Spider-Man PlayStation release: The Marvel game four years in the making

FANS have been waiting a while for this release — and the new PlayStation game promises a fresh take on the popular story.

THE Amazing Spider-Man will be swinging into action on the PlayStation 4 next month, and if initial impressions are anything to go by it’s going to be an impressive arrival.

The open-world game Marvel’s Spider-Man, developed by Insomniac Games and published by Sony exclusively on the PlayStation 4, puts players in the suit of the eponymous hero and unleashes them on a massive map of New York with a lot of adventures to have and masked goons who need beating up and/or suspending from the ceiling in webs.

Insomniac Games community director James Stevenson said the game had taken more than four years to make and would not deal with the web-slinger’s origin story, saying it had already been done before, and instead getting straight into the action and story.

“We’re going to make you feel like a powerful Spider-Man and the story pulls you in,” he said.

“For hardcore fans, it’s like Marvel heaven … there’s easter eggs all over the place,” he said.

Mr Stevenson said the designers had worked to make the game accessible to both hardcore fans as well as people whose knowledge of the character was ‘Peter Parker got bitten by a radioactive spider and now he has superpowers’.

The idea was to create a Peter Parker story, developers said.

Peter Parker is aged 23 in the game and is out of uni, working in a job which clearly isn’t paying the bills, and beginning to struggle with the fact that as Spider-Man, he’s the toast of New York, fighting bad guys and keeping the city safe — while as Peter Parker, he’s extremely late on his rent, trying to keep up with his work and family commitments, and generally not doing as well as his costumed counterpart.

Mr Stevenson said the idea was to create a second coming of age story that nearly everyone could relate to, dealing with finding one’s place in the world as a young adult fresh out of their studies.

“The idea was not just to create a Spider-Man story, but to create a Peter Parker story too,” he said.

The developers are particularly pleased with the web-swinging mechanic in the game, and having played a hands-on in Sydney earlier this week (as well as the demo at E3 in June) I can say they absolutely should be, with the movement and combat mechanics in the game proving very effective and easy to handle.

The game world also looked very detailed and from what I saw, it’s looking to be a promising release when it slings onto PlayStation 4 on September 7 — with a full review forthcoming when it launches.

Royce Wilson attended the Spider-Man preview event as a guest of Sony Australia.

The game will be available on PlayStation 4 on September 7.