(This post contains spoilers for the video game reboot of Spider-Man, Miles Morales, and Spider-Man 2.)
I tried really hard to transition to being a PC player. I finally got a rig that could handle most games I threw at it, and I was really happy with the results. Unfortunately, the world changed, and I was unable to get a job to try and save up for any upgrades. And, at this time of writing, upgrading a PC has become an impossible task unless you have a lot of disposable income. Feeling defeated, I threw in the towel and switched back to console for gaming and with the help of my amazing partner, we got a PS5 along with PS Plus.
While browsing the games on their game collection, I noticed that all three of the Spider-Man games were on them. I had recalled watching a streamer play through the first one and thinking it looked fun, and I had bought it for my partner on PS4 when we started dating and he enjoyed it. In addition, we’d just watched the Tom Holland Spider-Man films, so I was in the mood for it and gave it a shot.
I ended up enjoying it and almost got 100% on it, doing almost every extra thing you could do. I got a little burnt out though, and stopped for a bit. Here recently I picked up Miles Morales and also enjoyed it too, though less than the original since it was a copy-paste of the first game, but I at least went into it knowing that. Playing through that one made me a little excited though because at this point I was a bit tired of the formula, and I was excited to see how much different Spider-Man 2 would be, being a proper sequel. I downloaded it, started it up and…
…With some minor exceptions, it played the exact same way as the other two games before it.
It wasn’t that I didn’t enjoy the game or anything, it’s just…I was a bit tired of the formula and I had hoped maybe the game would change things up. And sure, it does in certain ways like being able to Web Glide, but it was still just the same old Spider-Man game formula, just prettier.
After doing more and more thinking after spending around 40 hours total on these games, the Spider-Man games are really good movies, but okay games. Let’s break it down a bit.
The story of each of the Spider-Man games all follow the same typical formula: By day Peter Parker is a kind of bumbling but really bright nerd with some of the worst luck in the world, while also being a superhero by night. Or, well, whenever he’s needed, which in these games is after maybe five minutes of getting to be a normal human. In both 1 and 2, they both have the same overarching plot of someone Peter loves and trusts who gains some kind of cool power or ability, but they ultimately turn and he has to fight them in an emotional showdown.
That’s the thing with these games and their stories: They’re well told and well written, but they’re also painfully predictable. There’s a sequence in 2 for example where Peter goes to punch Kraven, but he’s both blocked and stabbed in his side and casually tossed aside. Yes, the guy who has fought a giant human Rhino, a Scorpion, and all sorts of other magical entities is finally done in by a large man with a knife.
Anyway there’s a whole huge sequence where Peter is dying and you’re playing as Mary-Jane and you have to move him forward in a scripted sequence while shit is hitting the fan around you. Peter ends up dying to his wounds and his friend Harry, who is infected with the Symbiote, cries out and infects Peter and saves his life.
This whole sequence should be emotional, and while the acting was phenomenal and the sequence gripping, I ultimately knew Peter wasn’t going to die. It was far too obvious, between the fact that he’s the main character and the fact that on the box art Peter has black webs. The whole sequence felt like an excuse to just give Peter new powers to use to vary up the gameplay, which might be a really cynical way to look at it, but it’s just how I felt at this point.
The second game also has an obvious plot point where Peter regularly pushes aside Miles once Harry gains his symbiote powers to instead hang out with Harry, his childhood friend, and it was just screaming out loud that this was going to become some kind of drama in the plot.
Despite all this, I have to reiterate that, minus the Kraven thing with Peter genuinely being kinda funny, this is all well told and acted. The presentation is top notch, and it’s clear that a ton of effort went into all of this. Visually the game is gorgeous, with tons and tons of details in New York if you just walk around, but also just as striking from the sky where you’ll spend most of your time.
In fact, the side stories are some of the best parts of the game. I genuinely teared up at the conclusion of the Howard side quest in Spider-Man 2, and the sequences both with Hailey spray painting a wall and a young Peter Parker delivering his photos to the Daily Bugle are top notch, both with meaningful gameplay interaction and character building. They absolutely nailed these segments, and the choice to make Hailey’s gameplay segment incredibly muffled because she’s deaf was a powerful and meaningful choice.
Where I became much more mixed, and where the cracks really started to show though, was the gameplay.
All three games are beat-em-ups with a simple combo system, but with more of an emphasis on fighting smarter to make fights go smoother. In the first game you have access to your gadgets, which come down to webbing up the enemy in some way. While you can just beat a guy senseless, you’ll actually KO them immediately if you web them up and knock them into a wall or the floor. Doing this requires them to not only be fully webbed up, but for you to force them onto said surface, usually with a throw or a gadget.
