Marvel's Spider-Man review: the greatest Marvel video game ever made

Spider-Man is consistently one of the most popular superhero properties there is. Relatable, funny and endlessly optimistic in the face of the darkest foes, Peter Parker has been the subject of countless comics, movies and video games. But, even though some of those games have been very good, this one from Insomniac (Ratchet & Clank, Sunset Overdrive) sets a brand new standard.

With a cinematic story filled with personal drama, subversive twists and likeable characters, but set in a fantastical universe much more akin to the one seen in print, it's the best of Spidey's film and comic book iterations combined. But it's also a sensational game, blending open world acrobatics with more focused linear areas, and a well-realised protagonist with the freedom of fun upgrades and customisation.

It can't be overstated how great it feels to swing around as Spider-Man.

The game's greatness is best exemplified in the way Spidey gets around town. Web-slinging here is exhilaratingly fast and intuitive. Visually it's convincingly complicated and you really buy that Parker is using his superhuman reflexes to spot anchor points and build momentum by slingshotting or springing off rooves. But actually playing it is brilliantly simple, requiring you to hold one button to swing and then hit another contextually as options for zipping or wall-running fly by. It's incredible that, with a few hours' practice, it's second nature to raise or lower your altitude, scale skyscrapers or build up to blistering speeds, and it always looks stylish and natural.

What makes this game really work is that this and every other aspect that's important to Spider-Man as a character — including the humour, the neighbourhood focus, the acrobatic fighting, the science, the optimism and Parker's own humanitarianism — is given the same meticulous treatment.

Fighting is fluid and mixes a flashy strike and counter system — reminiscent of the Batman Arkham games — with Spider-Man's characteristic web gadgets. As with the swinging, it looks and feels amazing while also being mostly a matter of timing, strategic choices and watching out for indicators that let you pull off contextual moves. But it also goes so much deeper, allowing for awesome moments like crawling around the roof and webbing up goons when their friends look the other way, or beaning a faraway mugger in the head with a manhole cover you rip up with your webs.

While different classes of enemies mean you need to switch up your tactics, a clever "focus" meter fills as you pull off cool moves. You can cash this in at any point to heal yourself, but if you let it fill up you can spend it on a devastating finishing move. The combat in this game isn't difficult, but it does require attention. If you spot all the tells and remember which techniques defeat which enemies (slide under a shiled guy to get to his unprotected side), you should be able to make it through massive encounters unharmed.

It all takes place in a big open world the style of Assassin's Creed, but between the sheer fun of locomotion and the smart design of the world's challenges, things never get too repetitive. Everything's smartly interconnected so you never feel like you're wasting your time. Your growth as a character through skill and suit upgrades, for example, is ingeniously tied not just to experience points but also to different kinds of tokens you earn through completing activities, which incentivises you to try out missions you ordinarily might not go after, without forcing you to do everything. I loved seeking out specific challenges that would let me buy awesome new suits (my favourites were the 1930s-inspired Noir suit, and of course Tony Stark's Iron Spider, but there's more than two dozen from across the heroe's history), and each suit also comes with a new power you can equip to make you a more formidable force in combat.

You can hit a button combination to pull down shelves, rip up manholes, return grenades, or any number of other contextual actions.

But the incredible open world is only half the experience. The story driving it is also top notch.

The core narrative takes the smart approach of focusing on Spider-Man rather than a wider Marvel universe, but also avoids the usual origin story shenanigans, opening with an established Spidey who's been keeping the streets of New York clean for many years. He's already worked for and left the Daily Bugle, already met most of the the big bad villains and has his dual life as Peter Parker and Spider-Man pretty figured out.

At least until he succeeds in his years-long goal to put crime boss Wilson Fisk, aka Kingpin, behind bars. With the big man gone, all hell breaks loose in New York as rival gangs rise to replace him, sinister forces move against the corrupt mayor and the streets approach a state of martial law.

