In 2018, Insomniac Games impressed us all with the release of Marvel’s Spider-Man for PS4. Even then in its graphically limited, 30FPS form, the game was something special. Now Sony has brought the game to PC, unlocking higher graphics settings, ray tracing, and unlocked frame rates, giving us the smoothest, hi-fi gameplay possible. In today’s KitGuru Games, we’re going to take a look at the PC version to see if it delivers where it counts.

Spider-Man Remastered isn’t really a remaster in the typical sense. Sony has slapped ‘Remastered’ on the PS5 edition of the game, but the only major graphical change here is the addition of ray tracing and for consoles, access to 60FPS gameplay. Sony also changed the model for Peter Parker, but this change also affected the original PS4 release.

Those of you playing the game on PC for the first time don’t have to worry about that. The PC version is highly scalable, so you can run it decently on almost any device – there’s even a dedicated Steam Deck preset, which uses a mix of low settings with dynamic resolution scaling to squeeze out as much performance as possible.

I spent several hours meandering through NYC on a system equipped with an Intel Core i7-8700K, 16GB of RAM, and an RTX 3070 Ti. At 1440p, with high settings across the board, including ray tracing and DLSS in quality mode, I can average around 80FPS with this system and haven’t seen a drop below 60FPS yet. I checked out the Steam Deck preset out of curiosity and those settings allow this system to deliver a true 144Hz experience.

Graphically, the game looks fantastic and you can see some of my favorite screenshots so far in the gallery above. The level of detail in every Spider Suit, all the main character models and throughout the city is very impressive. You get so many opportunities to take incredible screenshots, especially with the photo mode, which allows you to pause the game and fine-tune camera placement, settings, exposure, weather and more so you can get the perfect shot. You can activate this at any time – mid web swing, mid jump, mid battle, so you can take action shots too.

I completed Spider-Man in 2018 when it first came out on PS4. At 30FPS I loved the game, but the latency sometimes made me frustrated with the controls. I replayed the game on PS5 in January of this year, and the jump to 60FPS really made up for that, but I still felt like combat could be smoother.

Now on PC, with an unlocked frame rate, we can control Spider-Man with almost no lag. Mouse and keyboard controls are very responsive in this game, especially in combat. The extra fluidity when you go above 60FPS, coupled with the snappy mouse control, makes combat almost too easy – more on that later.

While combat feels great with a mouse and keyboard, the gamepad experience is best for web swinging. You get more control over the direction of your web swings with an analog stick, rather than holding down Shift and one of the WASD keys to swing on a keyboard.

The move to mouse and keyboard also significantly changes how some actions are performed in the game. Moves and abilities that require a combination of buttons to be activated on a controller are tied to a single key press.

The game is perfectly playable with mouse and keyboard, but the gamepad is still my favorite control method for Spider-Man. The experience is good with both an Xbox gamepad and a DualSense controller, although haptic feedback and rumble effects are much more refined on the DualSense so if you have one I recommend using it but you have to plug it in via USB-C to take advantage of these features. If you’re playing with mouse and keyboard and find one of the button prompts a bit odd, you can re-bind all in-game actions in the settings menu. I’d also recommend trying one of the more difficult mouse and keyboard player problems.

Marvel’s Spider-Man puts you in the shoes of an accomplished Peter Parker, seven years away from Uncle Ben’s death and putting on the suit for the first time. Spider-Man is already an adept crime fighter and known throughout NYC. Right now, he’s trying to balance life as Spider-Man with his life as Peter Parker, helping Aunt May at the local homeless shelter and along with Dr. Octavius ​​works in a laboratory in the city.

There are a few main villains who take the spotlight at different points in the campaign, and as you progress, new enemy factions appear in the city. As for the open world, it’s a typical formula, with side missions, enemy camps, and challenges scattered around the map to keep you busy between missions. If this was Assassin’s Creed I’d roll my eyes, but this is Spider-Man, and that fact alone makes this game inherently more fun.

Spider-Man moves exactly as you would expect him to. In combat, he is constantly on the move, flipping, spinning and weaving around. It’s a true acrobatic spectacle and the number of tools at your disposal makes fighting fun throughout the game. That fluidity extends to web swings, which is also great and probably the best web swing we’ve had in a Spider-Man game so far. There have been several times when I’ve booted up the game just to swing around a bit. This is a game that will make you want to engage with the side content and this will reward you in the form of collectibles, extra XP and skill points. You want the extra skill points if you want to fully utilize your character and unlock everything. As you go through NYC collecting old backpacks, you can also unlock new suits and gain background information so you can piece together the journey this version of Spider-Man went through prior to the events of this game. Some of these backpacks also contain teasers for future sequels. The game also encourages you to take photos of landmarks around the city – which is worth your while, as it really shows the great level of detail that Insomniac has put in NYC itself.

There are very few open world games that will make you want to use all of its content the way Spider-Man does. It’s an excellent game whether you’re a huge Spider-Man fan or not. I’ve already beaten it twice and yet for the third time I’m 40% out of the game. The game runs very well on PC, mouse and keyboard controls are different but easy to master, and the option to use a gamepad is always there. The game is priced a bit dearly now for its age, but if you’ve got £49.99 to spare I don’t think you’ll regret the purchase. If you choose to get the game on PC or PlayStation – go for PC, this is by far the final version of the game.

Another point worth noting is that a modding community has already sprung up around this game. At the moment it’s mostly save files, reshades and recolored suits, but hopefully one day we’ll also see some more substantial fan-created content, which will further increase the replay value of this game.

The campaign will take you about 30 hours to beat, depending on how many side activities you do. After that, there are three DLCs to play through, adding about 7 more hours of story. If you want to do all the side content, you can easily spend over 60 hours in this game, and even after that you’ll probably still get the urge to jump back for a while to swing around and stop some crimes .

Spider-Man Remastered is now available on PC via Steam and the Epic Games Store. Later this year, Spider-Man: Miles Morales is also coming to PC, with a smaller scale adventure featuring Miles Morales, who has different skills and moves for Peter Parker, and faces different enemies, so it feels like a new experience.

Next year, Insomniac will try to impress us again with Spider-Man 2, which is currently only confirmed for PS5, but may be coming to PC at a later date.

KitGuru says: Have many of you tried Spider-Man on PC yet? How do you like the game so far?

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