ThePlayStationShowcase last month was… questionable, with some fine folks of the internet regarding it as the worst in Sony’s history. Despite that, I was on my toes in anticipation ofMarvel’s Spider-Man 2’s gameplay trailer—andInsomniacdelivered. The gameplay reveal of Spider-Man 2 was great, and triggered many fond memories from my past favorite wall-crawler games.
The black suit in the trailer, with its brutal combat and key-component edginess, took me back to the days of Spider-Man video game antiquity. You see, beforeMarvel’s Spider-Manswung to PC in 2022, the go-to options for someone looking for an open-world Spidey experience were Ultimate Spider-Man and Spider-Man: Web of Shadows—both games incidentally starring Venom as the core villain. However, the game I found to resemble the gameplay trailer the most was Web of Shadows, a cross-generational title that came out on eight different platforms in 2008.
ALSO READ:If Kang Gets Kicked, How Will The MCU Move On?
Although the game itself was largely mediocre and not much loved on release, I grew to cherish it over the years—and that was almost entirely down to the combat. Web of Shadows was not the first Spider-Man game to explore the backstory of the black suit (that honor goes to the notorious Spider-Man 3, based on the third film in the Raimi’s trilogy), but it was the first game to treat the Symbiote as more than a cosmetic change to Peter Parker’s spandex. Moreover, a significant selling point of the game was the ability to instantly switch between the red and black suits.
Both suits in Web of Shadows had their skill tree, adding more moves and combo variants to an already-diverse combat system. Some skills were shared between both suits, like one weirdly entertaining skill which made Spider-Man use his enemies as skateboards. There are suit-specific skills, like Spider-Man’s tendrils that could ground more than one enemy by swinging around them, or the black suit making some sort of controlled explosion. Each suit excelled in a different area of combat—the red suit does very well in boss fights as it focuses on speed and agility, while the black suit excelled in taking down multiple opponents at a time.
I have great memories of web-striking enemies, skating them down the street, before sadistically swinging them around. If they had any life left in their bodies, I’d switch to the black suit, grind them with a tendril, and punch them to oblivion. The switching was swift and smooth, so it was easy to keep your flow after switching. Overall,the combat was the single best thing about this game, and the ingredient that ultimately distinguished it from its predecessors.
Swinging back to that Spider-Man 2 trailer, it’s not the black suit that gives me flashbacks; does the black suit change more than just the color of Peter’s suit and web? Yes. Peter fights more violently in the Symbiote? Check. Super edgy and, at times, cheesy lines? Check. Reckless and vile attitude towards people that are close to him? Yep. The Symbiote feels like a creature of its own, tussling for control with the person who wears it, just as it’s supposed to be. You know it’s not your typical Spider-Man when he literally bashes the heads of Kraven’s goons in one of the most brutal depictions of the black suit.
Of course, some of this has to do with the source material rather than a specific game adaptation, but looking at the way Spider-Man web-grabs his targets in both games, it’s almost exactly the same thing. Even story-wise, Web of Shadows was a pioneer in exploring potential storylines where Peter became evil because of the Symbiote. While I don’t believe this to be the case for Spider-Man 2, I believehe will make for some sort of obstacle in the story from Miles' perspective.
It was usually Mary Jane or Aunt May that had to deal with the antagonistic behavior, but this time we have Miles. At the end of the trailer, a little electric effect on the “Be greater, together” text suggests to me that Miles' electric powers can disrupt the Symbiote. At this point, I believe it’s not too much of a stretch to suggest that Miles and Peter are destined to clash at some point.
Web of Shadows lets you do ‘weird’ things like choosing to keep the black suit and control the entirety of New York with the Symbiote and Choosing Black Cat over Mary Jane, and I hope that Spider-Man 2 will re-employ some of that weirdness without straying too far.
RELATED:Marvel’s Spider-Man: Best Suits, Ranked
Clearly, we weren’t shown everything the suit can do, but one of the many things Insomniac is yet to reveal is whether you can instantly switch between the red and black suits. This was a star feature in Web of Shadows, and even though canonically it’s not exactly how the Symbiote works, it opened up the combat mechanics in such a brilliant way that I think Insomniac can afford to go a little off-canon in the name of pure fun.
When I first played Spider-Man in 2018, I admired everything that Insomniac corrected from previous Spider-Man games—a great unique story, great combat that doesn’t limit you to punches and kicks, and many more. They set a new standard for Spider-Man games, and while Web of Shadows tried to do some of this for the most part, a lot of it is not aging as well as I would’ve liked.
Web of Shadows was a big web of intriguing Spider-Man ideas that could’ve gotten somewhere, but unfortunately lost its course and devolved into a product that screams ‘lost potential’. I’m rooting for Spider-Man 2 to be mostly what Web of Shadows tried—but ultimately failed—to be: a great Symbiote experience and a great Spider-Man game.
