Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered

Listen to this post:

With the way the gaming community churns and bubbles like a witch’s cauldron, it can be easy to forget each non-troversy as it comes and goes. Remember the freakout when people first had to authenticate PC games via Steam? It was a thing – imagine the silly Epic Games Store freakouts in reverse and you’ve got the idea. Oh, and when Bethesda put some of the first microtransactions in games via Oblivion’s Horse Armor Pack, there was definitely some sharting heard around the forums of the time.

Heck, people even threatened to boycott Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 over a lack of dedicated servers! Then they all forgot and bought it anyway. So it goes.

via YouTube

Speaking of forgetting – let’s think back to the days when the gaming community freaked out over the reflectiveness of puddles in Marvel’s Spider-Man. Yes, again, that was a thing. There were screaming matches about whether or not the puddles in a superhero game looked realistic enough to really draw the player in. Well, there’s good news for the world’s puddle people, as now Marvel’s Spider-Man has made its way from PlayStation to PC and it’s ready for your RTX 3090 to turn those wet pools into happy little lakes.

Though it’s been eight years since he started fighting crime, Peter Parker’s still trying to find his place in the world, both as Spider-Man and otherwise. This take on the character is somewhat different from what you know. For one, he’s no longer a reporter – he’s a lab assistant instead, working for one Dr. Octavius. Yeah, Octavius. This is a Spider-Man story. I think you can guess how this is going to go, but you’re going to have a great time along the way.

The most obvious comparison here is to the Arkham series of Batman games. Spider-Man is a very similar concept: take a superhero and build a game around embracing that hero’s most distinctive qualities. Where Batman has his detectivery and martial arts, Spider-Man’s all about speed, acrobatics, quips and, of course, plenty of web-swinging. This game’s got all of that in spades and it makes for a solid and memorable experience.

Let’s be real: the most important part of a Spider-Man game is the web-swinging, right? It’s fortunate, then, that this title really nails the fantasy of getting around as your friendly neighborhood wall-crawler. Spidey can swing, web-zip and parkour all day long; it’s all got a solid, weighty feel while still embracing that all-important sense of speed. Swinging is simple but still rewards paying attention to where you’re going and how you get there, while indoors Spidey is able to crawl around on the walls and ceiling with ease. There are even different voice inflections for Spidey’s lines if he talks while swinging around!

New York is packed with goodies to discover and easter eggs to find, so there’s definitely a reason to get into the groove and get to swinging around. You’ve even got a selection of bonus challenges to check out courtesy of Taskmaster. Doing whatever a spider can comes with plenty of rewards, allowing you to progress through a skill tree and build new spider-suits that offer special abilities.

Combat, meanwhile, owes so much to the Arkham games that plagiarism accusations might be in order. That’s not exactly an issue, though, given how great Arkham combat tends to be. You know the drill: use directional attacks to beat up thugs, dodge attacks when you see a popup noting that they’re coming and throw out gadgets and finishing moves to make fights more manageable. Spidey can also throw things around and is generally encouraged to knock enemies into each other and various objects, so there’s a strong environmental component to the combat here, which is interesting considering Spidey’s significantly more powerful ranged and aerial attack sets compared to Batman.\

It’s a lot of fun, but one quirk worth noting is that Spidey’s significantly more fragile than Batman, so there’s a much stronger emphasis on a solid defense.

Marvel’s Spider-Man was a headlining game for the PlayStation 4 back in the day, but time keeps on slippin’ into the future, even children get older and those damn puddles never lived up to their potential. Well, no more. We’re playing Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered and it didn’t get that title for nothing. Take your big, scary PC and throw everything you’ve got at it. You want raytracing? You’ve got so much raytracing. They say that if you crank everything up to the max and stare into a puddle, you can see the future.

What if you don’t have an ultra-powerful PC? Well, that’s completely fine too! Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered runs like a dream on basically any hardware you can throw at it. Even if all you’ve got is a cute lil’ Steam Deck you’ll have a fully playable and enjoyable version of the game so you can web-sling on the go. It took Sony a while to get with the idea of bringing their biggest games to PC, but ports like Days Gone, God of War and now this show that maybe they were just waiting on the chance to do it right.

Puddles aside, Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered is an all-around solid experience that’s well-suited for its role as a marquee AAA game and yet another example of how great the PlayStation Experience can be on a properly suited PC. It’s also a great example of how far licensed titles have come since the dark days of even ten years ago. Today, you can expect licensed superhero games to really nail the experience of saving the day. Isn’t that what we all wanted as kids? Well, it’s what I wanted at least. Point being: play Spider-Man, and at this point play it on PC while you hope they bring Miles Morales over sometime soon.