14 minutes ago
The following contains minor spoilers for the main Spider-Man game.
Spider-Man is already one of the biggest hits of the year, and now there's more of it to love. The first of three DLC packs, collectively titled, The City that Never Sleeps is now out and it provides more of everything that there was to love about the main campaign, an engaging story that crosses multiple missions, more collectibles, more random crimes to foil, new side quests, new costumes, and even more tokens to help you unlock anything you hadn't gotten to yet in the main campaign.
First thing's first. The Heist is a DLC pack which you access from the menu of your main game. It uses the same map but exists separately from the main storyline. This means you can access it any time, however, the events of The Heist take place chronologically after the main game, so if you jump in early, you might spoil aspects of the main story if you haven't finished it.
Primarily, we're talking about the side quest in which Spider-Man tries to chase down Black Cat, who is scoping out and robbing various places around town. It's a minor sidequest that doesn't have a direct bearing on the events of the Heist. Still, the sidequest assumes you haven't seen Black Cat in a while, so it doesn't fit if you just ran into her here.
The story begins with a voice over from Mary Jane regarding how the various crime family's in New York, having peacefully co-existed underneath Wilson Fisk, are now beginning to come into conflict following the power vacuum that was left when he went away. Spider-Man investigates one mob family's attempt to break into an art gallery and steal a painting and discovers that mobsters aren't the only ones involved in the theft. Black Cat is also involved, working for a gangster called Hammerhead. This is odd since the Cat usually works alone, so if she's joined up with gangsters, something else must be going on.
In addition the main quest, there are two main side quests. One sees social media psycho Screwball give you a set of different challenges to do, which are mostly modified versions of the Taskmaster challenges from the main game, and award you with Challenge Tokens in the same way. The other sends you searching for art hidden around the city which was apparently stolen by the original Black Cat, the father of the girl you're chasing now.
This latter side quest, along with a few other odds and ends within the game, are likely setups meant to pay off later in future DLC. The Heist is the first chapter of a larger story that will continue in two installments set for later this year. If you didn't buy the season pass, Insomniac needs to be sure they hook you for the whole story.
Basically, it's pretty simple, if you liked Spider-Man the first time around, then you'll like The Heist DLC. It's more of the same and in the case of a game like Spider-Man, that I thoroughly enjoyed, that's not a bad thing. The story is good and fun and offers some unique challenges within the standard beat-em-up and stealth combat. Said combat continues to be satisfying, as does swinging around New York City. If anything, the smaller package feels a bit neater, as your map isn't littered with more icons than you know what to do with. It's just enough to keep you busy.
Having said that, it's not going to keep you busy for too long. The entire DLC pack can be finished in a few hours time and unless you need to retry the Screwball challenges multiple times in order to perfect them, you'll be done with a solid evening of gameplay.
If you need new content to play more Spider-Man, and the recent New Game Plus isn't enough, then you could certainly do worse than The Heist. It's more of the same, but the same is still fun.
8 / 10 stars
Rating: 4.0/5