effectively explore it, and that is another element Spider Man does really well. The idea of swinging around a city, in between building and over rooftops, sounds like it would be really tricky, but it is absolutely effortless. You just swing in the general direction you want to go and somehow the game stops you constantly bashing into things. The balance between control and convenience is struck really well, and by the end of the game I was deftly exploring the city, using trick moves to boost of the edges of buildings, dive bomb to gain speed and other nifty tricks you unlock as you progress. It was just fun, and kept me coming back for more. And that’s what this game is all about - fun. So many games take themselves too seriously, but not Spider Man. Spidey’s endlessly cheesy humour and one-liners are wonderfully honed through some great dialogue, and it lifts the game above the unescapable severity of constantly bashing bad guys’ heads in. Even during the tensest of fights, Spidey is cracking one-liners and just taking the edge off, and I thought it was great. It reminded me that this is, at the end of the day, still just a game to be enjoyed. The combat is challenging and rewarding in equal measure. It can be quite unforgiving at times, but as I started to create my own style, using the various tricks, gadgets and special moves in combination and in response to the different types of foes faced, I slowly become an unstoppable giver of old-fashioned fist-based punishments, and again it was just really fun. There isn’t really much not to like about this game. It would have been nice to have more opportunities to explore ground-level - so much detail had been put into the streets, parks etc but I spent 95% of my travelling swinging, so I didn’t experience as much of it as I might have liked. I suppose some bits of the dialogue fall a little flat, and the game doesn’t really explore any ‘deep’ topics, but that’s kind of refreshing in a way - Spider Man is ‘uncontroversial’ - it is just some solid, light-hearted and enjoyable gaming, and who can complain about that?