The game is sitting at 90 on Metacritic at the moment which I think is overrated.
First things first, there are some things that the game does great. Traversal feels great. The game on a technical level performs excellent and instantaneous fast travel feels like magic. Stealth gameplay is very fun too though it does not get much focus.
On the other hand, the most important aspects of the game–story and combat–are underwhelming.
The story is standard capeshit so not much to say there. I liked Miles ascendancy to the status of the primary Spider-Man but Peter’s struggle seemed a bit forced. There are some heartfelt moments. Other than that it’s just them fighting the Bad Guys ™. There are zero criticisms of class structure and NY is portrayed as being a free reforms away from paradise. At least the voice acting is passable.
Combat is really boring. Mostly involves spamming attack button, press the Dodge button when the indicator comes up and spamming abilities on cooldown. Boss fights are so goddamned boring.
So yeah that’s why I think the game was just alright. Also it’s budget was a bewildering $300 million.
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It got good reviews because people just wanted more Spider-Man. If they make a third game that’s basically the same but with a new story you’ll see people suddenly agreeing with you.
Yeah agreed but there was already the Miles game before that so in my opinion there had been enough of the same. I think people just like single player story driven games from popular IPs that are not half assed. I think the recent star wars games that are Sekiro clones are received well for the same reason despite having glaring flaws.
Haven’t played 2 yet, but I was already getting burnt out on the formula after Miles. Hoping by the time I feel like playing it, it’ll be on plus. Too much in my backlog currently. Playing AW2 now, still need to beat BG3. I bought starfield and avatar, though after about 20 hours in each, not sure I’ll go back. A plagues tale is coming to plus in a few days, and the first one was pretty good.
I mildly disagree on the boss fights. I enjoyed them because of the parry mechanic, mainly. I enjoyed the Sekiro-lite (VERY lite) style of unblockable/undodgeable/unparryable tells that you had to read and respond to. I’m a little confused by one of your criticisms though, that it had zero criticisms of the class structure. Is there any reason a story HAS to criticize class structure to be good? I don’t like the story either, but that’s not even on my radar for reasons why.
Is there any reason a story HAS to criticize class structure to be good?
No. It doesn’t have to. But if the story focuses on a deeply unequal city like New York it could have made the story more grounded in reality. As it stands it had a strange focus on “gifted” children and a strange side mission where a pigeon whisperer black homeless man kind of dies alone in a public space and it’s just accepted as normal.
