Spider-Man PS4: 10 Things It Must Learn From Batman Arkham
10. Make Stealth Feel Challenging
Insomniac
When Rocksteady unleashed Arkham Asylum on the masses in 2009, they did so with the mantra of making the player feel like they were genuinely Batman.
Combat was fast, frenetic, and gloriously choreographed, spawning a whole host of copycats in the years following. Stealth, on the other hand, seemed to actually suffer from Rocksteady's mantra, with any and all challenge having been completely lost in the studio's attempts to make players feel like the ultimate 'invisible predator'.
To a degree, this makes sense. Batman is the literal king of the shadows, and in capturing the essence of the character it made sense to make him feel particularly powerful. Those stealth sections just seemed to lack the nuance of a Splinter Cell or Metal Gear however, and with Spidey's PS4 game said to feature stealth sections for both MJ and Peter, one can only hope they offer players a genuine challenge.
Superhero games should always empower players but it shouldn't come at the expense of threat. There needs to be risk to match the reward - something the Arkham games largely failed to do over the course of their four entries.
WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well.
In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.
