When first setting up my backloggd I had given this game 5 stars. Upon replaying I felt it deserved to be brought down to 4, then while writing this went back on my rating yet again and now I'm set on a nice 4.5. Numbered ratings are complicated! Anyway... (jump to the last paragraph if you want a TL;DR)
The gameplay in this is very much a culmination of every 3D Spider-Man game since the PS1 era. The swinging and combat are obviously heavily influenced by the Spider-Man 2 movie game. Even the huge chargeable jumps make a return! And after the games based on the "Amazing" movie series had a very Batman Arkham pastiche style of combat, this game takes it back to its SM2004 roots (which, of course, had inspired Arkham after all) with more controllable and upgradeable moves. And then you have air combat and web moves taking cues from the often forgotten Friend or Foe! The possibility of stealth during missions is a natural evolution from the stealth features in the 2002 movie game, although of course draws more Arkham comparisons from less knowledgeable/experienced players.
The story is perfectly enjoyable and complements the game's features. Mr. Negative in particular is actually much better represented in this game than in the comics, where I always found him a pretty boring and generic "overpowered" villain. The build-up to the real main villain is very well executed. Performances from the voice cast are excellent and sell every emotion (though not in the Brazilian dub - more on this later). There are moments during the story where you control Mary Jane and Miles Morales - these are purely stealth sections with no superpowers involved. Many criticize these sections, and while I never found them a problem, it is true that some go on for too long and get boring (I found one Miles section featuring the Rhino especially grating).
Side-missions are a thing - some are good and fun, some feel like filler. They're also very sporadic so it ends up feeling pretty weird, and a lot of them are repetitive. In fact, this is a big thing that drags down the game from being a "perfect" experience - repetitiveness. In each "act" (there's 3 of them) there's a group of side missions, and a big chunk of them are crimes you have to stop and enemy bases. For the first two acts this is fairly manageable, but on the third there are TWO groups of crimes in EVERY district of the city, and not only do they lack variety, they're ridiculously broken, becoming a chore to do. There are also two groups of enemy bases, although they're more fairly distributed. Not only that, but enemies are scattered all over the city during this part of the game, not counting towards any side mission counter, making the third arc very tiring and tedious.
Another type of side mission is the Taskmaster challenges - you unlock them at a certain point of the story and they're scattered through the city. There's two types: combat, drone, bomb and stealth (combat and drone challenges are just like challenges you'd find in Ultimate Spider-Man, so there's another throwback for you). They're not all that hard to do - as long as you're not aiming for the highest score. This wouldn't be an issue if challenge tokens (which you use to unlock costumes) weren't tied to the score - and you can't unlock all costumes just by doing challenges over and over again. Again, not much of an issue, but the drone challenges can be insanely difficult to get a perfect score on and might make you scream at the small imperfections of this game's web-swinging mechanics.
Now, since I mentioned costumes... the costumes mechanic in this game is cool because you don't just unlock a new outfit, you unlock an equippable upgrade/power for each costume that was included in the game's launch (so, not for DLC or patch costumes like the Raimi suit or Bag-Man). The equippable powers can be used with any costume, drawing comparisons to the Create-A-Spider mode in the second PS1 game, which is cool. You can also upgrade Spider-Man's web-shooters and other equipment. The gadgets add some nice variety to combat - a lot of people just gloss over them but I recommend trying out some different gadget combinations, it makes things pretty fun.
Design-wise, while I don't have any major complaints towards the game's selection of alternate costumes, some picks are mind-boggling. The Fear Itself suit, while a neat visual in dark areas, wouldn't really be missed if it wasn't included at all, and some of the costumes created for the game are very ugly. Suits from the comics that should look cool ended up VERY over-designed with a lot of additional unnecessary and visually-polluting details like random lines scribbled throughout (I'm looking at you Kaine and Bag-Man) and, in the case of the Dark Suit, a DIFFERENTIATED SOFT CLOTH CROTCH AREA. I get that in the game's story it was made by the Black Cat (who has the hots for Spidey), but what the heck?
Another minor complaint I have is the lack of a quality-of-life option that should be a no-brainer, but during the two years of updates, patches and a remaster, apparently no one in the whole design team for the game thought of: language options. I mentioned the Brazilian dub earlier and now I'll elaborate on it: I find it terrible, with stilted "acting", wonky translations, some actually untranslated lines, and wrong character names for the Brazilian market (this was actually mandated by Marvel, but it's in the game and weighs in how I feel about the dub). I'm Brazilian, so of course my PS4 console is set to be in Brazilian Portuguese. But if I want to change the game dub to the original, I have to change my console language, which is a very inconvenient thing to do for just one game. There's absolutely no in-game language options whatsoever, so I can't even leave subtitles in Portuguese in case a family member or friend who doesn't speak English wants to keep up with the story while taking a look at what I'm playing. This game has actually very thorough quality of life options like turning off quick-time events, customizable difficulty and thorough graphical settings, so how is it that in all the years the game was in development and then all the years it was being patched and remastered NO ONE in the dev team thought about a simple language option? It boggles the mind.
