In 2017, fans were pleased to see their favorite wall-crawler web sling through New York in Spider-Man's first gameplay trailer. We got some new gameplay at Sony's E3 2018 conference, and Spidey has never looked better. The team behind Sunset Overdrive have delivered a game where Spider-Man's full acrobatic prowess can be put to good use. A cinematic trailer starts out with Spider-Man approaching an enormous prison in the water by riding on the side of a helicopter. The cutscene transitions into a combat sequence where he fights escaped prisoners just outside of their cells. Much like the Batman: Arkham games, Spidey seamlessly moves from enemy to enemy, but while also acrobatically jumping off walls and through enemies' legs. From here, Spidey moves upstairs to go into another room. He spots Rhino and Electro before he platforms his way through the area. He's then grabbed by Scorpion and thrown, leading to another combat sequence against prisoners. He rapidly swings around the area as the camera moves around in unusual fashion. Spider-Man uses his web to take shields away from some enemies, which he slams into one to knock him out. The action then shifts outside as he rapidly moves through a rainy area. He wallruns and swings around before again encountering the villains. While confined, the area outside the facility looks to be quite large, and Spider-Man is able to swing around the area. He's warned that many of his key foes have escaped, and later he encounters them all on a helipad, including Mister Negative. A cutscene sees Spider-Man facing off against them all. He's nearly defeated, only for him to be saved by someone off-screen. Unfortunately, we don't get to see who it is before the trailer ends, although there is a noise that suggests it might be Miles Morales. Spider-Man is scheduled to release on PlayStation 4 on September 7. If you preorder the game, you'll get instant access to the Iron Spider outfit that Peter wears in Avengers: Infinity War.<doc-sep>SPIDER-MAN has quickly become one of the highlights of E3 2018 as the much-anticipated game debuted brand new footage. Here is everything you need to kn0w about when it's released and the lowdown on the story's villains and the gameplay demo... 4 Spider-Man swings on to the PS4 in September Credit: Marvel When is Spider-Man PS4's release date in the UK? Sony has confirmed that Spider-Man will be released on September 7, 2018. The game is a PS4 exclusive and developers Insomniac Games angered some fans when it announced that Spider-Man would save enemies rather than allowing them to die. The game stars a more seasoned Peter Parker who will need to balance his chaotic personal life with his career and will not be based on any existing story. It is available to pre-order now from Game and Tesco. 4 The collectors' edition will include a post-launch DLC series with the anti-hero Black Cat Credit: Marvel Is there a collectors edition? Spider-Man also comes with two collectors editions, a digital deluxe version, and a physical collector's edition. The digital deluxe includes the post-launch DLC series Marvel’s Spider-Man: The City That Never Sleeps. The three extra levels will each include a new storyline, added suits and the first chapter has already been titled the Heist and will involve Black Cat. An added physical collector's edition will include all of the above, as well as a steelbook case, a mini art book, and a Spider-Man statue. 4 Mister Negative is a lesser-known villain who was showcased in the trailers Credit: Marvel Who are the villains? Spiderman's E3 footage introduced audiences to a few of Spider-Man's worst enemies, six of them in fact, the same size as the infamous Sinister Six. Electro, Rhino, Scorpion, The Vulture and the not so familiar Mr Negative all teamed up to attack Spidey before its revealed they are working for a mysterious sixth benefactor. All villains bar Mr Negative have made feature film appearances and in the comics, Electro and Vulture were founding members of the Sinister Six. What we know about the last villain is he supplied each member with new tech-enhance super suits and a wounded Spider-Man recognises him. The two most obvious choices are Doctor Octopus and Green Goblin, who have yet to be mentioned thus far and have both led the Six before. 4 Spider-Man will seemingly have to contend with a variation of the infamous Sinister Six Credit: MARVEL Latest Releases ZONING IN Huge Call of Duty ‘1980s’ update adds Die Hard’s John McClane and Rambo DUTY CALLS New Call of Duty could be set in 'alternate 1950s dimension where WW2 rages on' CRIME TIME GTA 5 finally coming to PS5 and Xbox but PlayStation owners get exclusive bonus GAME TIME Call of Duty Season 4 release date – when does Warzone Season 3 end? GAME OVER Call of Duty bans half a MILLION players from Warzone in major crackdown GAME ON Sony making 25 NEW PS5 games – including Horizon, God of War and Gran Turismo Is there a gameplay demo? The game was first unveiled just over two years ago, at E3 2016 and since then, three trailers have swung onto the internet. Fans have had to wait until E3 2018 for PS4 to release the first gameplay demo. It showed the web-slinger and his cop pal Yuri Watanabe arrive during a breakout on Marvel's premier floating prison, the Raft. The combat seems to be taking cues from the critically-acclaimed Batman: Arkham series with environmental and counter-strikes appearing essential.