Topic: Games you've recently beat

It all started off strong, but after the initial introduction of Kraven the story and the everything with it took a bit of a dive. Things got so boring that I considered dropping the game and returning to it in a couple of weeks. Instead I read a couple of the comics and built some hype by reading about Kraven, it made me want to see what came next and I'm glad I stuck with it because things really do pick up just before that halfway mark.

Most of the side content was dreadful and didn't feel rewarding at all. I normally love side content, I'll pick flowers for days, but there's a time and a place for that and it's called Garden Simulator. The bees too, they overused those bees so much that all I could think of was Bee Simulator (which I have played) I was playing neither of those. I signed up for a Superhero game and there are countless other opportunities and a wealth of ideas to pull from those decades of comics, and yet they had me flying bee drones around over and over again.

I understand that it ties into Harry's good work and his philanthropy but again it's a Superhero game and there were so many ways they could have added a little more spice. There was also an uncomfortable feeling of forced diversity, I'm all for diversity but I didn't see an divides until the game decided there needed to be one. I was blind to all of it, I saw people, not colour, the game saw otherwise. The same thing happened in Miles Morales, all it did was make me feel like an outsider. I didn't see Miles or anyone else as different until the game pointed it out, and that line about voting for Trump made me do such a double take that I almost had whiplash. Moments like that shattered the immersion and made me question if I needed to take a step back to from modern narrative based games and focus on my Simulators like I'd already been doing for years. Thankfully those moments started to filter out just before that halfway point in the story and the writers remembered they were making a video-game.

The side contact slightly improved too with the Flame missions and Yuriy, when I saw that man (I don't remember his name and neither do you, probably) take the symbiote from the Oscorp train I wondered 'Is he going to be Carnage?', I'd just started reading an eight hundred page collection of Carnage comics and I wanted him to say the line. Then he did, I felt a kind of 'I need to play the next game' for the first time and it felt good. Up until then I'd told myself that three was enough, I was glad to be wrong about the story.

Everything with Lizard was fantastic, the suspense of stumbling around in the dark trying to find him all the while knowing he'd gotten even bigger and stronger, the ambience and lighting, all of it right up to actually fighting him and getting chewed on, drooled on, and slapped around. He was fun and the closest I'll probably ever get to fighting Godzilla.

Mysterio was a good confrontation (in the end) but the side-content to get to him was so unimaginative given his actual power. He felt like wasted potential, especially at the end of that quest-line when the big reveal was that he'd been locked in a closet the whole time and it was his two female assistants behind the whole thing, really? I've seen him in the comics now too. What the developers did was such a cop-out for such a great character.

Kraven was probably my favorite part of the game, I hadn't seen a Russian aristocrat in a game before, especially one who was so driven and focused. Every time he showed up and that score kicked in, so brilliant. I found his reasoning to be realistic and I respected it, the thrill of the hunt and that need to end his final hunt in glory (getting your head eaten by Venom, that's hard to beat) My mouth dropped open when Venom did that, but I was happy for Sergei too, he'd gotten what he always wanted. I really like that he killed Scorpion too, it showed that finally the developers weren't afraid to get serious.

As for Venom himself, maybe it was widely known that he was going to be in the game? It was a surprise to me, as was playing as him in Oscorp. I'd read nothing about the game, seen only the one movie. Being out of the loop worked in my favor. R1 was throw and I threw so many guys at so many things, it was even more fun than throwing sewer lids at people as Spiderman. As soon as Venom let loose with some dialogue I said to myself 'That has to be Tony Todd, all I heard was Candyman' and sure enough it was.

It's amazing how good the story did eventually get, but I'll never understand why they didn't add something more interesting than those spider-bots/bird drones, nor why they decided to make crime events so diluted and not even worthwhile. I enjoyed responding to crimes in the other two games, it felt more critical and allowed me to learn combat and to test each new skill. Instead what they did was dilute those events and make them feel overly simplified, almost to the point of mildly insulting. I then started to ignore the cries of those New Yorkers and left them to their faith of being mugged, branded, eaten and so on.

