A linear, decent 3D collect-a-thon platformer that plays like the studio's first foray into 3D games which makes sense since they'd been genre diving through 2D games with the Steamworld series but it's not polished or meaty enough to be anything more than unremarkable. It tells a fairly bog-standard environmentalism story and has its usual hero's journey tropes. The core Gunk-sucking mechanic doesn't get much use and doesn't factor in more than just cleaning up the general environment. But in the end, it's inoffensive and enjoyable enough and is quite short so doesn't overstay its welcome

Frustrating and punishing. I did not find this game charming in the least. There are scripted events that strip every ounce of progress from you and leave you much worse off than you expect. The characters are all irritating including the king, who you're supposed to sympathize with but comes off as a pathetic loser. After a scripted event that I found out was half way through the game that completely left me close to destitute, I realised I wasn't really enjoying the game. "Misery factory" is what I feel comes to mind when I think of the experience

The game was also fairly buggy when I played it. I'm sure some of the issues have been patched since

The best Spider-Man game in years but still an overly drawn out, lacklustre and tedious game. The graphics and the open world are excellent. Everything else, the story, gameplay, the activities, collectibles, music, are all within the range of "meh" to "acceptable". The DLC is a marked decrease in quality with a bunch of low quality challenges and an outright bad story. I enjoyed my time with it enough to recommend it to people looking for a Spider-Man game. But I cannot hide my disappointment at how everything is merely "good enough" save the graphics

The web slinging is great if all you want to do is simply swing around the beautifully rendered and realised New York City. But the moment the game requires you to do anything more precise, especially during the challenges or even if you simply want to stop at a destination, the web slinging immediately presents its flaws. It's far too sticky (huehue) and choreographed to do anything beyond simply moving forward and often times I find that it outright refuses to do what I want it to which sometimes is as simple as "go faster to the right". The combat is Arkham-like in its combos and parries, counters and takedowns but some enemy types are incredibly annoying for too long until you have the proper skills to counter their attacks (RPG guys are a menace) and some boss encounters get so incredibly noisy with so many effects that you can barely follow the action. The open world is filled with way too many checklists and some of them, like the challenges, are far too annoying and make the flaws of the game so much more obvious. The game seems to love its flawed combat a bit too much which makes the bases so incredibly annoying since it's almost 5-10 minutes of non-stop combat that interrupts everything else. This also makes collecting suits, mods and gadget upgrades so much more tedious since they're locked behind completing these challenges and bases. Not that it matters because one of the early suit powers and a certain suit mod makes the combat encounters so much shorter is available so close to the start that I stuck with those the entire game which makes the huge collection of suits worthless for anything other than looks where, yet again, they're barely serviceable because a lot of them are so ugly

The story is bland, MCU nonsense which, while making total sense since it IS an Marvel game, begs for some better writing. There's so many incredibly bad bits of writing here and some dialog is hilariously terrible. The pacing is also completely scattered, not just because of the nature of the open world elements but also because of the unnecessary MJ and Miles "stealth" segments. These are not only annoying but also almost worthless in moving the plot along. The story had one pretty neat moment towards the end with some genuine emotion with Peter Parker but is otherwise average to bad. The DLC is mostly filler garbage even in terms of gameplay. The music is milquetoast Avengers high strings and gets quite annoying very early on

Even after trashing so much of the game, this is admittedly the BEST open world Spider-Man game to come out after a glut of trash. It's mostly fine if you want to waste time as Spidey and save the neighborhood by busting up some crime. Buy it on a sale because this is absolutely not worth $60