<doc-sep>The new Spider-Man on PS4 features a humongous and surprisingly detailed Manhattan. But how close does this open world come to recreating the real New York City? We spent an hour with Sony’s E3 2018 Spider-Man demo on a mission to find out. The map includes the entirety of Manhattan, and though the demo limited travel to Greenwich Village, the East Village, the Manhattan Bridge, Chinatown, Midtown East, Murray Hill and Gramercy, we got a good idea of the heavy lifting and research that went into crafting this open world. Spider-Man’s world captures the idea of New York rather than the actual place. Specifically, it looks like an oddly clean version of the 1970s Manhattan seen in Scorsese movies — a city riddled with both brick buildings and crime, but devoid of litter, graffiti and post-9/11 police presence. The various districts have their own handful of iconic buildings and landmarks, but many blocks throughout the city bounce between Hell’s Kitchen’s brownstones and bodegas, and the Upper East Side’s gaudy shops and towering condos. The city has a number of hyper-specific recreations, though they’re often slightly out of place and askew. NYU is mostly condensed to a campus placed just north of Washington Square Park, with the Stern School of Business (called Empire State School of Business) and the Tisch School of the Arts (Empire State School of Arts) built around the least NYU thing imaginable: a quad. I suppose ESU is now doubling as both NYU and Columbia University, moving Peter Parker’s college downtown. How the designers handle NYU’s sprawling campus speaks to their general approach to Manhattan: condensing neighborhoods into dense pockets of familiarity separated by more generic city-space. The Village’s Grace Church rests near Herald Square, which is curiously south of a green space that seems to double as Union Square and Madison Square Park. Chinatown covers a vast segment of the map’s east side, stretching from the Manhattan Bridge (with an archway and colonnade) to the United Nations, displacing most of the East Village and Gramercy. The blocks are peppered with signs for Peking duck and tea, along with the game’s take on Starbucks, which appears to be as omnipresent as its real-world counterpart. Fittingly, close to the Manhattan Bridge, streets are filled with slow, congested traffic. The instinct is to swing above the cars, but I took a silly pleasure in hopping from the roof of one cab to the next. My favorite recreation is the Empire State Building, which may be the first take on the iconic structure in games that manages to capture the appropriate scale and awe. It takes a good deal of time to climb the facade — and you must climb it, because there are no other nearby buildings tall enough from which to swing. Perched atop its spire, you can see the entirety of the open world, lit beautifully in a permanent golden magic hour. Along with the spire on the Chrysler Building, it’s a good location to spot some of the other additions: the Freedom Tower, Madison Square Garden, the new and hideous glass high-rises that pepper the entire city, and a Central Park lush with fall foliage. On the Upper East Side is one thing you absolutely won’t find in the real Manhattan: Avengers Tower, marked with a big, red “A.” It doesn’t look like you can visit New York’s other boroughs, but they look nice from atop the Empire State Building. Two Long Island ferries float on the East River, and airplanes zip toward JFK. Jumping off the building and swinging just before Spidey careens into the pavement, you hear the traffic get closer. It’s a really fantastic detail, showcasing the unique perspective afforded to Spider-Man, a hero who can literally leap from impossibly secluded spots above the city onto the crowded streets below. Of course, when you leap from hundreds of feet into a crowded intersection, everybody reacts like it’s business as usual. New York City! On the ground level, you’ll spot lots of references to Spider-Man canon, like the Oscorp building, and Fisk and McClintock construction signage. But I really appreciated the smaller details. Spider-Man plushies fill the racks in a GameStop-like shop called Gamer Paradise; a giant toy greets passersby from the window. A stage in midtown is called the Auerbach Theater, possibly named after Jeffrey Auerbach, who served as a consulting producer on the ill-fated musical Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark. So sure, it’s not a perfect recreation of New York, but it’s a fun one, like a remix of the cultural idea of Manhattan from 1970 to today. Both familiar and unfamiliar, crime-ridden and impossibly clean. I suspect it’s been made by people who don’t love Manhattan so much as they love the home of Peter Parker. As most New Yorkers living in the other boroughs will tell you, that’s just fine: They’d rather not go into the city anyway.