The One Feature All Spider-Man Games Get WRONG

Nobody Gets Wall Crawling Stealth Right

Wall crawling being left in the cold suck as well because, for the most part, it and stealth sections should be a match made in heaven. Most action games have stealth sequences these days, but they're often not implemented particularly... organically.

Take the Arkham series for instance: its stealth was industry leading, and yet was let down because Batman needed a convenient set of gargoyles to be in every room for the mechanics to work as intended. You might even say they were the best gadget he ever needed.

Spidey doesn't need this kind of gimmicky level design to open up stealth though, because he can just web to any vantage point and stick to it if he wants. Some games have capitalised on that freedom well: The Amazing Spider-Man had pretty good stealth, and webbing people from a vantage point was as freeform as it should be. Sadly, what let that title down was the execution, with repeated animations, wonky enemy A.I. and a lack of challenge letting the idea down.

There hasn't been a game to properly run with that system and give it AAA production values. Spider-Man PS4 has stealth sequences in the same vein, but they don't base them around the wall crawling. Instead, you're doing the Batman thing, perching yourself on lampposts, ledges, and other pre-determined vantage points, but why?

Obviously, the reason is that it's a lot of work to make a compelling and challenging stealth section when the player has such freedom of movement, but that doesn't mean it's impossible or not worth the effort. It's kind of the equivalent of when cover shooters used to design their environments around chest-high barriers. If there were lots of these conveniently scattered around, you knew you were in for a firefight. You can spot the artifice.

Again, not capitalising on the freedom of wall crawling during stealth doesn't mean these sections kill their respective games, only that there's untapped potential there.