Spider-man is a name that has dominated video games, comic books, and movies for quite a while. It’s worth admiring that Spider-man can shine across different mediums, especially for a franchise that has been around for this long. The 2018 PS4 Spider-Man game is an excellent example of this.
Finally, PC Master Race fans get their money’s worth with a great superhero game. This is one of the many games Sony has ported over to PC, including Horizon Zero Dawn, God of War, Days Gone, and more soon to come. Sony has finally decided to open the doors to a wider audience.
It’s undoubtedly an exciting time to be a PC gamer, and since many players will be playing this for the first time, it’s worth remembering how great this game truly is. That’s what we’ll be focusing on for this review.
Before we start swinging around Manhattan, though, let’s see how Peter Parker benefits from this PC release.
A Refresher For Spider-Man Remastered
Spider-Man Remastered is an excellent video game and there’s very little debate about this among gamers. Since 2018, this game has been praised repeatedly, so I don’t need to tell you how good it is; you’re already aware.
Keeping that in mind, this review will be more of a focus on the features, performance, and overall benefits this game achieves by getting a PC port. Still, if you’re unaware of why this game is so good, let’s briefly discuss the strong points.
After the Arkham series, Spider-Man is arguably one of the best comic book games. That is high praise, considering how many similar titles we’ve seen over the years.
The pure enjoyment of swinging around New York with fluid animations and in-depth detail is something every Marvel fan has wanted for a long time. Even if you’re not a Marvel fan, you’ll enjoy this game because of the web-swinging mechanic alone.
It helps that the combat, skill tree, suit upgrades, customization, and even the level design here are top-notch. This is an excellent experience from start to finish. This is one of those games that I never uninstalled from my Playstation. I’d boot it up now and then to swing around the city.
Now, you can do all of that on your PC. What more is there to ask for?
The PC Port Gets Exclusive Features
Everything good about the original PS4 game is introduced here for Spider-Man: Remastered. The upgrade is that everything looks better, the settings menu has more options (which we’ll cover later), and Peter Parker has a new face.
The Remastered release for the PS5 changes the actor for Peter. Since the PC port is based on the PS5, the change is the same on the PC. There was a bit of outrage when this happened, but if you’re someone who cares that deeply about it, there’s already a mod for the PC version.
Of course, PC gamers did not hesitate to mod this game out of recognition, but let’s not get sidetracked and focus on the new features for now.
The Options Menu
Let’s start by looking at the extensive options menu for the PC port. To start, the four difficulty options are the same as the original release. There’s also an option to skip puzzles, which is one of the aspects of the game that some people do not enjoy. It’s good to see that Insomniac is not forcing that mechanic on you.
Now, if we’re talking about the “Display” and “Graphics” sections of the options menu, that’s where it gets impressive. In the display section, you can set the resolution, choose between fullscreen modes, change the aspect ratio, and you even get a FOV slider, which is a very welcome addition.
The graphics section is where most people spend their first few minutes of the game. Not because the game doesn’t run well but because so many elements make it worth looking at.
The first thing I did was turn off Motion Blur since I’m one of those who can’t stand it. The game supports 21:9 and 32:9 aspect ratios as well, and combining that with the FOV slider allows you to turn this into an immersive experience. I played this on a 21:9 monitor myself and did not face any issues.
Apart from that, you can tweak raytracing, depth of field, level of detail, texture filtering, texture quality, shadows, and everything else you usually see in a PC game.
Accessibility Options
Sony commits to improving accessibility in video games. This is evident from the accessibility options that were shown off in The Last Of Us Part II.
In the accessibility menu, you’ll find the option to skip QTEs, change holding buttons like R1 and R2 to just tapping them, and other options that make dodging easier.
They have visual and color options as well. You can highlight different enemies with different colors, allowing colorblind folks to enjoy the game easily. This opens up the game to a broader audience and is commendable.
Input Options
Spider-Man: Remastered is best played with a gamepad, even on a PC. This game was designed with consoles in mind and feels most natural with a controller. I played this with an Xbox controller, but any gamepad will work fine here. There are options to tweak the haptics, vibration strength, and more.
The game also features support for tweaking controls through Steam’s input system. This way, you can remap almost any button to your liking. Playing with a keyboard was surprisingly decent as well. While I wouldn’t personally play it that way, I tried it out, and the results were decent.
Use a controller if you have one, but if you must play with a keyboard and mouse, it’s not disappointing.
Dual-Sense Support
Surprisingly, this game has support for the PS5 dual-sense controller. This is an interesting addition to the PC port. To take full advantage of the dual-sense features, you’ll need to connect it via USB. It will not work with Bluetooth.
