MARVEL’S Spider-Man was rightly a huge success when it came out on PlayStation 4, being praised by pretty much everyone for its accessible story, intuitive controls, and generally being very good indeed.
Now, the experience is coming to PC in the form of Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered, with the game launching tomorrow (August 12) on Steam and Epic.
This isn’t going to be a long review because the game itself has been out for a while and the actual gameplay and plot etc itself is unchanged from its PlayStation release back in 2018.
Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered is the PC port of the PlayStation game, with some enhanced graphics effects such as Raytracing and Nvidia DLSS.
It looks great and very detailed – I reviewed it on a PC running an Nvidia RTX 3070 GPU – and on “High” settings it was running beautifully and smoothly for the most part. The graphics were very impressive, even without HDR, and I was particularly impressed by the raytracing effects from things like muzzle flashes, fires, and streetlights.
What did surprise me was how well the game worked with mouse and keyboard – while not quite as intuitive as a controller, it was absolutely playable and I could pull off combos and fancy moves without problems.
A controller is definitely the best way to experience the game though, and I can confirm it works with both a PlayStation 5 controller and an Xbox controller, both connected via USB. As well as being a more intuitive control system, the controllers also provide the force feedback feature missing from a keyboard and mouse setup too.
Being a PC title, you can customise quite a range of things, from key bindings to graphics settings, and it also has Ultrawidescreen Display support too.
Disappointingly, I did encounter a couple of crashes in the opening level, as well as one instance of the camera clipping through the scenery – issues I didn’t have on the PlayStation 4 or PlayStation 5 versions of the game. I didn’t run into issues in the main open world, however, even in the larger fights – the game ran smoothly, even when I was at the epicentre of a goon-brawl.
Beyond that, one thing which does concern me is Sony charging full price for what is essentially four-year old game, and especially one in which I encountered crashes more than once. It’s a good game, but it’s not AUD$94.95 (the price at time of writing on both the Steam and Epic stores) good – especially considering the base PS4 version is available for $19 at JB Hi-Fi and the PlayStation 5 edition of Marvel’s Spider-Man Miles Morales Ultimate Edition (which comes with Spider-Man Remastered as well as the PS5 version of Miles Morales) is currently $79 from the same retailer.
If you’re a Spider-Man fan without a PlayStation who is keen to finally experience this you’re going to have a good time, but I’d suggest you really need to wait until some of the bugs are ironed out and the price drops before you visit your friendly neighbourhood purveyor of electronic entertainment for a copy.