<doc-sep>Screenshot : Sony ( Spider-Man ) The New York Insomniac created for Spider-Man is just about everything I’ve hoped for since the 2001 Sam Raimi movie with Tobey Maguire. The buildings are all very tall, divided between glass skyscrapers and old brick high rises. In between, there are alleyways bathed in the warm glow of a setting sun that never seems to actually go down, at least during the demo. It’s like a group of developers looked at the poster for the 2001 movie and decided to make a whole city out of it. Advertisement The biggest challenge for anyone making a Spider-Man game is nailing how web slinging works. Treyarch’s run of Spider-Man games in the early aughts did a decent job at the time. The developer created a handful of games including 2005’s Ultimate Spider-Man where running off a rooftop and webbing to the nearest street light felt good enough to make up for the otherwise boring New York sandbox. I’m not convinced that Insomniac’s open world will be able to hold a candle to its contemporaries like Grand Theft Auto V or The Witcher 3. Occasionally I high-fived some strangers on the street or broke up a robbery in progress, but I didn’t have much opportunity to interact outside of set missions. What Spider-Man does for web slinging as Spidey, however, really does feel like something special, on the level of what Rocksteady Studios did for melee combat with the Arkham series. As I swung from one building to another down Broadway, little icons for points I could web to constantly popped on and off the screen. At first it seemed like I was supposed to be picking out the individual ones I wanted by trying to center them in my camera and then shoot a web, but movement quickly became more intuitive and less cerebral. Within minutes, I could more or less feel my way down a street or over the top of a smaller building because of how much work the game seemed to be doing behind the scenes to anticipate where I was trying to go. The R2 button would shoot a longer web that Spider-Man would then hold onto and use to build up momentum through a long, arched swing. The X button shot shorter, more direct webs at nearby points to simply propel me along at the same relative height. There’s also web-ziplining and a maneuver where Spider-Man shoots dual webs to lock onto a fixed point— say, the top of the Empire State building—and then pull himself up on top of it. But the short and long webs appeared to be the main tools for traversing the section of midtown I was confined to. It felt simple and elegant, with the game doing most of the work of figuring out what I wanted to do based off only a few inputs. The ability to throw my weight slightly to the right or left during the fall or rise of a web-swing helped me feel in control despite how uninvolved in most of the work I actually was. Like getting into the swing of Arkham’s freeflow combat, where button mashing becomes a detriment and it only takes a few presses and slight nudges to the analog stick to channel a kick or counter-punch, less felt like more when gliding from 20th Street to 30th in just a few seconds. There was only one place the illusion of being Spider-Man broke down, and that was in what happens with all that web-slinging momentum when it crashes against an immovable object, like a steel beam on a construction site or a taxi cab on the street. The answer is: nothing. Instead of colliding with the side of a building during a poorly-chosen swing, Spider-Man immediately goes into a run alongside it. Instead of crashing through the top of a car while plummeting in free fall toward the pavement, Spider-Man’s momentum dissipates violently a moment before making contact. It’s an understandable concession given how punishing sloppy web-slinging could otherwise turn out to be, but it occasionally shatters the believability of a system that other times was incredibly good at convincing me I was undergoing the same torrent of g-forces as the superhero I was controlling on screen. There was no capture allowed at our demo, but it loosely followed Sony’s E3 gameplay demo trailer above. Combat in the game was fun, but less impressive than the movement. Spider-Man can punch, dodge, and shoot webs at various objects in the vicinity to swing them around at enemies and bring them crashing down over their heads. The one boss fight I played was against Shocker (who was robbing a bank, because that’s something supervillains still do in comic books), and it mainly consisted of dodging his attacks until an opening appeared for me to smash him with some nearby rubble. It felt staged, and a stark departure from the free flow of the rest of the demo. Hopefully isn’t representative