Marvel’s Spider-Man: The Heist Review – A Swing and a Miss

Marvel’s Spider-Man: The Heist Review

Spider-Man’s new DLC called “The City That Never Sleeps” kicks off with The Heist: the first chapter out of three that pursues the storyline of the sexy and mysterious Black Cat. While its biggest draw is that it’s, of course, more Spider-Man, I found that it was little more than a small continuation of the main game with cut-and-dried features, anticlimactic missions, and a relatively unstimulating plot.

Almost all of the missions center around stealth, with the meat being little more than showing up, fighting a few guys, and then leaving after a few minutes. The enemies are standard thugs, with the new addition of one big, heavy goon with a minigun who defies most of our gadgets. The only mission that felt slightly different than anything before is one where we team up with Black Cat and order her to take down different marked targets quietly, which was a nice idea but really just felt like sitting back and letting someone else do all the work — not my cup of tea when playing as a badass superhero. Overall, the missions feel anticlimactic and standard. There were moments when I finished a short mission and was left wondering what the point of it was in the first place. The DLC lacks a good boss fight or even a mission with new objectives that go beyond the run-of-the-mill combat and stealth ordeals.

More of the Same Old

In addition to doing the main quests, there are a few things you can do on the side. One is to track down paintings hidden around the city, and another is to participate in Screwball challenges — very similar in theory and practice to the Taskmaster challenges of the base game. I found that these challenges were missed opportunities to do something innovative and fresh: her EMP challenges are little more than a reboot of the Taskmaster drone challenges with objectives to sling webs at rather than zones to fly through, and the combat challenges are exactly what you’d expect them to be. The challenge I found most intriguing was the gadget challenge, where you must kill enemies using only two types of gadgets. While this was super fun to do, it’s a shame that there was only one gadget challenge in the entire city. To Screwball’s credit, the Photobomb opportunities sprinkled throughout all of her challenges were pretty amusing to hit.

There are three new suits available in the DLC, but they are solely cosmetic as none of them offer any actual powers. It’s a bit disappointing that even the suit you have to complete every challenge and mission in the DLC to acquire offered no reward other than a standard costume. The suits are okay, but nowhere close to as interesting as some of the ones offered in the main game.

I loved the idea of pursuing Black Cat’s storyline, and while I don’t need much excuse to play more Spider-Man, I didn’t feel like this DLC offered much in the way of excitement or variety. I felt this chapter was unimaginative in its features, and for $10 a pop, I didn’t feel compelled enough to want more. If you’ve platinumed the game and crave a few more hours of gameplay, The Heist does the job just fine. Just don’t expect a wildly stimulating plot or any radical new additions. It’s more of the same, and for some, that’s okay.

***A PS4 review code was provided by the publisher***