Ultimate Spider-Man
Spider-Man games don’t exactly have the best track record, but this one thankfully stands out among the best. Like other games in the franchise, it’s an open world title, but it manages to avoid the one pitfall that all future games didn’t, which is that the web-shooting and traversal was incredibly simple. It genuinely feels like you’re swinging through New York as the Friendly Neighborhood hero, and it’s easy to just get lost and swing around the entire city.
Another issue that the game thankfully sidesteps is in its story, which exists in the vague time frame of the Ultimate Spider-Man comics. It perhaps relies a little too hard on fans to have read that particular comic arc about Venom, but the dual storyline between Spidey and Venom works and shows how distinct the two are from each other, both in their background and in gameplay. The game’s tagline is “Be Legendary, Be Predatory, Be Both”, and the game definitely succeeds on that front, particularly with Venom. It’s appropriately creepy to have to constantly leech people to survive, and touring the city as a giant black mass of tendrils is definitely jarring when you just get done playing as Spider-Man. These two may be night and day, but the game provides the same amount of fun and awesome when you play as either.
