Just finished it, and I think the hype is overblown. The gameplay is solid, but by the end the combat had become tedious. Web swinging felt nice, but landing could be very imprecise, and crawling felt like a last minute addition it was so poor. The story was just okay; better than most video games, but it never balanced all of the characters well enough. The game shortchanged much of its character moments, relying too much on prior familiarity with the universe, and most of the story beats felt like carbon copies of what had already been done in the movies. Until the last act, most cutscenes amounted to "go here and do this." The major event at the end didn't affect me at all because that character hadn't been developed well enough to make me care. The story beats in general were very by-the-book and obvious, as I guessed every major development. I also thought it somewhat strange how similar some of the specific character/plot details and events were to the Amazing SM films, especially given how lukewarm those films were received. The music was also quite bland; at it's best it was an okay imitation of the various themes from the movies, but usually it was just anonymous background noise.
One of my bigger issues with the game was agency. I get that this is an existing character, so multiple endings might not be feasible, but there have been plenty of games like this that managed to fit in branching dialogue. I think they could've handled the set pieces better; either by mixing up the playstyles, or at the very least included more QT events. There were many situations where Spider-Man fought or did things in cutscenes the player could've easily done themselves. It defeats the purpose of being a video game when there are significant moments that have no input
Overall, it was decent enough as the only Spider-Man game I've played, but all of the movies (except ASM2) are better. It doesn't do much of anything to stand on its own two feet, or anything truly unique or surprising to make it a definitive SM experience. At least this is the first accurate onscreen portrayal of MJ, which is something I guess.
7/10
), I'm archaic when it comes to tech and modern usage of it.
