I loved Spider-man when I was a teenager, evidenced by about a meter of Spider-man comics upstairs. I heard good things about the Playstation 4 game, but I don’t have a PS4. So when my PS5 arrived, I immediately bought Spider-man: Miles Morales, which includes the remake of the PS4 original.
Peter Parker
For those of you who don’t know, several people have taken on the mantle of Spider-man (well, spandex suit) over the years. Still, Peter Parker is the original Spider-man, and the most famous one.
The remade Spider-man from the PS4 features Peter Parker. When the game starts, he’s been Spider-Man for several years and at the top of his game. Well, sort of. He tries to make ends meet as he works for Professor Otto Octavius in a lab and volunteers at the F.E.A.S.T. homeless shelter with his Aunt May. He’s in an on-and-off relationship with his friend Mary-Jane from high school and his best friend Harry Osborn is on an extended trip to Europe.
At the start of the adventure Spider-Man takes down the crime lord Wilson Fisk. Unfortunately, this leaves a power vacuum behind, which a gang of demon-masked thugs quickly decide to fill. Things escalate from there.
Miles Morales
During the course of Peter Parker’s adventures on the PS4, he gets involved with Miles Morales. Miles is a teenager who loses his dad to criminals. Peter tries to help him, which unintentionally leads to Miles also being bit by a radioactive spider. He develops powers just like Peter. When he reveals his powers to Peter, Peter decides to train the boy. Enter a new Spider-man.
The new PS5 Spider-Man adventure features Miles’s encounter with a troubling gang known as ‘the Underground’ as they terrorize an energy company called Roxxon.
Miles is a different Spider-man than Peter. He is younger, and much less self-assured. That comes across in things like how he webswings — which is backwards and sideways as often as not. He’s also juggling studying, his dad’s death, and his mother running for city council. That keeps him on his toes.
Mostly, I wonder the same thing as with the other game: where the heck does the guy find all that time? Does he ever sleep? How does he explain looking beat up time and time again as he sits down for a class in college? Ah well, nit-picking.
Spider-man is just fun
I could nit-pick about story-arcs and physics, but in the end it’s simple: the games are fun. Swinging around New York is as satisfying as sneaking up on people with a retractable dagger up your sleeve was in the original Assassin’s Creed . And web-swinging is a lot less bloody.
The open-world side-questing is interesting enough to keep you busy, although in the end all the gazillion collect-item-x, do-side-puzzle-y stuff makes it start to feel like a job. But yeah, I’ve spent a lot of hours on both games and I’m not bored yet, so kudos for that.
The less than good stuff
Like I said, random open-world stuff gets boring. After you’ve beaten up the first dozen car-jackers and muggers, you know the drill. Somewhere at the end of the last DLC of the first game all those side quests just became a blur to me.
And I like the idea of multiple cool Spider-man suits that you can collect in the game, but most them — to me at least — look pretty crappy. I would have preferred 10 really cool costumes over the 28 now in there. But well, that’s me.
Also, Miles Morales feels more like an expansion to the original game than a completely new game. It’s mostly the same New York as before, but with a Christmas theme. It’s also shorter (especially if you count the DLC of the original) and nothing has been truly changed. Then again, you shouldn’t change a winning formula.
Finally, it’s interesting that the PS5 remaster of the PS4 game features a Peter Parker who looks a lot more like the actor Tom Holland who portrays him in the new movies. Supposedly, this has to do with the face structure of the guy voicing this Peter Parker (Yuri Lowenthal). I’ll buy it, but I’m not convinced marketing didn’t play a role. Then again, it doesn’t matter that much – and they didn’t white-wash the game or something sinister like that.
Conclusion
I love Spider-man for the Playtstation 5. If you managed to score a PS5, go get it.
