This Is How ‘Marvel’s Avengers’ Spider-Man Will Play, Plus More Wakandan Raid Info:
I did get to see a whole bunch of Spidey in action, and these are my impressions from both seeing him fight and talking to Crystal Dynamics themselves about his design:
If I had to summarize Spider-Man’s new role in Avengers, he seems to be a crowd control/support-based hero in a way we have not really seen before. His crowd control, you guessed it, comes from his webs, and Crystal Dynamics has created a new web status effect that builds up with various moves and ultimately webs up enemies, big and small, which freezes them in place and makes them more vulernable to damage.
I was most impressed by his traversal. They really went pretty far down the Insomniac road here, as he does not need to attach to existing objects like lightpoles or building corners the way we see with grappling hook heroes like Black Widow or Hawkeye. If his webreach those objects it will, but he has an R2-based swinging mechanic that will work even in open fields and as such, you won’t see him running on the ground much to get around.
His story here is being told through cutscenes and dialogue, but he does not have special zones or super unique missions created just for him, making this a smaller scale “hero event” that will be less than what we saw from Hawkeye or Kate Bishop. Makes sense, given that this is PlayStation-only. When I asked if they’d use this tactic to get out more heroes more quickly in the future, Crystal Dynamics said they would absorb feedback about how this goes and act accordingly.