After sometime I’ve finally finished Insomniac’s Spider-Man game and I know its a rather popular opinion that you’ve all heard before but it really is a great game. That being said it does have some issues with it as most games do, and I’m a bit bias towards the style of game it is but its still good.

The core issue with a Spider-Man game is trying to make you feel like Spider-Man which is no easy task, you have to be able to move a react at superhuman speeds and not to mention there has to be a satisfying web swing system. With that in mind Insomniac ticked all the boxes, just swinging around the city fighting the occasional crime that pops up is so much fun. The speed at which you fight and mixing it up with different gadgets makes you truly feel like an experience crime fighting Spider-Man. The story was really good for at least the first two acts, act three feels shorter than the other and just dumps stuff on you rather than trickling out, with plenty of teases and hints towards later developments. I won’t go into too much detail with the story as you really need to go in blind for the full experience.

Here is where I’ll admit though I’m a huge fan of the Arkham series by Rocksteady and can’t help but compare the two. The fact that Spider-Man draws so heavily on the Arkham series is the reason I enjoy the game, but I do emphasis that it does draws on the and doesn’t just copy for better or worse. The combat is very similar to Arkham but simplified making the combat flow well for the more fast paced combat in Spider-Man. However what it does poorly is stealth and I wished they had taken more notes from Arkham. The stealth is not user friendly to put it kindly, you have to rely on the environmental scanner to determine whether you can take someone down or not which means you are constantly having to trigger the scans as it doesn’t stay active. Another issue it has is it constantly changes whether it encourages the use of gadgets or physical takedowns, as a someone who plays heavily with gadgets this annoyed me. My absolutely biggest grievance with the stealth system is how useless it is in the base raids as after taking out the first wave everyone from wave two on wards suddenly is alerted to your position making it pointless to be quiet.

That aside I enjoyed the rest of the games various challenges and gimmicks. The challenges given to you by a certain masked villain are the perfect level of challenging for me that took a couple attempts for a good amount of them. The various crimes that pop up are varied enough to be enjoyable, and different styles are trickled out throughout most of the game. The sections in which you play as the “Spider Friends” are interesting a few enough to be interesting and not tiresome.

My biggest recommendation though is just play it for yourself there’ll be something for practically everyone to enjoy and I’m really looking forward to the DLC that’s coming out as I’ve been told it’s going to add another ten hours of game play.

Question for all you folks who’ve played the game, what’s your favorite suit? I’m torn between the Iron Spider and the Noir suit.

 

So God of War’s new game plus came out last month and after finally getting around to it I have some mixed feelings. The new mode supposedly increases enemy difficulty and changing some attack patterns, whilst allowing you to keep your old skills abilities and gear, adding stronger versions of old gear plus all new “Perfect” tier gear and materials. There may be some spoilers in from this point on wards and I’ll try and keep them to a minimum but as this is a post game unlock I’ll assume most people reading this have played it at least once.

What I do like about the game is the addition of the new gear for both Kratos and Atreus. I’m not going to list all of them as the list is longer than I expected but the two that caught my eye is Traveller + set, which gives a slowly regenerating shield that takes one hit as well as a buff to bare-handed attacks. The other set, and my current goal for this play through is the Cod of War set, from what I understand this is a reoccurring joke in the God of War series, which adds various bonuses to collecting health and rage stones. A nice feature they added solves an issue I had with finishing the game, excess Exp. Exp can now be converted into hacksilver at one of the stores.

Now to my issues with it which are mainly to do with the difficulty. Now i play on the default difficulty because in my first play through that was the perfect setting for me, however it was a joke. I breezed through all the fights leading up to Tyr’s Island, my stopping point for this review, and honestly not even the Baldur fight was anything more than an inconvenience. I have read that the difficulty does get harder as you progress and my issues may be caused bu simply now the play style that works for me but I’ll have to play further to find out. To it’s credit though the exploding draugr where far more common this time around and where the main source of my grief.

Let me now in the comments what you guys thought of it. Was it just me play on too low of a difficulty or did you guys feel the same?

Next post is going to something spectacularly, amazing and was a real blast the whip through.