So much of the content felt at odds with itself, at times I felt like I was playing Life is Strange but then things would escalate again and bosses like Lizard/Kraven and Venom were multi-phase button mashing bonanzas where I wondered if I was finally going to pop a square button or worse chip a nail. I generally avoid games with button mashing and Spiderman calls for a lot of it, which is fine when you are in the moment and lost in the spectacle.

Filler is fine too when it's at least challenging or gives you some real character development, I didn't get that with this game. I already knew Miles had gone to school, did we really need all of those Brooklyn Visions quests? Those mirrors and that photo segment were joy kills in every sense of the word. The Museum made sense because Mile's had a passion for music and it tied into his community, even-though it was obvious from minute one that the donor was behind the theft. I figured he wanted the collection for himself (which he did, realism) or he was trying to get the current operator out so he could make a play for the building.

Other than a strange identity crisis that rotated like a game of musical chairs the games other main fault was XP. It seemed like no matter what I did the reward was always a whole level, and I was drowning in materials to upgrade my gadgets and abilities. It didn't feel like I earned any of it, the only alternative was to max the difficulty which isn't exactly ideal but there was nothing else I could do to balance those level increase and abilities.

My main take away from all three games is that Insomniac can do great things when they remove the training wheels and add consequence to the game. They do dark very well but it takes them a while to get there. Those kinds of gritty and hard hitting story beats are a personal preference, my reference point has only ever been DC. It's entirely possible that all of those friendly neighbourhood Spiderman quests fit the character, I just don't know that they fit the pace. I might play it again and speedrun the story just for the separate Newgame+ trophy and to see Lizard/Kraven and tony Todd again.

Even though my playing the games more slowly over longer periods of time made a lot of things less tedious, I do remember thinking the game had a strong beginning and strong end, but dragged in the middle. Like you, I came into this game unaware of the Venom content. Despite liking the MCU and growing up with the Spider-Man character, I never really learned about Venom. I skipped the movies that contained it because they were all poorly received. And I hadn’t followed Spider-Man 2’s pre-release hype enough to realize that we’d be getting playable Venom content. So the latter part where you get to learn about and play with the symbiote powers was a pleasant surprise and quite a fun diversion. So yeah, strong start, mediocre middle, and strong ending, generally speaking.

And we’ve touched on the cultural Americanisms contained in the writing and tone, so that aspect is definitely its own issue. As I mentioned, the socio-political content didn’t stick out to me as much but I definitely would have remembered if I had come across that Trump line. It must have been specially tucked away as an Easter Egg, but I still definitely agree that it is out of place in a game like this, or in just about any game. I don’t mind politics in my games, and in fact I think most writing has inherent political or social commentary from its writer, whether intentional or not, but I really don’t think it fits to place specific present day names and events in a comic based fiction. Most games will intelligently place surrogate characters and events as symbolic or representative nods to real-world circumstances, and that’s just better writing in my opinion. (Such as Disco Elysium, BioShock, Metal Gear Solid, etc.) I don’t necessarily think a Spider-Man (or Batman, or any superhero game) can’t make some political commentary, but it really should fit within the fictional world and not detract from it, as it did for you.

As far as the writing and your comment on the sparsity of better mature narrative arcs, and the writing being at odds with itself, I think that’s a fair and apt description. Insomniac did seem to be torn between keeping it all “friendly neighborhood” and approachable to the core audience of young people and also appealing to adults with a sprinkle of gritty and darker content. The training wheels and Saturday morning cartoon filter does appear to be coming off for Wolverine. I think that’s where Insomniac will feel free to delve more fully into the gritty stuff without fear of alienating little 12 year-old Timmy. So fingers crossed that’s what we get when that launches later this year.