Marvel's Spider-Man
This game is an absolute blast. Controlling spoderman as you swing, zip, and dash around Manhattan just feels fantastic, and might even be the highlight of the game. The combat obviously owes a lot to the Arkham series, as many modern brawlers do, but there a few tweaks to make it feel a bit more unique, like how you dodge instead of countering attacks. I rolled my eyes when I first saw that there were going to be stealth sections, because it felt even more derivative of Arkham than the combat (stealth isn't exactly something spoder is typically known for, after all), but it really grew on me, and I soon started looking forward to every chance I had to take down a group of enemies entirely undetected.
The story is decent for the most part. This is a very likable Peter, even if his quips are sometimes terrible, and I really liked how they played up Norman Osborn's Trumpiness, but I will say that I think Octavius becoming Doc Ock would have been better left to the inevitable sequel. The relationship between him and Peter is great, but his turn as a villain is too rushed to resonate as much as it should. It also leads to story beats that feel a little forced, like how literally the first thing he does as Doc Ock is arrange a large-scale breakout at Ryker's and the Raft and form the Sinister Six. Kind of a wild first move for a brand-new supervillain, right? Octavius's similarities to Martin Li, particularly regarding his understandable animosity towards Osborn, also leave him feeling a little redundant in the overall story, and it's kind of annoying that at the last second the game apparently loses interest in Li and doesn't bother giving his character a proper conclusion, instead focusing entirely on Doc Ock.
The worst parts of the game are the fucking stealth missions where you play as MJ and Miles. They're disastrously bad. For one thing, they make very little sense in the story, especially for MJ. Her constantly sneaking into locations full of armed men hostile to her is stupid bordering on suicidal, and there is absolutely nothing she accomplishes that spoder couldn't and wouldn't have done a hundred times more quickly, more easily, and more safely. I might almost forgive their inclusion if they led to MJ growing as a character and realizing that there are other ways to help both her community and spoder than needlessly risking her life doing things she simply isn't equipped for, but no! When spoder finally confronts her, she argues that she's a Strong Independent WomanTM who can handle herself, the game frames her as being totally right, and spoder ends up apologizing for it! Even though she's clearly, objectively fucking wrong!
And even just looking at the actual gameplay, the missions are garbage. They're very simplistic, they're always on a set path you pretty much have to follow strictly, the mechanics are too shallow to experiment with, the AI is too braindead to enjoy trying to outsmart, the automatic fail once you're discovered is frustrating, and above all, they're dull and monotonous. Look, I have no doubt that at some point, there was a good idea at the core of what putting these missions in the game was meant to accomplish, but precisely none of that comes through in the final product. These missions should have been cut from the game, and the fact that they weren't suggests to me that they were probably a "pet" feature of someone too high up the corporate ladder to overrule who was determined to keep them in the game no matter how bad they were. I sincerely hope that these missions won't end up being in the sequel. Find something, anything else to do with MJ.
I wasn't sure if I really wanted to mention this, but the more I think about it, the more I feel that I have to - I have never seen a version of spoder this closely aligned with the police in any medium. Occasionally he'll comment on how he doesn't get along too well with the police, and sometimes a cop will throw a canned line at him about how he's not wanted, but for the most part, spoder seems to work with them pretty closely. He directly participates with and fights alongside them in multiple missions in the main story and the DLC, many, if not most of the side-missions and optional crimes he can complete involve him fighting alongside the police and helping them defeat criminals, and he "unlocks" each chunk of the world map by climbing a tower and hacking into their expansive surveillance systems (Ubisoft called, they want their dated game mechanics back) for the police. This wasn't a neutral or objective choice to present the game to the player. It was a narrative decision, and something that they could have very easily avoided, seeing how no other video game has featured spoder working this closely and directly with the police.
And there's no use dismissing this subject with a line like, "Oh, it's just capeshit, of course they're not going to go much deeper than the police being good guys," because this game does explore the ramifications of New York being oppressed by an authoritarian organization abusing its power - it's just the private military company Sable International that does it, not the NYPD. In the latter part of the game, these mercenaries begin using excessive force, trampling civil liberties, and imprisoning innocent protesters. spoder naturally finds this behavior unacceptable and soon becomes their enemy, even as he reasserts his allegiance with the NYPD, whom the game explicitly portrays as the "good" version of law enforcement, the organization that by contrast apparently doesn't infringe on civil liberties or hurt and imprison innocent people. But the game can't even keep this anti-authoritarian message consistent, because by the end of the game, the head of the company inexplicably joins your side, and in the DLC, spoder discovers that she's actually a wonderful person and a true hero deep down, just like him. I'm sure Insomniac meant no harm, but this simplistic portrayal of the police as unquestioned "good guys" and regular allies of spoder was tone-deaf back in 2018, and comes across as even worse now. Again, I'm really hoping that the sequel will do better on this subject.
Oh, and the DLC are pretty mediocre. They're not the absolute worst, but they're very short, don't have an especially interesting central conflict, end on very abrupt, unsatisfying notes, and in general have a very rushed, half-assed feel to them.