Marvel’s Spider-Man was in a lot of peoples’ ‘game of the year’ lists for 2018 (including mine!), and with good reason. The main story included in the core game made for one of the best retellings of some of Spider-Man’s greatest foes, and also painted a background for Peter Parker and the people around him that very few (if any!) of outside comic book media have managed to convey. As a whole, I felt that the main game closed off quite well, leaving off a small and almost barely noticeable hook in the form of subtle nods to Spidey’s amorous (but more often than not) rival Black Cat.
Closing off the DLC pack that delves into that character’s role in the game, ‘A City That Never Sleeps’, the third part, titled ‘A Silver Lining’, brings back one of the main game’s antagonist turned friend that’s now back to being an antagonist (you’ll have to play and figure out how that plays out!), and how she deals with the outcome of Hammerhead’s chaotic takeover of New York City that took place during the course of the previous two episodes, ‘The Heist’ and ‘Turf Wars’. Insomniac did well in splitting these off and using them to focus on particular character stories as an aside from the main story, so it’s no surprise the same goes on in the closer.
As with both of the other DLCs, Silver Lining works as a separate scenario from your main game save, forcing you to pick it from a menu and loading out to another instance of New York to swing through. It offers a similar range of activities to play around with, including a new set of Screwball missions — you know, the super-villain who happens to be a streamer, but kills people for views instead of playing bad videogames and cursing — as well as more street crimes to solve around the map and collectibles. It’s a good thing that this is the last one of these DLCs, because frankly, the whole deal was starting to wear thin. Sure, the story missions are fun, even if it doesn’t introduce a new enemy type who’s a bastard to deal with, there’s nothing really screaming NEW when compared to even the main game’s progression.
Silver Lining will take you a couple of hours to get through, plus an extra one or two in order to clear every single activity for their related trophies, and you’ll get three more suits, two for simply playing through it which are by far the best part of the DLC. These include a Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse costume (damn, have yet to see this flick, argh!) and a couple of others that aren’t as exciting, unless you’re way into the lore, like Aaron Aackman’s webs from Edge of the Spider-Verse comic and even a Cyber-Spider look, because of course Spider-Man has to have one of those stuck into a closet somewhere.
As a whole, The City That Never Sleeps is a quality set of DLCs. Unless you weren’t into Marvel’s Spider-Man at all, it’s very much worth delving into. It adds a bit more to the overall game, and hey, the new suits are fun to swing around in. While I wasn’t particularly in love with any of the new enemy types that the first two episodes introduced, the story cues that came into play during the three episodes, pacing issues aside, made up for the repetitive gameplay. Silver Lining closes things off on the same note as the entirety of this DLC, not explosively exciting, but not terribly either. Here’s hope that we won’t have to wait long to see what’s next for our friendly neighborhood wall-crawler in the inevitable sequel.
