Is Insomniac’s Spider-Man still acceptable in 2022? I’d like to think so. Lately, my rig has been working overtime again because I wanted to personally experience how our friendly neighborhood spider behaves on this platform. The answer to that can be very brief; except for some issues with ray tracing, Spider-Man runs like a charm. But I’ve also talked to enough people who – despite the graphical splendor – don’t like Spider-Man at all. Because a teenage boy who helps the police set up a surveillance network to keep everything in check… That’s really no longer acceptable.
Personally, I hadn’t even thought about it that much. I don’t play a game with social acceptance in mind. All those times playing Mortal Kombat and Carmageddon as a teen while society was screaming bloody murder… I really didn’t give a shit what the world thought. I liked it and that’s what counted the most. The same goes for Spider-Man, although it seems these days that I’m starting to get heavily outnumbered. Recently, when I played Stray, I was indirectly branded a racist by Kotaku. And now that I’m having a blast with Spider-Man, I’m supposedly turning a blind eye to police corruption and the threat of a surveillance state.
It’s actually bonkers that society is set up like this these days. In 2018, Insomniac’s Spider-Man was the cream of the crop and Peter Parker was everyone’s friend. But now, in 2022, Peter is above all a traitor. Insomniac even tries to keep it a bit tongue in cheek. But that whole cringefest of a Spider-Cop running joke should have been trashed according to a lot of woke people. Basically, PlayStation made a big mistake by ordering Nixxes to make it a pure PC remaster. The entire script should have been rewritten to bring the game more to the current social standard.
Trust me, it’s not that I’m going to defend this remaster tooth and nail. There are really things that could have been done differently/better. The graphics aren’t one of those things because Spider-Man looks brutal on PC. Especially when you have a powerhouse of a PC, there is a huge amount of beauty to see. Like I said, for some reason, ray tracing tends to spoil the fun by showing reflections that are full of graphics artifacts. That is a shame, to say the least. But if your rig has the power to max out all other settings – including the number of NPCs and vehicles in the far-from-dull city – you’ll be swinging around for hours without ever getting bored.
Of course, this is also partly due to another ‘once accepted, now outdated’ element: icons. The city is literally teeming with them. Tourist attractions, Peter’s hidden backpacks, Harry Osborn’s labs, the police surveillance towers (which are really not done if I’m to believe everyone)… You can literally waste hours of your time without completing a single main objective. On the one hand, that’s not really a punishment. Swinging through the city was already the main selling point of Spider-Man in 2018 and it still holds up today. But it can also just be one of those things where you think “Go easy on the icons, Insomniac”.
To conclude, on the question of whether Insomniac’s Spider-Man in 2022 is still relevant, that is very much up to you. If you’re just a fan of the Spider-Man character with no political agenda, the answer is yes. I mean, name another current game where you can swing through the big city to your heart’s content and introduce some street thugs to a heavy-handed denture correction, of which you can also take a picture. Anyway, if societal pressures won’t allow you to put police surveillance towers online “because it undermines a right to privacy”, leave Spider-Man to those who just want to enjoy it for what it is.
It’s ironic, sad, and funny how “middle of the road” Insomniac’s Spider-Man is. On the one hand, there’s the very “pro police” message and Spider-“Man” being the hero…
But on the other hand, there are standard “diversity” things in the game – pride flags, strong women, “soy-boy” looking Peter…
Then, there’s the Miles Morales sequel, which has virtually no police and add a BLM mural to the game lore.
So, among the “political crowd,” it would appear that Insomniac has set itself up to be blasted by both. To the gaming crowd, it is just a fun game…except for the MJ missions…they could have done those MUCH better.