Yeah copies in the wild doesn't mean much this far from release. Unlikely it has even hit shops yet.
That said, I played it at Gamescom on Thursday like the poster above.
My excitement initially went from 9 to 6: swinging felt weird. Heavy. Slow. Maybe even rubber banded.
But after some more tutorials and working out the details of the movement system , and how to harness all your options (Web leaping, timing jumps, corner comboing, etc) my hype shot up again.
This is a fascinating game because they haven't just mechanised spiderman's movement, they've mechanised the world and how you interact with it. Every rooftop, ledge, corner and fire escape becomes this opportunity to improvise and gain speed. You have to learn that you can't just build momentum by swinging; you have to build momentum using your legs and the environment. Once that clicks, goddamn does it feel right. You start moving quickly. It feels fast and it feels like your channeling Spidey's energy. It feels and looks almost like a moving comic when you get it right.
Combat is very scrappy but in a fun way. I took a lot of hits because I was trying to use as many options as I could. You definitely get these fantastic sandbox moments where a stray kick sends a guy off a building, where you swing a barrel to hit someone and knock a gun out of someone else's hand (I swear this happened but may be wrong), where using a gadget interacts with an object you didn't expect and it takes out a second goon you weren't focusing on.
All this was in a quick 20 minute demo. I'm VERY interested to see how it develops, because we already had so many abilities and this must have been in the first 2-3 hours of the game.
I managed to get to the level in... A bank or something, but my demo ended just as I entered. Instead I just did the optional enemy outpost and a couple of crimes and got better at swinging.
Playing this after finishing TASM2 a couple of weeks ago was absolutely liberating. In TASM2 the constant loading screens and small scope of most fights was infuriating. But here my favourite moment was taking down some guys robbing a clothing store (or something). I swung down seamlessly, took down one with a surprise attack, all the goons shouted and started firing, there were loads of pedestrians around and they were scattering and shouting stuff at me when I started laying into these fools. It felt amazing, especially whenever I booted baddies into windows or objects that would break.
Lol
