Playing this again for the second time - and especially right after GOD OF WAR: RAGNAROK - I think I'd say now that this is actually a fair bit below what the floor of our expectations should be for a mega-Triple A event game nowadays. Not a bad game in any functional sense, and its best feature (the truly excellent traversal system) almost guarantees it a thumbs-up all by itself, but it is nevertheless riddled with flaws, shortcuts, lazy design elements, and baffling / oversights, and I'm going to go ahead and complain about them in a bulleted list here:

- Number one, it really is SPIDER-MAN: ARKHAM CITY, down to the littlest design elements. And while it's no crime to take inspiration from an excellent game, a lot of the smaller details cribbed from it do come off as quite lazy in their reuse. There are a lot of "oh, come on" moments

- Although it must be said, there's one big thing they didn't lift from ARKHAM. That game took place in a fantastical crime-nightmare world packed with easter eggs and references and impressive details around every corner - this one takes place in a rigorously realistic facsimile of New York City packed with absolutely nothing of any interest at all

- The scale of everything is all over the place - doors, fuseboxes, items, wildlife (pigeons the size of dogs), even characters - here's Spider-Man fighting villain The Scorpion, listed in-game as 6' 3"

- The music is straight up bad. Like, I don't even have the vocabulary to criticize orchestral score, and I don't think I've ever been in this position with a big-budget full-orchestra movie-like OST, but yeah, it sucks, it's bad

- The writing is pretty poor on a macro- and micro-level. Big story stuff like Dr. Octavius' heel turn - which is foreshadowed for SO long but then feels absurdly rushed and unbelievable when it finally does happens - is inexcusably clumsy and more or less breaks the game's story in two, but also just character dialogue is dopey and unrealistic

- Taken as an overall thing, both plot and story are laughably pedestrian and cartoonish and just nothing in the end. It's actually kind of surprising how basic it is. Sub-MCU stuff. Like, there are three-episode arcs of the '90s cartoon that look like The Wire compared to this

- combat's fine, but it doesn't match ARKHAM at all. In those games, you press a button at the correct time, and you can bet your life that what you want to happen is going to happen, it's so tight it's like a math problem. Here, a little loosey-goosey, delay-y, systems tripping over each other-y. Overall not nearly as satisfying

- There are a lot of villains present, which is awesome and necessary, but good God, their designs are hideous, just terrible. Almost seems a few years out of date with how ugly and tech-y everyone is. Greebled nonsense, feels like getting stabbed in the eyes

- this is a Remaster-specific gripe, but having played both, the new face model for Peter sucks. He looks wooden and unexpressive and has this very punchable constant smirking, looking-down-his-nose thing going on. I actually quite liked the original guy. Not sure that I buy Insomniac's reasoning for replacing him, either - he just looks like Tom Holland and it's hard to believe that's a coincidence

So, I played this again to prepare for MILES MORALES and 2, and I'm hoping that those are stronger. The fact that I've 100%ed it twice should and does say something about this game's baseline playablility and value, but again, I think we should be expecting quite a bit more from the mega-prestige hyper-realistic performance-capture-ass industry-shaking titles. So what I'm saying is .... triple-A Games Awards bait ......... Be Greater