Marvel's Spider-Man Review

There's a moment early in Marvel's Spider-Man where you catch an air conditioning unit falling off a building, swing it around, and use it to knock three guys off a rooftop simultaneously, then catch them with webs before they hit the street. The game hadn't told you that was possible. You just tried it. It worked. That's what Insomniac got right. The traversal system isn't just about looking cool, it's a physics conversation between you and the city. Your momentum matters. Your angle of release matters. The gap between buildings matters. Getting good at swinging feels like actually learning a skill, and being good at it feels like flying. The story surprised us. Peter Parker is eight years into being Spider-Man, which means he's tired and stretched thin and losing his apartment while managing a career crisis and a relationship with MJ that's held together by mutual respect and repeated disappointment. It's a version of Peter we don't often see, competent, experienced, genuinely trying, and Yuri Lowenthal plays it with a warmth that makes you root for him even when he's clearly making the wrong call. The villain arc is the game's best writing. Otto Octavius's descent is handled with care, he's not a cartoon, he's a man with a real grievance who makes comprehensible choices that happen to lead somewhere terrible. The final confrontation lands because of it. The open world is where the game's age shows. The map is dotted with Ubisoft-style towers to climb, backpacks to find, crimes to interrupt, bases to clear. They're all mechanically fine and none of them are interesting. They exist to give you something to do while traversing between story missions, which would be fine if the traversal didn't make you want to just... keep swinging without stopping. The MJ and Miles stealth sections are also genuinely disliked by many players, including us. They're not bad, exactly, but they're jarring, you're playing as someone who can't punch a guy into a building, and the game hasn't built these characters into compelling stealth protagonists yet. They're doing story work that the main missions could've handled.