Highlights
- Parries in games like Batman: Arkham Knight enhance combat by creating momentum and requiring players to be actively engaged.
- Marvel's Spider-Man 2 introduces powerful parries that serve as offensive counterattacks, differentiating them from the defensive knife parries in Resident Evil 4's remake.
- In Marvel's Spider-Man 2, both Peter and Miles have unique abilities that allow them to overpower enemies and deliver devastating attacks, showcasing their mastery of their individual skills and gadgets.
Parries are all too common now in games, and yet their introduction in any action game can often present themselves as a huge boon. Parries are engaging mechanics in combat because they create better momentum with exchanged attacks and require players to be more involved on a moment-to-moment basis. The combat of Batman: Arkham Knight might appear simple on paper to fans who’ve not yet played it since at a distance it looks like the player can simply spam their parry counter input, but there is a lot of timing and skill as part of choreographing a perfect combat encounter.
Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 is debuting parries as a unique inclusion to combat that neither Marvel’s Spider-Man nor Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales had. One parry has been shown thus far for both Spider-Men, with both looking like a fully offensive counterattack while an enemy launches at them with an attack they won’t be able to dodge. These parries seem to be incredibly powerful, differentiating them from what makes the Resident Evil 4 remake’s parries special, but like the Resident Evil 4 remake players will probably want to employ these parries in combat as often as possible.
Resident Evil 4’s Parry Stays Within the Confines of Survival Horror
Resident Evil 4’s remake had a lot of expectations to meet, and somehow it was able to exceed them while making some fairly substantial changes. The remake was a tiny bit more macabre or grim than the original but maintained its campy quirks quite well all the same. Gameplay, however, was impacted most effectively with a knife parry system that had players collecting spare knives alongside Leon’s combat knife and defending against attacks while they still had durability on them.
This was a fantastic evolution of the knife durability Capcom had established in the remake of Resident Evil 2, and whittling them down with each counter allowed the remake of Resident Evil 4 to preserve an important element of survival horror while trying to micromanage an attache case inventory. That said, because knife parries in this remake are almost entirely defensively oriented, players can’t rely on them for actual damage. That’s where Marvel’s Spider-Man 2’s parries differ most.
Marvel’s Spider-Man 2’s Parry Packs a Superpowered Punch
Marvel’s Spider-Man 2’s gameplay is built upon the foundation of its two predecessors, but now both Peter and Miles seem to be on the offensive when it comes to mastery of their individual abilities and gadgets. Of course, Peter wearing the black symbiote suit lets him perhaps inadvertently tap into an anger he doesn’t typically express, and that is emphasized in how much of an oppressive onslaught he delivers in combat.
The symbiote can overwhelm enemies from a distance with large, swirling tendrils, which also seem to be a default way for Peter to parry enemies. In Marvel’s Spider-Man 2’s gameplay reveal, fans can see that Peter’s parry erupts the tendrils around him and pushes the hunter back, leaving them vulnerable to a follow-up front kick before Peter has to dodge out of the way of gunfire.
It doesn’t seem to spend any in-game resources to parry an enemy, and therefore all players might need to exploit this new mechanic is decent enough timing and to observe an enemy’s head for a glowing yellow aura. Miles’ parry is even more significant, though, as it shows that players can actually parry an incoming attack with an ability of their own.
In this case, Miles uses the ability he has slotted to chain bioelectricity between all enemies in front of him, taking them all out at once through the parry as a counterattack. There will likely be times when an ability should be preserved instead of being wasted on a simple parry, but this ability of Miles’ demonstrates that there may be great utility in saving an ability for a parry counterattack instead.
Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 launches on October 20, exclusively for PlayStation 5.
