Marvel’s Spider-Man DLC Chapter 2: “Turf Wars” Review
The ‘City That Never Sleeps’ saga continues
Overview
“The City That Never Sleeps” three-part DLC story continues with its second issue: “Turf Wars” making its way into the PS4 exclusive title, Marvel’s Spider-Man.
Following the events of the last DLC chapter, “The Heist”, featuring Felicia Hardy (Black Cat), Spider-Man resumes his efforts to calm the dangerous gang war waging across New York by honing in on the Maggia crime organisation and their leader, “Hammerhead”. As tensions begin to rise between Hammerhead and Spider-Man’s partner, Yuri, he finds himself trying to get Hammerhead off the streets while keeping Yuri out of trouble.
Along with this new story chapter comes new suits and new side content.
New Campaign Chapter
While the idea of this new story sounds interesting and exciting, it was quite underwhelming in execution.
For starters, the length of the campaign felt incredibly short, especially compared to “The Heist” campaign. The story was relatively uneventful… the campaign could be broken down into two main events and a bunch of filler.
I did, however, like how the Spider-Bot was used in the main story, and the other filler wasn’t bad, per se, but it was essentially just more beating up grunts. If you’re going to recycle the combat system to this extent, which isn’t a bad thing mind you, you need to keep the reason behind it fresh. In other words, there needs to be some plot objective behind the mindless combat that gives the player something to fight towards. And there was a reason, it just wasn’t a very captivating one.
I found that I really didn’t care about the story all that much in this chapter.
New Shield Grunt
In the first DLC chapter we received an addition to the combat system in the form of a new enemy grunt that wielded a minigun appearing in combat missions and challenges, and in this chapter we’ve received a new shield-wielding enemy grunt.
For what it’s worth, although the combat was more of the same, the addition of these two grunts together makes the combat far more challenging. They don’t change the combat itself all that much, but they act as an extra element that adds this additional layer of difficulty over the top.
New Suits
Three new suits were added, which seems to be the pattern with these DLC chapters. The suits come with no new suit powers, so they’re essentially just new skins to wear.
One of my personal favorite parts of this game are all the suits from the alternate comic universes and from the cinematic universe you get to choose to wear, and so the addition of these three new suits is a most welcome and satisfactory one in my books.
New Side Content & Objectives
Yuck.
I cannot make it known enough how much I detest Screwball in this game, both as a character and what she brings to the game. Her writing and voice acting are so unbearably, annoyingly cringe-worthy. I just can’t stand it. The missions themselves are uninspired, they’re just a lazy recycling of the Taskmaster challenges from the main game.
The only other new side content is the Hammerhead bases, which is also a recycled element from the main game. I wasn’t too disappointed about this, however, because I really enjoyed taking down the Saber, Fisk and Ryker Prisoner bases in the standard game.
But this was it. There is such little side content in this chapter that it’s laughable. The only challenge you’ll face completing these few side objectives is trying to listen to Screwball’s dialogue without blowing your brains out.
The Overall Experience
The only reason I’d recommend this plain, uneventful and incredibly short campaign to anyone would be if they’re, like me, following the story of the DLC chapters. If you don’t care for this ongoing story then I’d say this chapter, unfortunately, probably isn’t the best bang for your buck.
Hopefully the last chapter coming in December is far more like “The Heist” then “Turf Wars”.
Marvel’s Spider-Man — Joocey Score: 80%
DLC Chapter 1: “The Heist”— Joocey Score: 90%
DLC Chapter 2: “Turf Wars”— Joocey Score: 53%
