Spider-Man PS4 Turf Wars Review: 3 Ups & 4 Downs

Ups...

3. Insomniac's Storytelling Continues To Be Top-Notch

Insomniac

Just as Insomniac's narrative team knocked it out of the park when it came to the main game's story, they've done so again here. Whereas The Heist drew most of its strength from the dynamic shared between Spider-Man and Black Cat, Turf Wars instead draws from the relationship between the wall-crawler and Yuri Watanabe, who took on a supporting role in the main game. Yuri gets plenty to do, and easily emerges as the DLC's most compelling figure by the time the credits start to roll.

But first, a quick retrospective; Turf Wars picks up shortly after The Heist, with Felicia Hardy's fate still unknown, and with New York's Maggia crime families engaged in all-out warfare on the city's streets. At the centre of the carnage is Hammerhead, who is looking to consolidate his grip on NYC's criminal underworld with a whole new arsenal of stolen Sable tech, with Black Cat having scuppered his attempts to blackmail his rivals into submission.

Spider-Man did, of course, venture into dark territory in its main story, but things get even more sinister here. Hammerhead is a truly ruthless adversary, and seeing Spidey take on the mob serves as a nice counterweight to the more fantastical nature of the main game's plot.

Characters do, however, get left behind in the wake of Hammerhead's carnage. MJ is restricted to a few brief phone calls, as is Miles, but the story remains captivating all the same.

Advertisement
Content Producer/Presenter

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.