After beating Spider-Man again I thought I’d turn back the clock and play this, and I can very solidly say that they saw Infamous 2 from Sucker Punch and they saw Saint’s Row 3 from Volition, and Insomniac said ‘hey, what if we did both of those’, and so they did. What came out was a game with the writing of Saints Row 3, the traversal of Infamous 2 and, least surprisingly, the combat of Ratchet and Clank.

I’ll do a quick rant about some observations on insomniac’s movement system evolution before talking about the game proper. One particularly interesting thing is using this as a direct connector between Infamous 2 and Spider-Man, at least with the movement systems. Every move you can do to get around in Infamous is in this game, but Insomniac went ‘nope too slow, not flashy enough’ and swapped climbing walls for bouncing off every other object, and they decided that the rail grinding in that game would be the primary movement mechanic now, thereby making it faster and smoother than Sucker Punch’s system. They then took what they did here, replaced rail grinding with web swinging, and bar swinging with web-zip, and put every single move from this game’s movement system into Spider-Man (they even directly re-use a lot of animations, just take a look at the front flip and wall riding animations as easy examples), and then gave Spidey even more movement options and abilities, as well as smoothing out the movement experience. Interestingly though, for spider-man they didn’t have there be a threat if you fail to take advantage of the movement system. Here, if you stop, you’ll quickly be swarmed or shot, in Spider-Man, if you fail, you just get embarrassed, but in my dark living room that doesn’t really mean much. I think they sacrificed this threat because Spider-Man’s movement is a lot more involved and input/timing heavy than here, so having enemies on top of that (which it admittedly does in the latter third of the game) would make it a bit much to handle in an open world setting. Ironically this makes spider-man a step forward in terms of complexity and depth but a step back to what was available in Infamous in terms of challenge.

Anyway, on this game; The story is. Non-existent, but the writing is fun enough to pull it through. It strikes that perfect balance that Saint’s Row 3 and 4, as well as Borderlands 2 does where the script is pandering and goofy but in a heartfelt and charming way, as opposed to just feeling cold and calculated in it’s pandering like, say, Borderlands 3 and Saint’s Row (2022) do.
In combat Insomniac takes a lot of cues from their previous Ratchet and Clank games with a variety of fun, interesting and meaningfully different weapons that I really had trouble choosing between, I do wish there was more of a variety of enemies to use them against, and the lack of enemy and environment variety in combat makes things feel stale sometimes, but the design of areas and arenas really takes advantage of the movement, which really heightens what you can do in combat. It’s a shame that the only other time Insomniac has used movement that’s as interesting as this is in Spider-Man, and even then it barely factors into combat, and the only other time they use it in a shooter is in Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart, and even then it just flirts with jump pads and grind rails in some combat scenarios. It’s probably because they took this fast paced movement mixed with a shooter concept directly from this game’s biggest inspiration, Infamous 2, but seeing as it doesn’t look like we’re getting a new Infamous game any time soon, it’d be nice to see Insomniac, who largely do it better here than Sucker Punch did in Infamous 2, take on the torch.

I really liked this, but it feels like it’s close to greatness, only just missing the mark. Perhaps in the upcoming Spider-Man 2 Insomniac can finally figure out how to make an interesting open world (they got pretty damn close in rift apart) and go even harder on the gadgets from the first spidey game (make them combine with the hand to hand combat better and make them more aesthetically fun instead of just ‘web bomb, electric web, web drone, impact web’, you can do more there), and if they give that game the combination of the traversal and combat systems that they do here, it could be FANTASTIC.

Insomniac just seem cursed to make ‘really good’ games, always only just missing greatness.