I’m looking forward to playing Marvel’s Spider-Man 3, whenever that may be, but I’m hoping Insomniac Games takes care with this one to address a pretty big complaint I have about the game’s web-slinging mechanics.
Although Insomniac’s main focus right now is Marvel’s Wolverine, which comes out in September, it hasn’t shied away from discussing plans for Marvel’s Spider-Man 3 either.
The Spider-Man games have been very successful for the California-based developer, after all, so it’s definitely possible we’ll see a new game in the near future.
But for as much as I enjoy Insomniac’s Spider-Man games, there’s one particular feature from the older Spider-Man games that I wish would make a return in the series, and it’s not something that I feel alone in complaining about either.
Of course, I’m talking about the web-swinging mechanics, probably the most crucial element of a Spider-Man game. And I’m here to say that I just think it could be a lot better.
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Sony Interactive Entertainment
I enjoy Insomniac Games’ web-swinging mechanics, but I’m also reminded of when it was better
See, while the swinging in Insomniac Games’ Spider-Man titles isn’t something to scoff at, there’s an element of them that misses out on what made playing Spider-Man 2 on the PlayStation 2 so much fun.
In the PlayStation 2 game, web-swinging was massively affected by physics. Mass, Acceleration, and Momentum played huge roles in giving you a sense of your speed. How you moved after firing off a web would be affected by so many different factors, such as how you were already travelling through the air when you fired a web, and from which direction you swung from. It made every webswing feel unique and really sold the Spider-Man fantasy.
For Insomniac’s Spider-Man games, this felt like a small step backwards. Falling from a great height into a downward swing doesn’t quite maintain the right amount of speed and momentum that you’d expect from such a stunt. Similarly, the character always felt like they were being pulled towards where they shot the web like a magnet.
In these games, Spider-Man lets go of the web once he’s swung far enough with it, forcing you to fire another web to swing from. Meanwhile, in the PlayStation 2 games, if you held onto a web for long enough, you could perform loops across sideways beams, or launch yourself upwards and downwards if you let go at the right time, or swing all the way around a building if the web was long enough. And while doing this, you’d keep the same speed and velocity.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that I’d like to see Marvel’s Spider-Man 3 take a more realistic approach to the way it designs the physics of web-slinging mechanics. These games are still a lot of fun, but the novelty of swinging around as Spider-Man is losing me when there are these moments which take me out of it.
