Summary
- The first Spider-Man game had flaws, including repetitive side activities and uninteresting boss battles, but the sequel improves on these issues.
- The game's portrayal of cops and law enforcement is surprising, with a neoliberal perspective that sees them as innately good and deserving of protection.
- The sequel takes a stronger approach by minimizing police involvement and focusing on Spider-Man as a vigilante who takes justice into his own hands without relying on the police, resulting in a more impactful narrative.
I loved 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Insomniac's first go at 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Spider-Man, but the spider caught a few flies in the ointment. The open world side activities were extremely typical of the genre, and became reductive by the end. Boss battles were thrown at you in quick succession towards the end of the game, and felt less interesting as a result. The map also felt too compact at times, especially as you zipped around from side mission to side mission. The sequel tweaks all of these issues for the better, as you might expect. But the most surprising difference is the attitude 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Spider-Man 2 has towards cops.
In the first game, we initially get a tease that there might be a touch of the radical about this tale. Spider-Man fig൩hts Kingpin, but in doing so discovers part of the NYPD is on his payroll. Massive corruption explicitly linking law enforcement to mob rule, and then the game forgets about it. They get put away, jus🍎t a few bad apples. The rest of the bunch remains unspoiled. For the rest of the game, Spider-Man is in constant communication with the police via Captain Yuri, adopts his Spider-Cop persona regularly, and even fixes police surveillance towers so he can benefit from them snooping on citizens.
It's Time For Insomniac To Explore The Weirder Side Of Spider-Man
There's so much more to Spiꦚder-Man's lore than what we've seen in games and movies so far, and it's 𒁃time for Insomniac to get weird.
168澳洲幸运5开奖网:This neoliberal attitude, which sees the police as an innate force for good who must be protected and grown in order to best keep everyone else safe, permeates through the game. Spider-Man calls street level drug dealers his least♓ favourite type of criminals, even as he deals with deranged scientists who build massive vulture wings f𒈔or themselves as they destroy buildings. Sure, using the power of your inner demons to blow up the town hall and kill innocent bystanders is bad, but that guy has a dime bag of weed on him!
Most main missions in the first game end with Spider-Man leaving baddies webbed up, ready to be arrested. Peter Parker is a vigilante who takes the law into his own hands, deals out justice where it is needed rather than where the system wanted, and has a solemn vow never to kill. He sho🌳uld not like the NYPD all that much. And before we get into the idea that Spider-Man is apolitical, his defining feature is that he is poor, and is often used to highlight the inequalities of the city.
What's more, the developers agree. Insomniac has said th⛎at copaganda was not the inten🤪t in the first game, and that's why the sequel is so refreshing. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Spider-Man: Miles Morales, the 1.5 game between the two main titles, leaves police out of the picture almost entirely, even as Miles talks about his late father who died in the line of duty as a police officer. But if Miles' game avoids the issue, Spider-Man 2 confronts it.
Most obviously, this is done through Yuri. Once Spider-Man's woman on the inside, she has left the police force to become a vigilante herself 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:under the moniker Wraith. This is set up with further corruption in Spider-Man's DLC packs, and is established in the comics themselves. While the plan was likely always to move from Yuri to Wraith, it's generous to suggest the game's attitude to cops was a bait and switch scenario. More likely, the first game tried to write Spider-Man as a good person, and working with law enforcement (while hating drug dealers) was an easy way to do that. The sequel takes a much harder path of establishing Spidey's goodness without the handy dandy boys in blue, and the results are so much stronger.
Police featuring in the game at all is extremely rare, and when they do it's only in situations where their absence would be weird - when a building is destroyed, there's gonna be a cop nearby scratching their head wondering what to do. But neither Peter nor Miles have much communication with them, instead talking to the Fire Chief when they need a link to the more grounded emergency services.
Even the attitude to crimes is markedly different too. Not only are the quips about drug dealers gone, but most of the crimes we interfere in either involve reckless driving or regular citizens being beaten up. In the latter case, rather than fleeing when the punches stop, we gather up the victim and take them to hospital. We are the ones who serve and protect, not some hotshot with a gun. There's even one story where we see someone doing something illegal and drop in to warn them they should stop before the cops come, rather than exacting punishment on lawbreakers. The police surveillance is gone too, replaced by an opt-in app service to call for help, although the way this is delivered is a bit of a preachy overcorrection, with Peter explaining that spying is wrong.
There's no outward criticism of the police that goes beyond this remark that the first game's way of doing things was bad, and the corruption within the force remains an abandoned story thread, continued in spirit by Wraith. But there is a concerted effort to address the undercurrent of Back the Blue in the first game, with uncritical cop worship a far more loaded issue now than it was in 2018. Spider-Man 2 is a rare case of being able to say something while actually saying nothing, and the silence around police in the game is deafening.