Guaranteed to get your spidey senses tingling: PETER HOSKIN reviews Marvel’s Spider-Man and Two Point Campus
Marvel’s Spider-Man (PC, PlayStation, £49.99)
Verdict: King of the swingers
Rating: 
I’m swinging in the rain. Just swinging in the rain. What a glorious feeling…
Sorry, didn’t see you there. I was too busy, well, swinging. Or, to be more precise, web-swinging as Spider-Man through the urban canyons of New York City. It really is a glorious feeling.
I’m doing this because of a recent(ish) change of policy at Sony. They used to be very guarded about their ‘PlayStation exclusives’ — which is to say, games that could only be played on PlayStations and not any other console.
But now, for some of their biggest exclusives, they’ve started releasing them on PCs a few years later. There have been some great ones so far: Horizon Zero Dawn, Death Stranding, God of War…
….and now, this week, Marvel’s Spider-Man from 2018. With all the original expansions and newly prettified for desktop gamers. It is, I think, the greatest of the lot.
I’m swinging in the rain. Just swinging in the rain. What a glorious feeling…
Sorry, didn’t see you there. I was too busy, well, swinging. Or, to be more precise, web-swinging as Spider-Man through the urban canyons of New York City. It really is a glorious feeling
This is partly because of its blockbusting scale. Even the Marvel Cinematic Universe struggles to compete with this grand comic-book story, told across about 20 hours, and full of both spectacle and (brilliantly voice-acted) character work.
It’s also because of how the game looks. Without the enhancements for PC, Marvel’s Spider-Man was a stunner. With them, it’s, er, splendiferous. Its version of Manhattan Island is a crystalline complex of light rays and reflections that sometimes had me gawping rather than gaming.
But I was soon back to gaming, thanks to that swinging mechanic. Press a button to send Spider-Man Tarzanning through the air, release it to have him drop. Up, down, up, down, with a few embellishments along the way. It’s a masterpiece of momentum, and it never gets boring.
Even when Marvel’s Spider-Man threatens to be like other games — sending you to some part of the city, so that you can beat up some goons, so that you can upgrade your skills — there’s always its amazing take on simply getting around. Whoosh! And, indeed, whee!
Two Point Campus (PlayStation, Xbox, PC, Switch, £34.99 or included with Xbox Game Pass)
Verdict: Graduates with honours
Rating: 
I suppose there was a time in my life, during the horror of my finals exams, when I wanted to tear a university down.
But, proving that we all have the capacity to change, I’ve spent much of the past week building a university up. Several universities, in fact.
That’s because I’ve been playing Two Point Campus, the new game from the delightful people who brought us Two Point Hospital. Both are management simulations, which is one of the most misleadingly anodyne names in all gaming. As people who grew up playing Theme Park in 1990s will tell you, managing things can be tremendously fun.
I suppose there was a time in my life, during the horror of my finals exams, when I wanted to tear a university down
But, proving that we all have the capacity to change, I’ve spent much of the past week building a university up. Several universities, in fact
And Two Point Campus certainly is fun, not least for its gameplay. If you’ve played a management sim before, then you’ll know what to expect: you lay out the rooms and furniture of a university; hire teachers to do the teaching, janitors to do the maintenance; then try to keep everyone happy — especially the students — while making some money along the way.
But Two Point Campus does all this so adroitly that it makes a decades-old formula feel fresh. It strikes a very fine balance between allowing you to calmly lay out the faculty of your dreams and — quick! quick! — putting pressure on you to address some new emergency.
It’s also fun because, well, it’s fun. Like its ward-based forbear, Two Point Campus has a colourful look and a lightly sardonic sense of humour. Your establishment’s tannoy will blurt out advice like: ‘Students are reminded to set reminders.’ And rather than a redbrick, you’re more likely to be setting up a castle-like school for knights, with classes in jousting.
This makes your university a joy to zoom in on, to get a closer look at its cartoon weirdos, with names like Dennis Gutterflake and Synapse Periwinkle, as they handle rayguns in science class or flirt near the statue of love. Just don’t mention the tuition fees.
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