The One Feature All Spider-Man Games Get WRONG

The Camera Issue

First off, obviously some of the games have done this better than others, and it's not like the system hasn't changed since Spidey first awkwardly shimmied up a wall on the Atari 2600.

The first 3D game on PS1, for instance, gave a lot of love to this ability, and laid the groundwork for a bunch of Spidey games to come. With platforming being all the rage back in those days, wall crawling was an essential part of the character's arsenal, and with a limited amount of web swings to get around, navigating the world on your hands and feet became a main source of gameplay.

This made for some pretty cool moments, such as the levels that had you moving up a skyscraper, avoiding those machine gun spotlights PS1 titles loved so much. There was also some rudimentary stealth involved as well, with players thwipping up to the ceiling and taking out guards from below without being seen.

It was a pretty good start, but with it came issues that developers still struggle to overcome to this day. For one, anything other than a flat surface would have Spidey awkwardly shuffling and spinning around trying to compute how he could possibly get over a centimetre-large lip on a skyscraper.

However, the camera was the biggest hurdle. After all, there's no point giving you a full view of Spidey on the ceiling if you can't see the criminals shooting you from below. To accommodate this, early games often swung the camera outside the map to a top-down view. While this aided clarity, it became a total immersion breaker, as parts of the environment became transparent, Spidey himself appeared to be crawling on air, and the barriers of the entire level were shown to the player.

The issue of how to control the camera during wall crawling is something all developers working on these games have had to battle with. During the 2000s, even into the 2010s, a bewildering camera was one of the most common criticisms in gaming. Hell, even regular action titles struggled to make one work without it freaking out and giving you a view of inside someone's skull, and those usually followed a character on ground level.

It's probably no surprise keeping this in check for a hero with much more manoeuvrability was a logistical nightmare.