Marvel's Spider-Man

Long story short, this is the Spider-Man equivalent of the Batman Arkham games. Both combat, stealth, and overall gameplay are almost identical. The open-world activities are not too exciting, but swinging from buildings like a super-fast wrecking ball and using gadgets in combat has been pretty exciting, for the first few hours at least.

The plot and overall presentation are always respectful of the source material, but at the same time it's noticeable that they also tried to play with the characters a little without adapting a specific story. They have been clearly saving up on iconic villains for the sequels, but there are enough popular characters complementing the more obscure ones. There are some spectacular scripted sequences here and there, but strictly gameplay-wise, most story missions felt rather average for an open-world game.

The DLCs offered a few not-too-exciting story sequences featuring minor characters, as well as minor variations on activities already featured in the main game.

The soundtrack to Garden State got Zach Braff a Grammy.

I bring this up to illustrate how something can be comprised of pieces of other works, and become its own entity that is strong despite its lack of originality. And to mention the non sequitur that the dude got a Grammy for making a mixtape.

Anyway, everything in Marvel's Spider-Man has been done before, but the game does them very well. This comes in a series of buts:

Checking off a huge list of side-quests has been a staple for open-world games, and this is no exception, but there's only a digestible amount of each type of side-quest, and each type of side-quest is pretty fun.

Beat-em-up, combo-based combat is as much the basis of this game as it was in the Batman: Arkham games, but they managed to avoid making it tedious and frustrating without sacrificing challenge.

The web-slinging is almost exactly how I remember it from Spider-Man: Web of Shadows, but the way they integrated focus-recharging and a few new moves made it fun to web-sling from one tip of Manhattan to the other despite there being a fast-travel option.

As far as the innovation subject goes, meat and potatoes might just be meat and potatoes, but you can still rustle up some really good meat and some really good potatoes.

Storywise, there's not much you can expect a Spider-Man vehicle to do save for rehash how his villains got to where they were, where in the timeline they fall, and how they're going to be represented. Yet again, this is something the game's story writers seemed to do well enough that I was actually intrigued with the story and couldn't wait to see how things shook out. As someone who's very light on comics, I also had no idea who Mr. Negative was until this game. Interesting concept, that guy.

The animation was also some of the best I've seen on this generation of vidjagames. Gameplay and cinematics, both. There's a handful of games that match that description, so—wow, there's a theme—there's another thing the game didn't break any ground on, yet still excelled at.

Is the game perfect? Nah. Will the game remind you of about five other games you've played in the past three years? Yeah. But is it fun? Hell yeah, dude. I couldn't stop playing. I slammed out the entirety of the campaign and side-quests over the course of five days. (I didn't get all the secret photo ops, or get ultimate status in all the Taskmaster stuff, but Red Dead Redemption 2 is waiting for me to start it and I can't be fucked to get tedious on Spider-Man right now.)