The Remastered version of the game includes all three parts of the so-called The City Never Sleeps expansion. The story takes place after the events of the main game itself and features the characters Black Cat, Hammerhead and Silver Sable. Miles Morales gets a bit of character development as this does lead to his own game but Mary-Jane Watson unfortunately has a reduced role. She does tease Peter Parker over his relationships with other women but that’s about it. I disliked the power-ups Hammerhead gets to make his a worthy adversary here but the rest of the story isn’t bad. It does mean that the combat difficulty is ramped up significantly, enough to encourage me to regularly use gadgets which was no doubt the designers’ intention.

A few months after the defeat of Dr. Octopus, Spider-Man runs into the Black Cat while foiling an attempt by Maggia gangsters to rob the Manhattan Museum of Contemporary Art. Naturally it’s the Black Cat who makes away with the prize which is a USB drive hidden in the frame of a painting. Spider-Man eventually learns that she is doing this on behalf of Hammerhead who wants to seize control of all the Maggia families using the data on these drives. At the same time, Hammerhead is stealing the weapons and equipment left behind by Silver Sable’s mercenary forces to take control of the city. Spider-Man is further shocked that the Black Cat is doing this because Hammerhead is holding her son hostage and Peter may be the father. The gang wars spiral out of control until many police officers are killed, enraging Captain Yuri Watanabe and Silver Sable is not happy about her gear being stolen. Meanwhile the supremely annoying Screwball is somehow free again and sets more challenges for Spider-Man.

The three pieces of DLC of this mini-campaign each takes place on slightly modified versions of the same map. This replaces the usual set of side activities with new ones and changes all the random crime happening in the city to fit the current storyline. Most of the activities are reskinned versions of the old ones but there are a few new modes, such as beating up a group of thugs before they complete a task and using Spider-Bots to spy and to find and disable bombs. The Screwball challenges are the most radically different, forcing you to rely only on gadgets to defeat enemies, or to score bonus points by taking photos of Spider-Man’s feats. In addition to the named characters, there’s one new thug type, the brute armed with a mini-gun, who is quite dangerous.

The story, continued across the three DLC, start on good building blocks. Black Cat playing coy with Spider-Man, Yuri Watanabe being enraged to the point of going rogue, Silver Sable returning to the city etc. But the resolution of their individual threads was disappointing to me. Black Cat’s teasing goes nowhere and her brief appearance in the last DLC is pointless. I didn’t know about Yuri being a comic book character so that revelation was cool, but we never get to see her in action. They do get Silver Sable mostly right. Not only do we finally get to fight her, and it’s even a very difficult one, but she features in a really exciting set-piece sequence with her VTOL fighter jet and she gets to meaningfully participate in the climactic fight. To build Hammerhead up into a plausible endgame threat, he gets a lot of technological enhancements. But it’s silly to me that Hammerhead of all characters can grow powerful enough to effectively take over New York City.

I wrote in the previous post that the combat felt almost trivial towards the end of the game. Obviously we can’t have that in the expansion so the difficulty has been ramped way up. The new mob type combines the toughness of the brute with a dangerous ranged attack. We’ve faced rocket-shooting enemies since the opening act of the original game but now they’re faster and the rockets can track you. Of course all of the previous enemy types are still here even when it narratively doesn’t make sense, such as the whip-wielding enemies which were supposed to be the Demons. The expansion throws so many enemies at you at once that, yes, I felt pressed enough to have to tactically retreat from time to time to create breathing room, to selectively eliminate specific threats first and to save gadget uses for problematic enemies. This means that combat is challenging and so fun once more.

Screwball’s challenges are even more difficult. The combat-focused ones impose a strict time limit. Her stealth challenges require both perfect stealth in levels with surveillance cameras and watchful enemies and speed. The gadget ones by contrast are a gimme as she gives you infinite gadget uses. You just have to keep spamming them. The other side activities are just different flavors of collectibles. They serve as a medium to offer bits of lore but aren’t otherwise notable. They’re okay but feel a bit too compartmentalized to me, like each story thread has little to do with any other. You can trace Yuri Watanabe’s changing mindset for example through a series of audio logs but she never actually appears even while Hammerhead is still rampaging through the city.

I rarely play through expansions because even when I like the game, too much of the same is still nauseating. I made an exception because this adaptation did a great job of capturing both Spider-Man’s movement and combat style and had a strong story. Plus of course, it was included in the package anyway. I enjoyed it well enough and appreciated the depiction of a New York that is victimized by Hammerhead’s gang while still recovering from the cataclysmic events of the main story. The little bits about teaching and training Miles Morales are fantastic too. Even so, it does get repetitive and you can only swing around the same city for so long before it starts getting stale. I’m glad I’ve finished this and I will get around to the Miles Morales game at some point, but not for a long while.