Review: Spider-Man on PC is a Steam Deck marvel

Spider-Man Remastered on PC brings together the original game, which debuted on PS4, as well as the three expansion packs that added fan-favourite villains and fleshed out Peter Parker’s first outing.

This is a collection of all of the content released for the game. However, to truly complete the story you’ll have to wait until Marvel’s Spider-Man Miles Morales is released on PC in the future.

While some of the game’s open-world box-ticking exercises haven’t aged as well as we’d have liked (there are a lot of enemy bases to clear and backpacks to collect), the story is still excellent, the combat is engaging and the swinging is practically perfect.

The latter has been the game’s calling card for years but it’s literally difficult to imagine how it’s ever going to be bettered, outside of adding a few more tricks for a bit of style.

Visually, Insomniac’s title is a knockout. PC allows all of the bells and whistles, meaning that despite the fact that this PC version is built on the bones of a four-year-old game, it stands toe-to-toe with the heavyweights of modern gaming.

While the improved shadows and ray-traced reflections will require a significant machine to get running at full speed, should you have the hardware, it’s incredibly impressive.

Although, for us, it’s the new ultra-widescreen support that’s the show stopper. Swinging through the city across multiple monitors, or one ultra-wide is a whole new experience.

Spider-Man’s performance on Steam Deck is just as spectacular. It’s almost unbelievable that a game that was such a showpiece for a console only one generation ago can now fit in your (admittedly extra large and roasting hot) pocket.

When review code for the game was first issued, the game performed woefully on the Deck, however, as the review period continued, the Steam Deck version of the game was refined with updates.

It’s got to the stage that now, at launch, despite having completed the game on PS4, PS5 and having played over half of it on PC, we’re ready to start a fourth adventure on the Deck. It’s that good.

Be warned though, it’ll chew through the battery, especially if you have the brightness up, and we still ran into a few visual hitches here and there, but generally, the performance was stunning and essentially feels like playing the gaming on a base PS4, in your hands.

While not the flashiest draft pick in the acquisition wars, it may play out that PlayStation’s signing of Dutch porting house Nixxes ends up as one of the company’s shrewdest bets.

Should this be the future of PlayStation first-party, with blockbusters enjoying an exclusivity tour on the PS5 before arriving on PC, if they’re all of the quality of Marvel’s Spider-Man, it’s difficult to see this as anything else than a winning plan.

While Spider-Man Remastered doesn’t fix all the problems of the web head’s PS4 outing (the stealth missions are still an annoyance that interrupts any playthrough) the open world has never been more fun to swing around, or looked better.