of the rest of the game’s boss encounters, which, based on last night’s trailer, there appear to be a ton of. Advertisement Spider-Man also has a small arsenal of gadgets and an ultimate he can unleash after filling up a combo meter that sprayed web at everyone in the vicinity, doing some damage and temporary restraining them. Neither of these moves really changed up the rhythm I immediately fell into of webbing people in the face, pulling myself toward them, punching them a few times, and then dodging overhead or through their legs before the next person was able to attack me. Pulling in random objects like oil drums and piles of rebar to swing around was fun and useful, as was being able to fling grenades back at nearby mobs, but none of it felt quite as good as just traveling around. I was always eager to dispatch whatever goons I was fighting in order to get back to flying through the streets of New York.<doc-sep>
The biggest surprise of Insomniac Games’ Spider-Man is that it makes you feel like a superhero within seconds. Other video game developers have tried to capture the feel of swinging through Manhattan as Peter Parker’s alter ego. Some have come close. Most have landed on the other end of the quality line, somewhere between forgettable and infamous. We can’t speak to the entire game, but when it comes to instantly being the webslinger, this Spider-Man bests them all. Yes, all of them. The feel of zipping through the city seems so effortless, so right, that it’s a trial to spot what Insomniac has done to capture it. After an hour with the game, I have a few guesses. The controls, for one, are simple to the point of minimalism. When I sat down for the demo at Sony’s E3 2018 press event, someone from Insomniac’s team gave me only one instruction: “R2 is the gas.” The right trigger is responsible for most of Spidey’s traversal. Away from buildings, the button slings him from skyscraper to skyscraper. Against walls, it lets him run horizontally or vertically, shamelessly defying gravity. Spider-Man doesn’t run out of energy; I know this, because I ran directly up the entire facade of the Empire State Building. Speaking of which, the city captures the idea of Manhattan better than the actual location. For the first half hour, it looked beautiful in a soft blur, passing me in the background. But for the back half hour, I strolled the cities, enjoying polish that doesn’t match Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto 4, but rivals every other open world in terms of detail and character. Anyway, back to the running! If you stop running at the wall, Spidey automatically sticks in place in that classic Spider-Man position, ready to slowly crawl in any direction. It’s surprising the first time this happens; the game makes the complicated part of Spider-Man — hurtling along the avenue at 50 mph — so easy that you forget that Spider-Man spends most of his time inching up a skyscraper to spy on some midlevel criminals. Of course, the game does slow down, like when Spidey needs to scout enemies from a distance. I get the sense that someone better at the game could meticulously, quietly, efficiently take down henchmen, but that was not my experience. My fights were sloppy, nothing like the demo shown at last year’s E3 — despite one battle being set in what appeared to be the exact same location. And yet, I think I prefer the fights being something of a debacle, sharing some of the slapstick humor that elevated the recent Spider-Man: Homecoming. My Spider-Man is just how I imagined I would be in the suit: accidentally covering a room in web, smashing everything in sight and somehow saving the day despite myself. Combat is straightforward, borrowing gleefully from arcade beat-’em-ups, rather than the “Batman-style combat” that has begun to feel a bit contrived after a decade of sequels and copycats. One button punches, another shoots your selected web attack, another dodges. One shoulder button selects your special web power (tripwires, web bomb), while another unleashes it. I favor using environmental attacks. The world is full of bricks, car doors, barrels, scaffolding and other New York City construction materials and debris, just waiting to be weaponized with a comically elaborate flourish that terminates on an enemy’s skull. The style meshes well with the boss fight in the demo, in which Spider-Man goes toe-to-toe with Shocker in a bank lobby. The baddie fires beams of electricity and radiates shock waves. Spider-Man plays a game of The Floor Is Lava to avoid the attacks, and uses heavy objects and debris that have fallen from the ceiling to hobble his adversary and then pulverize him. Like the combat style, it’s refreshingly old-fashioned, a choreographed battle that captures an older generation. That’s how it feels to play an hour of Spider-Man. Slinging it is a bit predictable and easy. It’s also a lot of fun. You know, sort of like I imagine the life of a superhero. Spider-Man is set for release on PS4 on Sept. 7.