Marvel Spider-Man

A few minutes into Marvel’s Spider-Man, Peter Parker is preparing to suit up and head out.

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Picking up his costume from a table, he brings it to his nose, and looks briefly disgusted. It’s the sort of peek behind the curtain that this kind of game should be perfect for: it’s only when you get this close to a superhero, and see the world through their eyes for a couple of dozen hours, that you start to wonder about the little things: about, say, what a man-made, skintight costume might smell like after a few nights on (and above) the town. Not great, it turns out.

It’s also, whether by accident or design, a canny way of introducing one of the game’s key features. Parker can change his getup (and its accompanying loadout) on a whim, crafting new kit using tokens earned through completing various open-world activities. If Parker’s failed sniff test is an elegant way of introducing us to suit crafting, however, the opening hour of his latest game fails what Edge has come to know as the phone test. It’s a miserable start. By introducing its various currencies one after the other – clear bases to earn base tokens, stop street crimes to earn crime tokens, and on and on – Insomniac has us frequently reaching first for the pause button, and then for the phone in our pocket, looking for something better to do.

Mercifully, it’s a false dawn. Insomniac will still be introducing you to new currencies 15 hours later, but by then they’ll be so infrequent as not to irritate, and in all likelihood you’ll be so in love with the game they underpin that you won’t mind the intrusion in the slightest. This is a troubled game, certainly. Yet it gets away with a tremendous amount thanks to the easy charm of its characters, its fine technical achievements and, above all, the graceful implementation of its decades-old power fantasy. Spider-Man has had his ups and downs in videogames. This is by far his peak.