Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered (PC) – Review
Every PlayStation Studios PC version has been rock solid thus far, but Marvel’s Spider-Man is the first one that seems like it has fully fulfilled its full potential now that it’s unbound by PlayStation hardware. While the ray-tracing enabled PS5 remake was no slouch, the visual and performance gains on PC are beyond compare. New features like DLAA and customisable ray-tracing make the city seem better than ever before, while the framerate increase from DLSS and a faster GPU make swinging through Manhattan feel smoother and more even more thrilling.
The experience is enhanced better further with a 21:9 or 32:9 monitor, which offers New York in a beautiful panorama that’s just begging you to take a break from crime fighting to play Peter Parker the Photographer. It’sSteam Deck confirmed too, though performance is still a work in progress. Even on PC, Marvel’s Spider-Man is still the same game with the same shortcomings, and those underlying issues can’t be remedied no matter how high the frame rate goes. But are its shortcomings easier to ignore when you’re flying 90mph down 5th Avenue at 120 FPS in super ultrawide? Absolutely.
Marvel’s Spider-Man, like God of War and Horizon Zero Dawn before it, is incredibly well optimised for PC. While you’ll need a powerful rig with an RTX 3080 and latest-gen i7 processor to achieve the full 4K @ 60 FPS experience, even a toaster will run it on the lowest settings. My system comprises an RTX 3070, an AMD Ryzen 5 3600x, and a 49” Samsung Odyssey G9. At low settings I can reach a continuous 70 FPS, or 50 FPS on high settings, which is surprising considering the panel is a huge 5120 x 1440. What I’m missing in fps I’m more than making up for in FOV, but this is the first game that has me wanting for an upgrade.
I won’t hammer on about the super ultrawide here as it’s still a very unique screen size, but the effort Sony has put into supporting 21:9 and 32:9 with its ports has gone a long way in making it a more standard aspect ratio, and Spider-Man is the best example yet. The skylines are gorgeous in ultrawide and the subtle distortion at the border of the screen makes web-swinging feel even faster. While the cutscenes are substantially narrower, they’ve all been reframed in a way that makes them feel natural in ultrawide instead of the game straining a resolution it wasn’t initially created for. This is the greatest 32:9 game I’ve played yet and it seems like the way it was designed to be played.
Although the Steam Deck had some performance issues, I was able to play the majority of Spider-Man on it. I identified a few serious issues, even though they have been slowly resolved as updates have been pushed through during the review period and even today. Cutscenes’ faces and hair are pixelated and occasionally lag behind the sound; assets on walls or in inventory are unreadable due to low resolution; and the entire scenario when you follow Electro across Riker’s Island moves at an intolerable 10 frames per second. Even though I have no doubt that future patches will further enhance Steam Deck’s performance, I also have the impression that playing on it will always be a bit of a letdown. The Steam Deck, however, is a fantastic tool for engaging in open-world games of this type, which rely on a checklist format. Quick Resume makes it simple to jump in and destroy a few enemy bases or search for backpacks whenever you have a spare few minutes. Despite the bugs, I’d still suggest it to everyone who owns a Steam Deck.
Playing Marvel’s Spider-Man on PC was a lot more enjoyable than on PS4 or PS5, thanks to all the improvements, but I still found myself constantly aware of the game’s flaws despite the game’s impressive visuals. Swinging around the city is exhilarating, but there’s room for improvement in terms of story development and item customization. At moments, the combat is as dynamic and expressive as any big screen Spider-Man encounter, but it’s also often impeded by the clunkiness of the momentum-killing radial interface. I would like to see the sequel take more from the Arkham series, which does an amazing job of mixing equipment into combos. Even in a second playthrough I never felt like I could completely get my spider legs, though KB+M did make it a lot simpler to whip the camera around to target distant enemies or rapidly escape into the rafters after a stealth kill.
My biggest problem with Marvel’s Spider-Man boils down to an issue of theme and tone. It perfectly captures Spider-look Man’s and feel, but adds nothing to the mythos. It seems content to wade in the shallow end of the socio-economic issues that make Spidey a unique hero, to give us a Spider-Man that’s late on rent and stretched thin by his many personal and professional responsibilities, but avoids any commentary beyond this being an occasional motivating factor to the plot.
Marvel’s Spider-Man takes these themes for granted, as if they represent a totality of his character rather than signifiers. Socio-economic concerns are present on the streets and in the F.E.A.S.T. shelter, but only on the perimeter. Corruption, whether it’s police who are on the take with Kingpin or a mayor creating a bioweapon in secret, are handled as individual, rather than systemic problems. Despite more than 60 years of comics proving that Spider-Man is capable of more than simply punching bad guys, the character is often reduced to that one role.
Marvel’s Spider-Man is a big, beautiful retread of very known Spider-Man stories, which makes it feel like a bit of an imitation in the end. An great imitation to be sure, but it might have been so much more.
