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Being a tourist in New York is not always the cheapest thing. If you want to get to the viewing platforms of the Empire State Building, Rockefeller Center & Co., you have to shell out a chunk of US dollars. And if you don’t get hold of the expensive VIP ticket, there is a risk of long queues.
It’s more pleasant for Spider-Man. The comic hero swings over crowds, sprints up the outer walls of skyscrapers and scrambles to the top. This is how life is lived in the PC adaptation of “Marvel’s Spider-Man”. The game published by Sony Interactive Entertainment was released in 2018 for the Playstation 4. The “Remastered” version for the PC will be released on Friday. Compared to the PS4 version, it is graphically prettied up a bit, and it also contains all the additional content that has been released for the game so far.
Classic heroic story
The great trumps of the title are speed and dynamics. With a brisk start, he quickly pulls the player into his net. Peter Parker, aka Spider-Man, is woken up by a police call from 911. A gang of villains led by the villain Fisk fights the troubled police in the streets, and of course the comic book hero comes to the rescue.
Spider-Man takes on hordes of enemies at the same time, punching them across the chin, trapping them in spider webs, even dodging their rocket launchers. At the end of the mission, the inevitable happens: Fisk is overwhelmed in a boss fight and put in prison.
But is this a long-term success? Because without the boss Fisk controlling them, the gangsters and other villains seem to lose all their inhibitions. Banks are robbed, a gang war looms, and suddenly a new, mysterious bandit group emerges.
Anyone who knows superhero films will not be surprised by this plot line and the subsequent twists. “Marvel’s Spider-Man” doesn’t reinvent the genre, but rather follows familiar narrative paths. What is refreshing, however, is that the game offers variety.
The frenzied passages as Spider-Man alternate with calmer scenes in which you play the “normal” Peter Parker. The aim is to solve mini puzzles or pay a visit to the aunt. And the player also slips into the role of Spider-Man’s (ex-)girlfriend Mary Jane Watson in order to sneak past a villain in a museum and to reveal a secret.
But the secret star is New York. The city appears faithfully reproduced. A walk in Central Park, swing across Times Square, climb the Empire State Building? It’s all possible. If Spider-Man ventures among the crowds that populate the streets, he is promptly recognized. He hears a lot from selfie requests to curses.
The side missions can’t keep up. Most of the time, these are boring police emergency calls about theft, robbery or burglary. “Beat Up Those Five Gangsters”; “Collect these ten items”: Such missions abound. The developers could have done more here.
Fluid fights
This side mission monotony is somewhat relaxed by the brisk combat system. It works as fluidly as swinging across the street blocks. In the course of the game you can find all sorts of special items that make fighting even more varied. For example, a “spider drone” that the superhero can send out and attack the enemies.
Comic and superhero fans will get their money’s worth with the title. However, the price is rather high for the game, which is several years old, at 60 euros.
The test sample was made available to the “Wiener Zeitung” by the manufacturer. Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered is coming to PC on Friday, August 12th.
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