You’ll get dynamic haptic feedback in both the triggers and the controller. You’ll need to download drivers from Sony’s website and install them on your PC or laptop.
Ray Tracing, DLSS, And AMD FSR
Now, let’s get into the meat and bones of this PC port. People get excited whenever a console game is ported to a PC. Most of the time, you can play at a better resolution, and in recent years, ray tracing additions have made the games even better.
Sure, both the Xbox Series X and Playstation 5 have ray tracing support built-in. However, there are a few corners cut here and there. A PC port takes that to the next level since you have more settings to play around with.
Spider-Man Remastered has extensive ray tracing settings, plus DLSS and AMD FSR support.
Upscaling Methods
This was highly surprising from the PC port of Spider-Man. For anyone unfamiliar with upscaling, here’s how it works. The upscaling method in question, like Nividia’s DLSS, will render the game at a lower resolution but then use machine learning to upscale it to your monitor or TV’s native resolution.
You might think this will blur the image, but DLSS uses clever AI and machine learning to mitigate the loss of image quality. Most of the time, most of the DLSS settings look just as good as the native resolution while giving you better performance since it’s rendering at a lower resolution.
AMD does something similar with FSR, and this game supports FSR 2.0. In all honesty, DLSS looks and runs better, but FSR is decent if you want a performance boost. Ray tracing demands much from your graphics card, but an upscaling method can lower the performance cost.
Ray Tracing
This is where the PC port of this game shines. If you have a high-end gaming PC, this is one of those games to boot up if you want to see what your rig is capable of. This game has four options for ray tracing: Off, Medium, High, and Very High.
Of course, turning on ray tracing will cost you a lot of performance, but you might be able to bring that back with DLSS turned on. Either way, ray tracing will reduce your average and peak framerate.
On the other hand, if your machine can handle it, you’re missing out if you don’t turn it on. The city feels even more alive in higher settings, especially at night. Surfaces like mirrors, the water, and city lamps feel lively, and the game entrances you even more.
The game looks even better at the higher settings than the PS5 version, which is saying quite a lot. Of course, the PS5 also costs less than a PC that will run this game with high ray tracing settings, so there’s that.
Either way, both the ray tracing and upscaling methods are impressive.
Performance
Now, let’s get into the real question: How does this game run with all of the options and graphical settings available with this game? To sum it up shortly, it runs surprisingly well. Some of the previous Sony ports to PC had their issues. Horizon Zero Dawn was not well-optimized at launch, nor was Days Gone.
Fortunately, that is not the case here. This game runs surprisingly well on a wide range of hardware. If you have a low-end PC, you can lower the resolution, decrease texture quality, anisotropic filtering, shadows, and more to get a stable 60fps.
Of course, you’re giving up a lot of visual detail that way, but for those who never played this game on the PS4, it does not take away from the enjoyment. This game can be visual eye-candy for sure, but it is still a blast from start to finish, even on low settings.
Now, if you have a mid-range PC with something like 16 gigs of RAM, a relatively decent processor, and maybe an RTX 2060 or similar, you’ll have a good time here. With that rig, you can play at 1080p or even 1440p if you play around with some settings.
It’s optimized quite well for higher-end PCs, where this game looks, feels, and plays the best. Of course, ray tracing comes with the performance downside, but that’s the nature of the tech, not because of the game.
Through and through, this is a well-optimized port, and most gamers should have no complaints.
Final Thoughts
That’s about it for the Spider-Man: Remastered (PC) review. Another thing of note is that when you boot up the game on PC, you’ll be greeted by a launcher. Within this launcher, you can tweak all the graphical and display settings mentioned above. You can set the game to your liking before even launching it.
This is the type of game that you just don’t forget about. It’s right up there with Web of Shadows and Spider-Man 2 on the Playstation 2. Arguably, it’s even better.
The only downsides with this game are the repetitive side missions and somewhat clunky camera. In the grand scheme of things, those are minor complaints.
Positives
- Excellent web-swinging mechanics
- Highly addicting gameplay
- Loads of PC-exclusive features
- Impressive accessibility options
- A good story that doesn’t overstay its welcome
Negatives
- The camera can feel clunky at times
- Somewhat repetitive side missions
Good job! Please give your positive feedback ☺️
How could we improve this post? Please Help us. 🤔
An enthusiastic follower of the game industry. Gaming is an escape for most but in my case, it allowed my to write about the stuff that I love. What started out as ramblings on my own random blog gradually turned into a freelance writing career.
When you don’t find me writing or researching about games, you’ll find me building PCs, hunting for new components, or naturally, playing games.