The story — and there's probably enough for a trilogy of films here — gets much darker than any of the movies would dare, but it's also more human and grounded than many of the comics. I looked forward to playing as Peter Parker as he works as an assistant in a science lab, or pitches in at a homeless shelter run by Aunt May — almost as much as I looked forward to swinging around town solving random crimes and completing myriad challenges — and that's down to the incredible quality of the characters, writing and design here.

As always with Spider-Man there is constant narration and banter, and it's very good, but the quality of overall writing and Parker's relationships with the wider cast really floored me. This extends to some fun twists with established characters, like J. Jonah Jameson as an alt-right shock jock, or a familiar villain who — in this version of the story — is Peter's kind-hearted but ambitious mentor.

You spend a lot of time playing as Peter Parker, or dealing with his friends, and that's surprisingly a good thing.

The ensemble cast and the wider universe hinted out here is actually one of the game's standout features. I don't remember the last time a new version of Mary Jane, Miles Morales or Norman Osborn was as interesting, and the villains are equally so. Comic fans in particular are in for a treat, with obscure favourites like Black Cat and Taskmaster filling in supporting roles as mission-givers alongside the main bad guys in the Sinister Six. I won't spoil anything here, but some of the directions this story goes are genuinely unexpected, and it gets more and more ambitious as it progresses.

One of my favourite things about Spider-Man is that his greatest adventures aren't about saving the world, they're about helping the people in his neighbourhood, and that's something this game nails. Not only is the main story concerned with very local issues, but the New Yorkers talk to you, and you can gesture back. A social feed on the map screen keeps track of the people mentioning Spidey online. And the game will often suspend your loftier objectives so Spider-Man can "patrol".

In effect, this means that story missions — which generally take place in bespoke areas, have discrete objectives and occasionally even let you control people other than Parker — are interspersed with periods where the whole of New York City is yours to explore for as long as you like. The map is huge — both vertically and laterally — and standing at the top of Avengers tower, looking down at the massive playground of buildings and streets that make up New York, it all takes on a painterly, comic book appearance. But at ground level it's a bustling metropolis filled with cabs, people and endless petty crime. You can spend hours running up buildings and diving down to see how fast you can go, clearing each area methodically of objectives or zipping around Manhattan to only do the kind of jobs you really like (or the ones you need for that sweet Impact Web upgrade).

When you start off the map is largely blank, but finding and activating cell towers in each area fills them with activities and collectibles. For example there are dozens of backpacks to find, which are old supply caches filled with fun nods to Spider-Man's origins. Activities are also drip-fed onto the map as you earn experience points from swinging around and completing missions, so you always have something to do without it getting overwhelming.

New York seems almost as tall as it is broad, with crooks or secrets on every rooftop.

By halfway through the game there'll be more than a dozen activity types including enemy strongholds to clear out, puzzles to solve and (inexplicably) pigeons to catch. New Yorkers you meet in the world will also occasionally give you side missions to complete. There's certainly no shortage of things to do, and an impressive amount of it is a lot of fun. (There are a few exceptions, for example taking photos of various landmarks can be tedious.)

There are a few other similarly small criticisms I would make of the game overall, including how crowded and dangerous the map tends to become in the second half of the game as the game's true villain makes their move to topple the city, and how fiddly some of the quick time events in the otherwise brilliant boss battles are, but it's hard to complain when so much here is so good.

And with a game so filled with stuff, one of the biggest achievements is that it rarely feels bloated. Concepts used for optional challenges are often turned into story beats later for example, whether that's applying your ability to separate goons as Spider-Man to escape a desperate hostage situation as a less powerful individual later on, or applying your knowledge of how to process materials in the lab to a more high-stakes scenario.

In the long pantheon of video games based off of comics properties there have been few bonafide greats, and even fewer from Marvel. But even though some diehard fighting game fans might disagree, there's little doubt in my mind this is the greatest interactive representation of a Marvel property to date. With lots of twists and turns, fun fan service, a brilliant story and hundreds of well-incentivised optional tasks all backed up by a near-flawless traversal and combat system, this is everything you could hope for in a Spider-Man game.

Marvel's Spider-Man is out on September 7 for PlayStation 4.