Swinging Around

Marvel's Spider-Man

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As cinemas are filled with superhero films every year, the gaming industry has their own bevy of hard hitters too. This time, Marvel’s Spider-Man is swinging around driven by the talented developers at Insomniac Games. Having a rocky video game history like the thrilling SpiderMan: Shattered Dimensions (2010) or the clunky The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014), Insomniac must make use of their power to fulfil such daring responsibility.

Retelling Of An Old Tale

Set-in present-day New York City, Peter Parker gave up his camera to be a research assistant. At the same time, he has an on-and-off relationship with Mary Jane who turned from aspiring star to investigative journalist. In terms of his superhero duty, he is a veteran who has defeated numerous villains like Vulture, Rhino and Electro while establishing friendly partnership with the city’s police.

As you get acquainted to this modern version of everyone, the game gets an explosive start by pitting you against a crime lord. Almost immediately after that, the whole city is yours to explore. The game is good at capturing the magnificent concrete jungle and you can learn more about the geography by swinging from one building to another. There is very little learning curve when it comes to his web-slinging as the developers managed to compress the complexity of such movement to one button. Furthermore, this simple approach does not dilute the exhilarating experience you get when traversing the cityscape.

What’s important here is how fulfilling it is to see and even feel as if you’re Spider-Man acrobatically propelling to different parts of the city thanks to the satisfying rhythm. If and when you mess up, the game doesn’t punish you but only to see the web crawler losing momentum. Even if you smack against a building, the game will start a wall-running sequence to keep to the pace going.