So, all in all, Marvel's Spider-Man for the PlayStation 4 is a GREAT game, managing to bring together every good thing from previous Spider-Man games (and some not-so-good that were improved into good things) but brought down by some very repetitive missions and baffling design choices.
The gameplay in this is very much a culmination of every 3D Spider-Man game since the PS1 era. The swinging and combat are obviously heavily influenced by the Spider-Man 2 movie game. Even the huge chargeable jumps make a return! And after the games based on the "Amazing" movie series had a very Batman Arkham pastiche style of combat, this game takes it back to its SM2004 roots (which, of course, had inspired Arkham after all) with more controllable and upgradeable moves. And then you have air combat and web moves taking cues from the often forgotten Friend or Foe! The possibility of stealth during missions is a natural evolution from the stealth features in the 2002 movie game, although of course draws more Arkham comparisons from less knowledgeable/experienced players.
The story is perfectly enjoyable and complements the game's features. Mr. Negative in particular is actually much better represented in this game than in the comics, where I always found him a pretty boring and generic "overpowered" villain. The build-up to the real main villain is very well executed. Performances from the voice cast are excellent and sell every emotion (though not in the Brazilian dub - more on this later). There are moments during the story where you control Mary Jane and Miles Morales - these are purely stealth sections with no superpowers involved. Many criticize these sections, and while I never found them a problem, it is true that some go on for too long and get boring (I found one Miles section featuring the Rhino especially grating).
Side-missions are a thing - some are good and fun, some feel like filler. They're also very sporadic so it ends up feeling pretty weird, and a lot of them are repetitive. In fact, this is a big thing that drags down the game from being a "perfect" experience - repetitiveness. In each "act" (there's 3 of them) there's a group of side missions, and a big chunk of them are crimes you have to stop and enemy bases. For the first two acts this is fairly manageable, but on the third there are TWO groups of crimes in EVERY district of the city, and not only do they lack variety, they're ridiculously broken, becoming a chore to do. There are also two groups of enemy bases, although they're more fairly distributed. Not only that, but enemies are scattered all over the city during this part of the game, not counting towards any side mission counter, making the third arc very tiring and tedious.
Another type of side mission is the Taskmaster challenges - you unlock them at a certain point of the story and they're scattered through the city. There's two types: combat, drone, bomb and stealth (combat and drone challenges are just like challenges you'd find in Ultimate Spider-Man, so there's another throwback for you). They're not all that hard to do - as long as you're not aiming for the highest score. This wouldn't be an issue if challenge tokens (which you use to unlock costumes) weren't tied to the score - and you can't unlock all costumes just by doing challenges over and over again. Again, not much of an issue, but the drone challenges can be insanely difficult to get a perfect score on and might make you scream at the small imperfections of this game's web-swinging mechanics.
Now, since I mentioned costumes... the costumes mechanic in this game is cool because you don't just unlock a new outfit, you unlock an equippable upgrade/power for each costume that was included in the game's launch (so, not for DLC or patch costumes like the Raimi suit or Bag-Man). The equippable powers can be used with any costume, drawing comparisons to the Create-A-Spider mode in the second PS1 game, which is cool. You can also upgrade Spider-Man's web-shooters and other equipment. The gadgets add some nice variety to combat - a lot of people just gloss over them but I recommend trying out some different gadget combinations, it makes things pretty fun.
Design-wise, while I don't have any major complaints towards the game's selection of alternate costumes, some picks are mind-boggling. The Fear Itself suit, while a neat visual in dark areas, wouldn't really be missed if it wasn't included at all, and some of the costumes created for the game are very ugly. Suits from the comics that should look cool ended up VERY over-designed with a lot of additional unnecessary and visually-polluting details like random lines scribbled throughout (I'm looking at you Kaine and Bag-Man) and, in the case of the Dark Suit, a DIFFERENTIATED SOFT CLOTH CROTCH AREA. I get that in the game's story it was made by the Black Cat (who has the hots for Spidey), but what the heck?
Another minor complaint I have is the lack of a quality-of-life option that should be a no-brainer, but during the two years of updates, patches and a remaster, apparently no one in the whole design team for the game thought of: language options. I mentioned the Brazilian dub earlier and now I'll elaborate on it: I find it terrible, with stilted "acting", wonky translations, some actually untranslated lines, and wrong character names for the Brazilian market (this was actually mandated by Marvel, but it's in the game and weighs in how I feel about the dub). I'm Brazilian, so of course my PS4 console is set to be in Brazilian Portuguese. But if I want to change the game dub to the original, I have to change my console language, which is a very inconvenient thing to do for just one game. There's absolutely no in-game language options whatsoever, so I can't even leave subtitles in Portuguese in case a family member or friend who doesn't speak English wants to keep up with the story while taking a look at what I'm playing. This game has actually very thorough quality of life options like turning off quick-time events, customizable difficulty and thorough graphical settings, so how is it that in all the years the game was in development and then all the years it was being patched and remastered NO ONE in the dev team thought about a simple language option? It boggles the mind.
So, all in all, Marvel's Spider-Man for the PlayStation 4 is a GREAT game, managing to bring together every good thing from previous Spider-Man games (and some not-so-good that were improved into good things) but brought down by some very repetitive missions and baffling design choices.