Marvel's Spider-Man (2018): The Web-Swing That Sold the Whole City

Insomniac Games released Marvel’s Spider-Man on PlayStation 4 on 7 September 2018, an original story rather than a film tie-in, built around an eight- years-into-the-job Peter Parker already established as the city’s hero when the game opens. Every review at launch led with the same observation, and it’s still the correct one five years later: the web-swinging is the best version of that specific fantasy the medium has produced, and the open world wrapped around it is a fairly conventional Ubisoft-style structure that the swinging is good enough to make forgivable.

Why the swing works

Insomniac’s traversal team modelled web-lines that anchor to actual geometry — a real building, a real lamppost — rather than an invisible ceiling height the way earlier Spider-Man games faked it. That single technical decision changes the whole feel of movement: momentum builds across a swing and has to be managed rather than simply granted, a skilled player can chain low, fast arcs between buildings that a casual player button-mashing the swing input can’t replicate, and the game’s camera and animation work together to sell speed without ever losing legibility of where Peter actually is in the skyline. It’s a movement system built around mastery rather than automation, which is the single hardest thing to get right in any traversal-first game and the thing this one gets right from the opening tutorial onward.

Fast travel exists, framed as a subway ride, but the swing is fast and fun enough that using the subway reads as giving something up rather than saving time — exactly the design test this desk has argued most fast- travel systems fail, passed here by making the alternative to fast travel the actual reason someone bought the game.

Combat: a freeflow lineage with webbing on top

Combat borrows the attack-and-counter rhythm popularised by the Batman: Arkham series — a light attack, a counter prompt telegraphed a beat before it lands, and gadget variety layered over the base combo — and adds web-based crowd control specific to Spider-Man: pulling enemies together mid-air, webbing a target to a wall, using the environment itself as a weapon in a way the Arkham games’ more grounded Gotham never quite allowed. The lineage is obvious enough that it’s worth naming outright rather than treating as coincidence: this is the freeflow template, adapted for a hero whose whole identity is vertical rather than horizontal movement, and the adaptation is thoughtful enough that it doesn’t read as a reskin.

The city as texture, not just a canvas

Manhattan is compressed and stylised rather than a 1:1 recreation, but the borough-by-borough specificity — the tight verticality of Midtown, the different silhouette of the Financial District — gives the swing something worth looking at rather than a generic backdrop to bounce off. Insomniac seeds the map with landmark-adjacent detail and Daily Bugle propaganda posters that do double duty as environmental storytelling for J. Jonah Jameson’s ongoing anti-Spider-Man podcast, which plays automatically while the player swings and does more efficient characterisation work in ten seconds than most side missions manage in ten minutes.

Gadgets and suits as a toolkit, not a costume box

Beyond the counter-based combo, Peter’s gadget wheel — web bombs, the Trip Mine, the Spider-Drone, Suction Bombs — gives combat a genuine tactical layer that rewards reading an encounter before wading in: a room full of armoured enemies calls for a different opener than a room full of gunmen who’ll shoot Peter out of the air mid-swing. Unlockable suits carry their own passive powers rather than being purely cosmetic — the Spider- Armor’s damage reduction, the Iron Spider suit’s extra limbs for crowd control — which means the game’s substantial cosmetic collection, pulled from decades of comic and film history, actually changes how a fight plays rather than just how Peter looks in it. That’s a disciplined choice: it would have been easy to make the suits pure fan-service skins, and Insomniac instead ties nearly every one to a small mechanical hook.

MJ and Miles: a deliberate change of pace

Interspersed stealth sections played as Mary Jane Watson and, later, a young Miles Morales strip away the web-swinging and combat entirely, asking the player to sneak past armed guards using distraction and cover rather than superpowers. They’re the most divisive part of the game for a reason — some players found them a pure pacing interruption — but their function is legible: they exist to make Peter’s abilities feel exceptional by removing them for twenty minutes at a stretch, and MJ’s sections in particular do real narrative work establishing her as an investigative journalist with her own agency rather than a rescue-mission object, a choice that pays off directly in how her character is written across the side story involving the Screwball web-series and Wilson Fisk’s fall from power.

