Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered PC Review: A Wonderful Port

Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered has finally arrived on PC, almost two years after its release on PlayStation 5 and just four years since its original release. However, it’s not exactly the kind of game you could play on either platform. This version contains exclusive improvements that make it the best way to play the best video game created by the award-winning web developer to date.

I’ve been playing Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered on my gaming PC for a few weeks now, and this is the third time I’ve joined Spidey and company on this particular quest to take down superhuman crime lord Mister Negative. Even though I was familiar with the game, it didn’t take me long to immerse myself in the story and networking again, and it’s just as fun to play as the first time.

For those already familiar with Marvel’s Spider-Man, the game itself remains unchanged – it’s still one of the best superhero games you can play today. So if you’ve never played it before, rest assured, you’re in for a surprise.

You spend most of your time in the game swinging from building to building over the bustling streets of Manhattan, and that’s definitely one of the most fun parts of Marvel’s Spider-Man. . In other open world games, getting around can seem like a chore, hence the prevalence of fast travel in this genre, but I never wanted to use it here because flying through the air is just awesome. I found myself repeatedly running towards the tallest building I could find, jumping off its roof and launching myself to the ground at high speed only to break my fall at the last second by releasing a web – some games. Capture high-speed traffic just as effectively as Spiderman.

What’s even more amazing is that the rest of Marvel’s Spider-Man’s mechanics are almost, if not just as fun. If the combat and stealth sections are reminiscent of the Batman: Arkham games, they’re certainly not knock-offs, thanks in no small part to the fact that Spidey has genuine superpowers in addition to his unique set of gadgets. There’s a lot of depth here, and he always feels like there’s something new to master, even after taking on a bunch of goons without taking damage and sustaining 100+ combos.

You’ll have plenty of opportunities to develop and improve your combat skills between the main story missions and the endless variety of side activities that Marvel’s Spider-Man has to offer. While the first one can be completed in about ten hours, if you’re anything like me, you’ll spend three times as much finding collectibles, catching petty crimes, sightseeing, or completing objectives in Manhattan. That’s not counting the three chapters of The City That Never Sleeps DLC that’s part of the Remastered Pack, which gives you over 20 additional hours of pranks and jokes.

While most of these side quests are fun to complete, they can get repetitive after a while due to their volume, and it certainly doesn’t help that you hear a lot of repetitive lines if you expect to complete them all. To be clear, the quality of the writing means that they simply spoil the immersion rather than bore you, but it all adds up.

All of the characters in Marvel’s Spider-Man feel well executed when it comes to dialogue or action. Otto Octavius ​​in particular may have received his best adaptation yet, and that’s no small feat with Alfred Molina’s impressive performance in Spider-Man 2. It’s clear Insomniac has a great deal of respect and understanding for the material. of origin from which it is based, resulting in a compelling story that thrilled me during its explosive sets and quietly empathized with me in its more mature moments.

The same degree of adoration is clearly present in the game’s visual presentation, whether or not you activate the PC-exclusive enhancements. Looking in the settings menu, you’ll find a pretty solid set of graphics options. Your usual suspects here include unlocked frame rates, plus features like AMD FSR, Nvidia DLSS, Nvidia DLAA, support for ultrawide gaming monitors, and of course ray tracing.

The modularity available here is fantastic, with lots of customizable options and tools, like dynamic resolution scaling, making it easy to find the perfect balance of quality and performance for your system. Just be sure to check the Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered system requirements to meet your performance expectations.

I haven’t encountered any bugs or crashes while playing the game yet, but found it to be very CPU intensive (even with my Intel Core i7 11700F), especially with ray tracing enabled. While it affects my frame rate drastically, I can’t turn it off because Marvel’s Spider-Man is one of the best tech demos I’ve ever seen. Ray-traced reflections drastically improve the look of the city and its inhabitants, including Spider-Man, making it look more real than the frankly very cluttered screen space alternative.

However, those with older graphics cards that don’t support ray tracing, or those who simply prefer to disable it in favor of better performance, should be well catered for. I applaud the efforts of Nixxes and Insomniac to make Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered highly engaging on a variety of hardware configurations.

Before I close this review, I’d like to briefly talk about how Marvel’s Spider-Man translates to keyboard and mouse. While it is perfectly playable and has the ability to customize the hotkeys to your liking, I suggest you plug in the best PC controller you have. The DualSense is great with its haptic feedback and resistive triggers, but an Xbox controller will work too. This is also verified by Steam Deck if this is your jam!

Marvel’s Spider-Man doesn’t push the boat, but it does what it sets out to do with such a high level of quality that it’s hard not to admire its performance. Even after four years of potential contenders, it’s still one of the best superhero games ever made better by the power of PC.