Marvel’s Spider-Man has a lot of antiquated systems that already felt dated back in 2018. Its old-school checklist approach to open world design has been largely supplanted - Ubisoft games notwithstanding - by more thought♛ful gameplay and its monotonous busy work i.e., catch the pigeons, find the backpacks, take the pictures, is the very definition of filler. As much as there is to love about Spider-Man’s crisp animations, fluid mobility, and exceptional web-slinging,🦋 there’s nearly just as much to criticize about, well, everything else.
But if I had to pick onꦗe Spider-Man gripe to groan about for roughly 500 words, it would have to be, without contest, the radial menu, AKA the pause button that ruins every fight in the game. This momentum killer of a mechanic is by far Spider-Man’s most outdated mechanic, and the fact that it was never altered or improved through multiple rereleases is baffling.
The briefest summary: Spider-Man unlocks eight different gadgets and web attacks throughout the game that he can use in combat. His Web Shooters are the default gadget, ꦏand any time you want to switch to a different weapon, like Impact Webs or Spider-Drones, you have to hold down R1 and select the gadget you want from a radial menu by tilting the🧜 right analog stick. While you’re choosing your gadget, time will slow to a crawl. But as soon as you release R1 time will resume and your new gadget will be selected.
Radial menus have been around almost as long as controllers. They’re frequently used in RPGs to simplify menu options. In Mass Effect, the radial menu allows you to select weapons and direct your squad mates to move💧 or use abilities, while Fallout uses radial menus for inventory and for navigating crafting menus on the fly. Radial menus are faster and easier to n🥃avigate than pause menus, and they can help players avoid spending too much time outside of the game. The problem with Spider-Man’s radial menus is that they’re only used in combat where the acceptable amount of outside-the-game-time is precisely zero.
The joy of fighting mobs of enemies as Spider-Man is the ability to mix your attacks up into never-ending combo strings. With enough skill, a warehouse full 💧of armed goons can be eliminated without Spidey ever taking a single hit. Spider-Man can instantly close the distance between himself and any enemy, use the environment to take out multiple targets, and even turn their own weapons against them. Combat is fast, improvisational, and filled with little animation flourishes that give each encounter a dance-like quality that is uniquely Spider-Man. Unfortunately the pace and momentum of combat is entirely soiled by the constant need to pause the game and rota🐼te through your gadgets.
Everytime you want to switch off your default Web Shooters, you need to pause the game, pick a new one, and then try to resume the fight seamlessly. Instead of reacting and improvising your moves, you’re forced to mentally buffer multiple inputs in a row. While it won’t break your combo meter to switch gadgets, it does break the flow of combat significantly. The interruption is particularly frustrating if you struggle with decoding, because the radial menu represents each gadget only as a symbol. 🤡By the time I’ve identified which gadget I want to use, I often have to reorient myself in the battle. As cool as it would be to fire off Concusive Blasts and Web Bombs as you pummel your way through enemies, combat is a lot more satisfying when you just ignore gadgets completely.
The frustrating thing about the gadget problem is that it has already been solved by other games. I𓆏n the Arkham series, Batman has just as many gadgets as Spider-Man, but you never once have to꧟ pause and select them from a menu. Using L1 as a modifier along with different combinations of face buttons, Batman can seamlessly weave all of his different gadgets into his combos. I’ll never understand why Spider-Man doesn’t work the same way.
That’s not the only solution to the problem either. Just off the top of my head, I can think of several more. Instead of defaulting back to the Web Shooters when a gadget runs out of ammo, it could just cycle clockwise around the gadget wheel so you always have something new equipped. You could swipe in different directions on the touchpad to automatically equip different gadgets without pausing the game. The L1 button isn’t even used for anything! Tapping it could cycle through each gadget, or you could hold it and have each gadget a🐬ssigned to a different button. I’d even take a horizontal menu you can cycle through with the left and right D-pad buttons, which also aren’t used.
There are so many ways to swap gadgets, but Insomniac only offered us the worst one. Even after a remaster, a mini-sequel🌳, and a PC port, the radial menu is still the only way to swap gadgets. Modders may end up being 𓂃my only saving grace for now, but before Spider-Man 2 comes out I need to get this message out: death to the radial menu.