Highlights
- Marvel's Spider-Man games excel in providing an immersive open-world experience with traversal and collectible hunting.
- The upcoming Marvel's Spider-Man 2 will have short load times and the ability to switch between Peter and Miles, but the rumored inclusion of suit battle damage may not be as significant as in the Arkham games.
- Unlike Batman, Spider-Man frequently changes costumes, making it more challenging to incorporate consistent battle damage throughout the game. However, this feature adds to the immersion and fun of the gameplay.
Marvel’s Spider-Man reinforced why superhero games work so well in an open-world space, and even though Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales was a shorter experience in terms of its narrative offerings, its open-world activities were bolstered even further with the Friendly Neighborhood app. Both Spider-Man games make traversal and collectible-hunting digestible in a way where it’s difficult to pass up an opportunity to snatch one up when it appears on the mini-map, and random crimes sprouting nearby when close to a destination are perfect for role-playing as the web-slinger.
It will be interesting, then, to see how that experience will translate in Marvel’s Spider-Man 2. Much has already been briefly prefaced about its open world, such as how load times will be exceedingly short while swapping between Peter and Miles, or when choosing to drop in anywhere in an unlocked district via fast travel. It has also been supposedly revealed that Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 will have some semblance of suit battle damage, though if true it is apparently only during missions, and points out a significant difference between why battle damage in the Arkham games works so logically for Batman.
The Batman: Arkham Games Each Take Place in One Night
Battle damage is a huge part of the Arkham games, where the process of Batman’s suit retaining wear and tear is almost instantaneous. Batman doesn’t get to have a pristine costume for long before some scripted event mars the suit, such as when Two-Face gets a shot at Batman in the courthouse at the beginning of Arkham City. Battle damage may not be a feature that is necessary to portray progression, but it works so well in the Arkham games because they take place over singular nights.
This way, it’s believable that Batman would be wearing one suit the entire way through—with Arkham Knight being an exception—and the games are structured so that players feel like they have accomplished everything Batman has within one night, rather than having the games take place over a long period where Batman could presumably acquire more tactical strategies and be better prepared for whatever it is he is up against.
Instead, Batman must thwart supervillains and petty crime with what’s at his disposal and with what he’s able to retrieve from external sources, such as when he has the Batwing drop the Line Launcher into the Botanical Gardens’ secret lab in Arkham Asylum. Therefore, it’s fun to see how far along players are in the game as indicated by how torn Batman’s cape may be.
Marvel’s Spider-Man Features Many Chances for Suit Swapping
Insomniac’s Marvel’s Spider-Man franchise cannot compete with this level of battle damage, simply because there is an extraordinary number of opportunities where Peter or Miles get in and out of costume. Unlike Batman, Spider-Man relies on his mild-mannered alter-ego a lot more, and being out of costume has as much significance to the story as does being in costume.
Marvel’s Spider-Man and Miles Morales do already represent battle damage, such as in the first game’s introductory boss fight against Kingpin, which could then lead narratively to Peter substituting his classic costume with Marvel’s Spider-Man’s Advanced suit. That said, battle damage for each and every costume throughout the game would be a massive hassle and one that the wall-crawler could easily circumvent by simply slipping into a new copy of the suit each time he went back into the open world.
Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 will have this same issue if battle damage is truly a feature, and players might not see all the effort of that aesthetic for long if the tears, holes, and cuts are repaired by the time Peter and Miles return from a scripted mission. This isn't a make-or-break kind of feature, but it does help sell some fun immersion.
Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 is out on October 20, exclusively for PS5.
