Satisfying moment-to-moment gameplay bolstered by strong characters and a decent story. The web-swinging, combat, character interactions and collectables in this game make for an experience that can be played for hours at a time.

The game isn't perfect by any means. Any part of the game where you play as anyone other that Spider-Man, while brief and rare, tend to be boring. The game can be held back by some repetitive and uninspired side quests. And lastly, I take issue with the game's pacing.

Spider-Man PS4 begins with an incredible, pulse-pounding sequence, but then drops and doesn't meet that same level of urgency until the final third. But, with that said, the last third of this game is top-tier, and I refuse to spoil anything about it. It is worth playing for that part alone.

Instead of reviewing the game, I'm just going to describe some of the things that happened in my playthrough:

I went to the Lincoln Memorial, put a stealth boy on and went up behind a slaver to stick a grenade down his pants. The others couldn't detect me since I was invisible, so they said, "huh, must have been the wind" after the first one blew up, and I repeated the process until half of them were dead.

I went to Father Clifford in Rivet City and baselessly claimed that Diego was having a sexual relationship with Angela. The moron believed me and turned around to Diego, who was about three feet away, and excommunicated him from the church. Diego got over it pretty quickly, turned to Angela, who was about three feet behind him, and proposed. They will be getting married soon.

(I'm smirking just as I write this)

I went to Tenpenny Tower and spoke to Gustavo over the intercom, demanding to be let in. He boasted that he was safe on the other side of the wall and told me to scram. I took out my mini-nuke launcher and fired a shot over the side of the wall, killing Gustavo and sending his lifeless body flying over the side of the wall. After looting his corpse, I went back to the intercom and spoke to Gustavo for the first time since blowing him up. He still wouldn't let me in.

My goodness, you need to play this game.

One step forward, one step back.

Ratchet is much more likable in this version, but his relationship with Clank feels like an afterthought. The gameplay is much more addicting, but the story is far weaker. As a remake, it changes too much to feel loyal to the original game, but keeps enough elements from the 2002 game to stop it from being able to stand on its own entirely.

Oh well, at least it was better than the movie

I thoroughly enjoyed the FF7 remake, but I was nervous when I heard it would be split into three chapters. After all, when you add three to seven, you get ten, and I didn't want that.

Final Fantasy ten is really bad. The characters are all frustrating and obnoxious in their own special way(Auron excluded), the repeated enemy encounters are irritating, the voice acting is embarrassing, and the story is contrived nonsense. I could only sit through so may hours of ear-bleeding, un-skippable cutscenes before I shelved the game. The only reason I don't give it a lower score is because I don't feel like I can get away with it, having not played the game in a while. I really don't want to play it again, so we'll settle on this. Perhaps the latter parts of the game are far better, and perhaps the remake is fantastic, in which case, I'll look like a fool; but, honestly, I doubt it.

I had an aggressive bias against Final Fantasy for years, and I blame this game for why honestly.

Just because I loved Arkham City doesn't mean I want to play a much worse version of it.

The plot holes in this game are ridiculous, the villain motivations are non-existent and every villain in the rogues gallery is pointlessly shafted and delegated to repetitive, serialized side quests with the exception of three. The explosion of repetitive, tedious Riddler trophies are almost preferable to the repetitive tedium of the main quest. Nearly every plot point from this confused, unnecessary story is directly stolen from Arkham City, and the 100% ending is actually somehow worse than the base ending. I did find the tank gameplay fun for a time, but there was far too much of it and it didn't fit the tone of the rest of the game at all.

While far from the worst game I've every played, Arkham Knight is among the most disappointing.

I liked Miles Morales more than the 2018 game.

While having less content, I thought the overall pacing of the story was much better. Miles's personal dilemmas resonated much more with me due to the consistent tone and intimacy of the story. Gone are the tidal wave of repetitive side quests and gimmicky gameplay sections that held the 2018 game back. If the compactness and streamlined gameplay structure from this game could be applied to a story with more content, the next Spider-Man game could be getting five stars from me.