Hands On: What Kind of Side-Content Is in Marvel's Spider-Man?

Marvel’s Spider-Man will see the eponymous superhero battling the Sinister Six over the course of the campaign, with hundreds of henchman recruited to get in the web-slinger’s way. You can expect a dense storyline in Insomniac Games’ latest, exploring Peter Parker’s life as a scientist, as well as his relationships with characters like MJ Watson and Aunt May. But what about those moments when the wall crawler’s not navigating social situations and fending off villains? Here’s some of the side activities we spotted in our recent hands on.

It’s important to stress here that we only played two hours of the title, so there’s almost certainly more content that you’ll unlock as you make your way through the campaign. That said, New York City is fairly populated from the off, with a number of distractions designed to capture your attention as you swing through the urban jungle.

The first mini-objective that’s been well publicised are the radio towers scattered around Manhattan, which you’ll need to hack into by completing a sine wave minigame. Essentially you need to match the frequency of the transmission, and once you do so you’ll be rewarded with a panning shot of your surroundings Assassin’s Creed-style, while areas of interest will be added to your map.

Crimes are perhaps the main thing that will catch your eye. These range from simple combat scenarios to stolen cars that you need to chase down. Completing them earns you XP and tokens, which can then be invested into upgrading your character and unlocking new gear. The same is true of Peter Parker’s old backpacks, which are scattered around the city and need to be collected from hard to reach places. The neat thing about this particular collectible is that you’ll unlock items which can be viewed in the title’s menu, and these provide additional lore.

Other side-activities include landmarks which you need to photograph using the in-game camera for XP boosts, while there are various Kingpin strongholds scattered around the map that you’ll need to infiltrate and extinguish. These are essentially combat challenges, where you’ll be forced to face off against waves of increasingly difficult goons.

Finally, we noticed that when you play as Peter Parker and return to work, there are optional “science” puzzles that you can complete, whereby you need to place tiles on a board in a Pipe Mania-esque manner. From what we could infer from our hands on, there’ll be sets of these that you’ll unlock throughout the campaign, and again completing them feeds into the title’s overall upgrade tree.

We know from previous reports that there’ll also be bomb diffusion missions, so we expect there to be a lot more side-content in the full release. It’s not exactly ground-breaking stuff, but as we pointed out in our swinging preview, getting around New York City is so entertaining that it’s just fun traversing the skyline and mopping these challenges up.

Which of Marvel’s Spider-Man’s side-activities are you most looking forward to completing? Hack into some radio towers in the comments section below.