Miles Morales and 2 try to add some variety to this by adding abilities, where Miles can use his electrical Venom powers in addition to basic webs to cause a lot of stun effects and even has a powerful single hit punch. In Miles Morales, Miles can only use these powers when his Focus bar is full, a bar which only fills when you successfully punch an enemy. This bar can be expended to heal yourself, or you can use a full gauge to use a Finisher which instantly knocks out an enemy. It creates a risk versus reward system, where you have to use your healing currency to do a lot of damage instead, but if the battle goes south, you won’t be able to heal much. It was a good system, and I actually liked playing as Miles a lot with all the new options in Miles Morales.
Spider-Man 2 however, throws all this on its head, and for every step forward, it manages to take two steps backwards. Now, your abilities are mapped to L1 and a face button. The catch is, these abilities only recharge when you punch an enemy. In addition, the Focus bar is back, but whereas in the other games you could get a partial heal from a partial gauge, now you can ONLY heal when a gauge is full, which was kind of a baffling change. On the default difficulty, enemies hit pretty hard, and taking a hit, especially gunshots, do a lot of damage if you don’t properly dodge them. Restricting the healing to only full gauges felt like an unnecessary difficulty increase, because while you might think the enemies are a touch weak in the prologue against Marko’s sand clones, they very quickly go back to their hard hitting selves once the Hunters are introduced.
Here’s the thing though. In each of these games, they all come back down to just mashing square against some guys in some shape. For as cool as the skills are, most of them don’t feel useful or powerful. In fact, a lot of them are geared towards launching enemies in the air, but you have so little area of effect attacks, that launching an enemy in the air only feels like it just delays them from possibly attacking you for a while, and at that point you may as well just keep them airborne and dodge bullets from the inevitable assault rifle guy who is always there.
The main missions in all three games all function the same way: You swing to the marker, a cutscene plays, Spider-Man lands nearby, you fight some guys, and then you move forward in a scripted building. Either that or you walk around outside your costume and get to experience a slower paced plot-focused segment. This same formula is repeated in all three games, and by the time I got to 2, I didn’t feel like I was playing a sequel, rather the exact same game I’d just been playing.
There’s also a stealth mechanic in these games and I just…I hate it. You can scan enemies and the game will tell you if doing a takedown on them is “Safe” or “Dangerous”. If it’s Safe, you’ll take them out without alerting the other enemies. Dangerous means everyone will learn about your presence. In order to move enemies, you can shoot webs either near them or at certain objects that glow blue to make them make noise. The problem is, what usually happens is the enemy you want to take down as well as the enemy nearby him will investigate the noise or the web, and they’ll never leave the danger state. Many times I had two enemies who were programmed to be near each other and I could never get one of them to move far enough away for the game to give me the Safe prompt.
In addition to all that, Spider-Man 2 somehow manages to make this worse because in the first two games, it’s clearly labeled when you can do a square button Perch takedown because the symbol is marked with…well, a pink square. This DOES NOT EXIST in Spider-Man 2 and I admittedly just GUESS by mashing square when I want to do a Perch takedown. That they got rid of that is even more baffling to me than the partial Focus heal. For a game that has heaps and heaps of accessibility features (which is fantastic, don’t misunderstand), the fact the UI is somehow WORSE in the sequel is just…amazing. Maybe there is a difference in the UI to show you when a Perch takedown is possible, but if there is, I didn’t notice it.
While I’m complaining about stealth, in Spider-Man 1 and 2, you have multiple missions where you have to play as MJ and sneak past various characters, either to escape or to find information you’re not supposed to know. While these segments are supposed to be a break with the Spider-Man punching action, they’re really just annoying set-pieces with instant failure conditions if you’re caught, which can be really frustrating, especially if stealth isn’t your strong suit. Miles even has a section like this in the first game since he doesn’t have his powers yet and his section where he has to flee Rhino is especially egregious.
Spider-Man 2 brings this back, but at least MJ has a stun gun now, and getting spotted isn’t immediate failure, but getting shot twice is. Which if you do get caught, happens really fast and the enemy is likely to just find you again anyway, and when there’s two guards at once…well, good luck. Sure you can run at them and stun gun them, but both times I got caught and did this, I just got shot a second time and failed regardless.
The cherry on top was how during this section I had stunned a group of enemies, did a mission objective, and on the way to the other one, found two of the guards I had knocked out were now standing back up, not in a T-pose, but clearly glitched out and not moving. It was kind of funny, but it also just made an already annoying segment feel that much more janky and annoying.