The honest case against the open-world scaffolding

Where the game is a conventional Ubisoft-style open world rather than a genre-redefining one is everywhere that isn’t the swing. Crime events — muggings, car chases, bank robberies — recur with enough repetition across the map that they become background noise by the midpoint rather than meaningful content, filled largely because an open world “needs” ambient incident rather than because each one adds something new. Collectible backpacks, scattered across the map as a nod to Peter’s history, are pure completionist busywork dressed up in narrative flavour text. Why every open world puts a tower on the map applies here almost too literally — the game’s version of the tower is a research station Peter has to sync from a rooftop, unlocking the map’s icon soup exactly the way the genre’s worst habits predict. None of that touches the swing, but it does mean roughly a third of the game’s total content is the kind of filler this desk would ordinarily flag as evidence of a budgeting decision dressed as generosity rather than genuine design ambition.

Photo mode as a quietly smart addition

Insomniac’s in-game photo mode, letting the player freeze mid-swing and adjust the camera, exists ostensibly as a marketing-friendly feature for sharing screenshots, but its actual effect is more interesting: it turns the traversal system’s best moments — the exact instant Peter releases a web-line at the top of an arc — into something the player is invited to notice and compose rather than blur past on the way to the next mission marker. It’s a small addition that quietly reinforces the game’s actual thesis about what it wants players paying attention to.

The Focus meter ties everything together

Underneath the gadgets and suits sits a Focus meter, filled by landing clean combo hits and stealth takedowns, that can be spent on one of two things: a finishing execution against a marked enemy, or an instant partial heal. That single resource forces a real decision mid-fight — press an advantage against a dangerous target, or bank the meter to survive a bad exchange — and it’s the mechanical glue that makes combat, traversal and stealth feel like one connected system rather than three separate modes bolted together. A player who’s been swinging and web-striking enemies from above walks into a room already partway to a Focus finisher, which rewards using traversal aggressively rather than treating the skybox and the arena as separate spaces.

Boss fights: the swing forced back into combat

Several boss encounters, particularly the opening Wilson Fisk confrontation and a later fight against Martin Li’s Demon-masked Screwball-adjacent underlings, are built as arenas where the traversal system has to fold back into a combat space rather than an open skyline, and the results are uneven. Fisk’s fight, staged across a collapsing tower interior, uses the environment cleverly enough to justify itself as a set-piece; a handful of the mid-game boss encounters lean more on quick-time-adjacent dodge prompts than on the freeflow combat’s actual depth, and read as the weakest design in the game precisely because they’re the moments furthest from what makes combat and traversal good everywhere else.

Where to play it

The original 2018 release is PS4-exclusive; a remastered version, bundled with the Miles Morales spin-off as part of the 2021 Marvel’s Spider-Man: Remastered, brought the game to PS5 and, for the first time, to PC in 2022 with ray-traced reflections and an unlocked framerate. The PC version is the strongest technical showcase now, though the PS5 remaster’s DualSense support gives the web-swing’s momentum a tactile feedback layer the original PS4 controller couldn’t offer.

The verdict

Marvel’s Spider-Man is at its best in exactly the minutes most reviews predicted it would be — airborne, mid-swing, with no mission active and nowhere specific to be — and it’s honest enough about that fact that the side content, while padded, never actively competes with the traversal for the player’s attention the way a worse open world would. Anyone who wants to see how far Insomniac pushed the same movement system with a sequel’s budget and a second hero should read this desk’s take on Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, which expands the swing into wing-gliding across a bigger map; anyone comparing the freeflow combat’s actual lineage should look at how directly it borrows from the Arkham series’ own counter-based rhythm before this game ever existed.

Spoilers below

The story’s central reveal — that Norman Osborn’s decades of illegal bioengineering research created the Devil’s Breath virus that eventually mutates his old associate Otto Octavius into Doctor Octopus, while also being the eventual cause of Norman’s own transformation into the Green Goblin in the game’s final act — recontextualises nearly every earlier scene of Peter’s uneasy alliance with Otto as a betrayal the game had been quietly seeding since the opening hours. Aunt May’s death, delivered while volunteering at a clinic overrun by the virus Otto releases on the city, lands as the story’s emotional low point specifically because the game spent its entire runtime building May as a fully realised character with her own arc rather than a background caretaker, and the credits scene introducing Miles Morales as a second web-slinger sets up both the Miles- focused spin-off and the eventual sequel’s dual-protagonist structure.