Of all my years of playing video games, I’d never gotten all the available collectibles. We live in a time where more games are coming out than ever before and they all fight for our time. With the release of Marvel’s Spider-Man, I like many others, was excited to finally play it. I did so at E3 and was blown away. I spent hours and hours and finished it within the first week of it being out. It’s safe to say this game made me a completionist.
Doing Whatever a Spider Can
Among the many things the game gets right are the collectibles. A smart thing Insomniac does is progressively revealing them to you rather than making them all available at once. Sure finding all 12 pigeons is a little tedious, but there’s a narrative reason for doing so and it’s another excuse to swing around Insomniac’s incredibly detailed New York. The same can be said for the 55 backpacks scattered around the map and the landmark pictures. Traversing the city makes collecting these a blast.
With this version of Peter Parker being Spider-Man for eight years, there’s a lot of unexplored backstories. With each backpack you get, Spider-Man has a little anecdote about it. After taking a picture of a landmark, he might make a comment about it. All the collectibles have a story behind them that expand the world of the game.
One other thing the game does is once you finish a particular story mission, the game will suggest you explore the open world, obtain some collectibles, and do some of the side missions. It’ll eventually lead you in the direction of the next story mission, but the game wants you to explore every nook and cranny within it. Even the different bases have a reason to be there since they’re tied to a villain in the game.
Marvel’s Spider-Man is an example of a game that does collectibles right. Married with that is the fun of traversing the city that our hero calls home. It’s the first game I platinumed besides a Telltale game and I don’t regret all the time I spent. With DLC on the horizon, I can’t wait to see what Insomniac adds to this already incredible game.