tl;dr Overall good game. Story is decent, gameplay is pretty good but the game is way too repetitive.

Overview

I bought this because it has a very good rating on Steam and has a Steam Deck verified badge. Also, a few people recommended it to me, if I recall correctly.

Gameplay

The gameplay is pretty good. It’s very reminiscent of the Batman Arkham series, especially the combat, but why invent a bad system, if you can just copy a good one? The one thing that does stand out is the traversal mechanic. Moving through the city, swinging from building to building is really well done. It’s a lot of fun to do just that. Character progression is decent as well. There are three separate skill trees that you can spend skill points on and the skills you unlock make you deal more damage, unlock special skills and other stuff, standard fare but that’s fine.

Other than that, the progression works similarly to all the open-world (action/adventure) RPGs out there: you have a main story line that progresses with separate quests but there’s also a bunch of side quests and activities to increase play time. Some of them are fun, others not so much, but that’s a matter of taste, of course. What *did * annoy me was that there’s just so many side activities! I spent a significant portion of the time with doing mindless chores which is a plague that seems to have infected every single open-world game I’ve played in the last 10 or so years. Working through icons on a map to feel a sense of progression is not a good design (I blame Skyrim, little wonder I never got on with it), especially if the activities feel superficial and don’t integrate with the main story well or at all. I can’t say it enough: I don’t want playing a game to feel like work! I wish AAA studios understood this better. The only way to offset this issue somewhat effectively (though not completely) that I’ve seen so far is superior writing, something like Witcher 3, but this game is far from on par with that.

And the Screwball challenges are the absolute worst, I’m not sure whether I finished even a single one. I don’t even know why I should have, I didn’t see or feel any incentive.

Performance

The game runs well on Steam Deck. I seem to recall the odd dip in frame rates but all in all it’s not worth mentioning. The game looks pretty and the experience was smooth overall. Battery life isn’t stellar but that’s to be expected, I think I got somewhere between one and one and a half hours of play time out of it with frames capped at 40.

Story

The story is pretty decent, for the most part. I like the relationship difficulties with MJ, some of the side quests are interesting and the main story is fine. However, as the game progressed, I felt more and more alienated by the sheer lack of plausibility. At the beginning of the game you hunt down your regular mob boss or the odd super villain but after a while the city evolves into a full blown war zone between a private company with increasingly outlandish sci-fi gear and weird mobsters with magic powers. I mean, it may be that this stuff occurs in the comics as well (never read any of those) but I kept thinking how the setting felt less and less authentic and more like an excuse to introduce stronger enemies for Spider Man so the balancing doesn’t suffer too much.

Conclusion

In total, I think this here is a decent game. Gameplay is very good, story is decent, although it loses in plausibility after a while and performance is good as well. The biggest downside for me was the humongous amount of chores and side quests, most of which weren’t amazing, some even downright terrible. This, unfortunately, spoiled the experience quite a bit.

I know there are sequels out by now. I won’t be getting them any time soon, if at all, because if it’s more of the same stuff, I’d rather spend my time on a better story that is less wrapped-up in work.