If someone asks you to name the best Spider-Man game of all time, you don’t need an uncanny, prickling spider-sense to intuit the answer. Unless the new PS4-exclusive blockbuster bash-em-up manages to set some stratospheric new benchmark – and since developers Insomniac have boldly messed with the classic costume design, they must be fairly confident – the answer will forever be 2004’s Spider-Man 2.

It may have technically been a tie-in to the second Tobey Maguire movie but it felt more Spidey than Raimi, the first game to truly grasp that the essence of the character lay not in lightning-fast brawling combos or gumming up enemies with web-balls but by simply dropping Peter Parker into a New York City sand-and-skybox and gifting him the web-slinging skills to hurtle through, over, round and up its vertiginous skyscraper topography. The retrospective write-ups are as glowing as an irradiated arachnid, and rightly so.

So Spider-Man 2 is top of the heap and sometimes it really does look like a heap. There have been a ton of discarded or half-hearted Spidey games and it feels like I’ve played every single one, from all the Lego Marvel games to chunky co-op brawler Spider-Man: Friend or Foe. All the various installments that fail to meet Spider-Man 2’s gold standard risk composting into one amorphous blob of red-and-blue tights and Stan Lee vocal cameos.

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Source: Eurogamer Web history: a lifetime of playing Spider-Man