Marvel Rivals' Spider-Man Has One Ability Insomniac Desperately Needs For Spider-Man 3

Summary

Marvel Rivals closed alpha gave players a closer look at 20 Marvel Universe heroes, sparking debates on their gameplay.
Spider-Man is a popular character but gameplay differs between Marvel Rivals and Insomniac Games' Spider-Man series.
While Marvel Rivals' traversal mechanic may outshine Insomniac's wall-crawling, players are eager for more features in future titles.

With developer NetEase Games granting players access to Marvel Rivals' closed alpha on May 9, players have had a better look at the role-based multiplayer title, and have been able to analyze each hero's gameplay in depth based on clips that have been shared online. As is to be expected within any fandom, this footage has sparked debates regarding how they compare to past appearances of the characters in titles such as Marvel's Avengers or Marvel's Spider-Man, or even specific seasons of Fortnite.

Marvel Rivals currently features 20 different characters from the Marvel Universe, with the Avengers, X-Men and Guardians of the Galaxy represented alongside the likes of Loki.

One of the most anticipated characters is Spider-Man, with the web-slinger already proving to be extremely popular in gaming, most recently in Insomniac Games' Marvel's Spider-Man series. Of course, the gameplay in Insomniac's games is different from that of Marvel Rivals, as the superhero has an entire open-world city to swing around in a single-player experience, instead of Marvel Rivals' multiplayer arena-type levels. That's not to say that the heroes don't share similar traits, as both games have kept faithful to the source material in their depictions of their powers, with Spider-Man being able to crawl on walls, fire webs, and swing around in both. Of course, that's not to say there aren't mechanics that each title could pull from the other.

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Marvel Rivals Has A Traversal Mechanic Marvel's Spider-Man 3 Should Add

Wall-Crawling Is One Of The Weaker Parts Of Insomniac's Traversal

While Marvel's Spider-Man seems to have greater web swinging than Marvel Rivals so far, especially with Marvel's Spider-Man 2 giving players the option to make this more physics-based by turning off the swing assist, there is one area that Marvel Rivals seems to be doing better than Insomniac. In the interior levels of the Marvel's Spider-Man games, Peter and Miles are usually encouraged to use web zip to get around - or web lines in Marvel's Spider-Man 2 - but climbing from walls to the ceiling has always felt a bit clunkier compared to the rest of the characters' movement.

In Marvel Rivals, however, Spider-Man can go straight from a wall-run - a mechanic that is also in Marvel's Spider-Man and is far quicker than wall crawling - into running along the ceiling, as shown in a clip shared by exclusion in Marvel's Spider-Man is not game-breaking, it is something that would make sense for the character to have and would make indoor traversal a bit quicker and varied, and several other players responded to FleurashDesign's post by tagging Insomniac directly and requesting such a feature in a future title.

It is worth noting that FleurashDesign does state that Spider-Man's controls do take some getting used to in Marvel Rivals, and calls the fan-favorite hero "the hardest character to use in the game" which could be one of the factors as to why Insomniac Games has yet to include something similar in its series. A previous Spider-Man title, Web of Shadows features combat that moved fluidly from being on the walls to midair to ground-based, and it's a shame this has yet to be replicated in a title since. This could be because normally most of the criminals Spider-Man faces are on the ground, whereas that title had symbiotes to fight on the side of the buildings, but with Marvel's Spider-Man 2 having a similar kind of symbiotic threat in its third act, it's a shame this kind of wall and ceiling-based combat didn't return.

Time will tell as to whether Insomniac does add such a feature to Marvel's Spider-Man 3 but for now, NetEase Games seems to be giving it a go as a way of making the most of Spider-Man's abilities and setting him apart from the other heroes in the game. While Marvel Rivals' alpha was only available to some, it's possible that with enough good a beta for the game could realistically come sometime in late summer or early fall of this year with a full release sometime in the middle of 2025, so it won't be too long before most players are able to get their hands on the game and try out Spider-Man's gameplay for themselves.

Source: FleurashDesign/X