Another thing to mention as well is that despite the game being open world, there’s…really not a lot to do in the game. As you complete the main story you’re drip-fed new activities to complete, but most of them consist of picking up a thing, going on a scavenger hunt, or doing a traversal or combat challenge to earn a currency for upgrades. At random times a crime will occur, but it’s randomly pulled from a small set of kinds of crimes which with the exception of vehicles, boil down to “beat up the bad guys” in some form. Once you do those activities, there’s…not much else to the world. Which is a crying shame because it’s incredibly beautiful and meticulously detailed but ultimately it’s the kind of open world you’d look at and say “wow this is pretty.” and then once the activities are done, you shut the game off and forget. It’s open world because it has to be and not because it adds much outside of visual value and I suppose immersion.
You probably would think from all of this that I hated these games and wasted 40 hours of my life, or that perhaps I’m being too harsh on them. Making video games is incredibly hard, and I have nothing but the utmost respect to game developers, especially in times like these. But the thing is, I enjoy these games. The combat is perfectly fine, and even with the complaints, it’s still pretty fun, even if it is just a copy-paste throughout all three.
The problem is, these games are critically-acclaimed and are console best-sellers, and they’re also an extremely good example of why I, and I’m sure many others, are losing faith in the video game industry: Spider-Man and its development is so busy trying to be a great movie, that it forgets to be a great game.
It’s a game where all the effort felt like it went straight into everything except game design. The graphics, acting, music, accessibility, story…those were what the main focus was. That the gameplay is just a borderline copy-paste with very little variation feels like proof positive of that idea. I have no idea what the budget on this title was, but with how expensive games are to make nowadays, it just feels like almost none of it went into making the game part fun or different.
My main gripe with this is mostly Spider-Man 2. The first game I can forgive and give a pass since…well, it was the first one. Miles Morales was intended to be a side game and to give Miles his personal origin story, and it was fine, but by the time they got to 2, there’s an expectation, not just in graphics, but in gameplay. And there’s just not enough to justify it.
I was playing a game to experience a movie more than I was playing it to play a game.
This might be an unpopular opinion or a hot take, but the most important aspect of a video game is the gameplay. It doesn’t matter how pretty your graphics are. It doesn’t matter how fantastic your story or actors are. It doesn’t matter how epic the musical score is. If your game isn’t fun to play, it’s not a good game. If your game becomes stale to play, then it starts to just become unfun.
Here’s the thing: If I wanna see a great film, I’ll go watch a movie. A video game is not a movie. They’re fundamentally different things, and the game industries obsession with trying to become interactive Hollywood and its ballooning budgets are what are slowly killing it, because they’re trying to make games into something they aren’t.
It’s why a lot of people are turning towards indie games. It’s why people are such die-hard Nintendo fans, because Nintendo is a gameplay-first developer. It’s why despite people mocking and lamenting Nintendo for being so behind technologically and with hardware that Nintendo continues to be the leader in the industry: Because they make games with fun gameplay first.
A lot of this post feels like I should’ve already known this. Someone wagging their finger saying, “Yeah, no shit Prinny, it’s pretty obvious things have been this way for a while.” And yeah, I knew that. It’s hard not to go online and see constant cynicism and negativity on literally everything. But I had to try for myself. I didn’t want to come to a conclusion without trying it. It’s nowhere near as bad as people said it is, (a lot of things in life are never as bad or as hard as people say they are most of the time) but these games as they went on really felt like they started to get to that point.
What sucks is these games are made by freaking INSOMNIAC GAMES. They gave us Ratchet and Clank and made I don’t know how many of them that are all fundamentally the same game, but they all had their own variations on the formula. Every Ratchet game feels unique and its own thing. They got GOOD at this, and that makes it so much more baffling to me that these games felt so copy-paste. Even the latest Ratchet, A Rift in Time, had its own unique spin on the Ratchet formula, and it was fantastic! A great blend of a fun and well-told story with solid gameplay that evolves from previous iterations that doesn’t just rely on new-age technology to carry it on its back.
At this time of writing, Insomniac is about to release Wolverine, which they’ve confirmed is a much more linear game, and while I haven’t played it (and don’t plan to until it inevitably ends up on PS Plus because I really don’t care enough to spend full price on it), I think this is the right call for this kind of game. Perhaps by taking out the stress of focusing so much on creating an entire New York to explore, they can focus on making a much more, well, focused experience with a strong emphasis on gameplay and the inevitable melodrama of a Marvel plotline.
Again, I DID generally enjoy my time with all three of these games. It’s just that as I played them, I saw more and more cracks in the gameplay elements, and after seeing none of them being changed much or in some cases being made worse, I started to get that horrible and grim reminder that the direction the games industry is headed isn’t for me anymore. Sure, I might stick with indie or Nintendo titles more moving forward, but I genuinely loved the games Sony developed back in the PlayStation 1 and 2 days, and seeing what they are now, even ignoring recent events, it just made me feel really sad. It made me realize that in a lot of ways, games are slowly becoming something I don’t enjoy, and it just leaves me feeling really disappointed.