Marvel's Spider-Man
Be Greater
Action/Adventure ‧ Insomniac Games ‧ PS4 ‧ 2018 ‧ 7 min read
"No matter what happens... I want you to know... I'm so proud of you."
Every great Spider-Man story eventually returns to the same question: what does it cost to be this person? Not the powers, not the suit, but the ongoing, relentless decision to keep showing up for a city that will never fully know your name. Marvel's Spider-Man, developed by Insomniac Games and released for the PlayStation 4 in 2018, understands this question better than most Spider-Man adaptations that have come before it, and answers it with more emotional honesty than the genre typically allows.
What immediately separates this game from every prior Spider-Man adaptation is its starting point. Peter Parker has been Spider-Man for eight years. He is not a kid learning his limits. He is a young man who already knows them, who has already absorbed the grief and sacrifice that comes with the role, and who is still drowning anyway. His apartment is days from eviction, his phone full of missed calls he does not have the energy to return. His relationship with Mary Jane Watson has collapsed under the weight of secrets he convinced himself were kindness. He is late to his own life, perpetually, in the way that only someone who gives everything to everyone else can be. The game drops you into this exhaustion without apology, and it is exactly the right choice. Every version of this character has given us the origin story by now. What we have almost never seen is the aftermath of it.
The story centers on the rise of Martin Li, also known as Mister Negative, a philanthropist whose shadow identity threatens to tear New York apart. Li is a competently written antagonist, and his connection to Peter's personal life adds genuine stakes. But the game's true emotional engine, and its most obvious parallel to Sam Raimi's finest work, is Otto Octavius. In this version, Otto is Peter's former mentor, a brilliant and principled scientist whose body is failing him and whose resentment toward a corrupt system has calcified into something dangerous. He is a person first and a villain second, warm and encouraging in his early scenes, precise and quietly devastating as the story unfolds. When his transformation arrives, it does not feel like a twist. It feels like a tragedy that was always waiting to happen, and it hits with the kind of emotional weight that most games in this genre are simply unwilling to reach for. His final confrontation with Peter is not just a boss fight. It is a breakup, a eulogy, and a reckoning all at once, and the game earns every second of it.
The supporting cast is a more complicated conversation. Miles Morales is introduced here with understated grace, just a teenager from the neighborhood, curious and good, and the game has the patience to let him exist without rushing toward what he will eventually become. Aunt May anchors the emotional core of the final act with remarkable warmth, and her final scenes do not reach for melodrama, they simply ask you to sit with what heroism actually costs. Mary Jane is where things become genuinely complicated. On her own terms, she is not a bad character at all. She is a confident, driven investigative journalist with her own moral clarity and her own case to crack. The issue is that she is not Mary Jane Watson in any meaningful sense. She is, in practice, Lois Lane wearing the name and very little else. The bold, electric, slightly reckless MJ of the comics, the one who brought the warmth and chaos into Peter's life, has been traded in for a more grounded archetype that works fine on its own terms but feels like a miscast. You can write a great journalist character and still have her not be MJ.
Outside of the story, the game is a technical achievement that frequently feels joyful in a way open-world titles rarely manage. The web-swinging is the finest ever designed in the genre, and that is not a small claim. It communicates momentum and physics with an accuracy that makes traversal feel genuinely expressive rather than mechanical. Clearing rooftops at full speed, redirecting mid-arc, barely catching a flagpole and launching forward with centrifugal momentum, it becomes instinctive within minutes and never loses its pleasure throughout the entire runtime. New York City is rendered with a density and life that makes the world feel inhabited rather than decorative. The combat, built around fluid juggling of web attacks, gadgets, and environmental takedowns, rewards creativity and encourages experimentation in a way that consistently feels responsive rather than punishing.
John Paesano's score is the most underappreciated element of the entire package. His main theme builds from something intimate and searching into something genuinely heroic, matching the emotional arc of the story note for note. The quieter passages during Peter's personal scenes carry real melancholy, while the action compositions pulse with energy without ever tipping into generic bombast. It is a score that understands the difference between music that accompanies a story and music that deepens it, and it consistently does the latter.
The game's most persistent structural flaw runs deeper than any single mission. Peter is supposed to have been Spider-Man for eight years. That premise is what made this game feel exciting when it was announced: an older, battle-tested Spider-Man with history behind him and no hand-holding required. But when you actually play it, almost none of that history exists. His major villains do not have prior relationships with him. Doctor Octavius arrives as someone Peter has never truly faced before, introduced here without any weight of years between them. There is no sense of a rogues gallery built up over a decade, no weight of repetition or grudge that only years of conflict can produce. The result is a game that wants to feel like a sequel to a story we never got to see. Peter still struggles with things a Spider-Man eight years in should have long since resolved, and while the story occasionally masks this well, it is hard to shake the feeling that we have been given an experienced Spider-Man in name only. The premise they established was, in principle, exactly the right foundation for something genuinely new. The execution, however, did not fully trust the promise of that premise.
The stealth segments involving Mary Jane and Miles are a similar case. The ones where MJ sneaks through a building and Miles outruns the Rhino work well enough on a first playthrough, the pacing change feels intentional and the stakes feel real. But this is still an action game at heart, and stopping that momentum to hand control to a character with no combat options is a decision that reveals its cost the second time through. On a first run they are not poorly constructed sequences, and each serves a clear enough narrative purpose. On any replay, however, they are pace killers without exception, and the lab puzzle sections fall squarely into the same category. The open-world structure, for all its craft, also leans on familiar collectible rhythms that pad the runtime without always adding meaning. These are not fatal flaws, but they are genuine ones.
What remains, however, is a Spider-Man story that takes the character seriously in a way that feels rare and earned. It understands that Peter Parker matters not because he is powerful, but because he chooses, again and again, to carry a weight that nobody asked him to carry and that nobody will ever fully see. The closing hours of this game sit with that cost without flinching, and in doing so they produce some of the most emotionally resonant moments in superhero fiction across any medium. Marvel's Spider-Man earns a soild 4.5/5
(Miles Morales picks up exactly where this leaves off, and somehow makes you feel it all over again.)
