Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered PC Review

Sony’s stance on the PC has been curious, to say the least. Seemingly stuck in the past by insisting that first-party games will be exclusive to the PS5, then grudgingly saying that they will port the games to PC, but only after a “suitable amount of time” has passed from initial release on console. Despite that reluctance, Sony has poured substantial resources into the efforts so far. Having played the God of War PC port and now the Spider-Man Remastered port. I can honestly say that Sony has set the high-water mark for console ports. The purchase of Nixxes has created a sleeping giant in the PC gaming world.

In terms of the story, nothing has changed from the console versions. The main quest line is an amazing tour de force through Spider-Man’s New York City. Fighting classic villains like the Vulture, Elektro and Doc Ock is an Amazing experience filled with Spectacular acrobatics and action that puts you in the costume. The open world is one of the most vibrant, lived-in worlds in gaming. It’s something that we first saw in AC: Unity and sadly not again until this game. Bystanders call out to Spidey as he swings past, ask for his autograph and generally feel like real people going on with their lives while they fight the bad guys.

Sadly the open world suffers from a similar affliction of bloat as the other games. Searching for backpack collectables, completing research challenges as well as Taskmaster challenges and the most egregious of all having to not only clear Fisk strongholds but to redo them but with Negative Man minions just makes the game outside of the main quest feel like so much busy work. This isn’t to say that the design of this busy work is terrible it is just busy work that reminds you that you are playing a video game.

But this is not why you clicked on this review. Technically this port is simply near perfect. Running on what is admittedly a fairly high spec system (Ryzen 9-5900X, 16GB DDR4-3600MHz RAM and a 3070Ti) at Ultra settings with Ray Tracing set to the maximum settings, the game averaged 120 FPS. This is of course with Nvidia’s DLSS 2.0 enabled. The game though does not maintain a stable framerate, when swinging through New York, which is still the most fun you can have travelling between waypoints, the frame rate will often drop to 80 FPS. That is still a very high framerate but drops like this are noticeable.

Switching Ray Tracing off the framerate jumps to an average of around 140 FPS and to be honest Ray Tracing is nice when you first switch it on and take the time to look at the reflections in the glass skyscrapers of NYC so if you want higher FPS then switching off RT is advisable. But even with RT off, the framerate isn’t stable, and you will experience consistent drops and fluctuations depending on the action on screen.

The framerate drops while noticeable did not affect my enjoyment of the game and did not result in me dying unnecessarily. However, for anyone who is a stickler for stable high frame rates, this will be something that you need to take note of. However, do not take this as a sign that the game is not worth your time as it is one of the best games on any platform in recent years.

The game also does have some very, very minor bugs, but nothing game-breaking. Most often I would go on a backpack hunt, but the items would not spawn. A simple restart would sort that out if that was what I wanted to concentrate on, but if I found something else to do I could just carry on.

Finally, we must talk about the most anticipated feature of any PC port – mods. As soon as the game was released modders got to work. The first mod I downloaded was a simple costume mod to give Peter a black costume. But since then amazing mods allowing to play as a ninja turtle, the Kingpin and most importantly Kermit the Frog. Watching a frog puppet beat up the Rhino is something that has to be experienced. For the more technically inclined there are full texture packs available and some other more esoteric mods available.

Spider-Man Remastered for the PC is a game that should be in all gamer’s libraries, it is the best comic book game out. Yes better than the Arkham series. Technically the game may have some minor glitches, but that does not detract from the experience. It honestly is the best time you can have in an action game.

This review was written by Lynley James.