We’ve seen Marvel’s Avengers first raid and Spider-Man in action

Marvel’s Avengers is about to get the update fans have been talking about for over a year. Not only will all players get their hands on the game’s first real endgame activity — the raid, Discordant Sound — but PlayStation players will get to step into the shoes of their favorite webhead with Spider-Man.

We’ve seen both the raid and the game’s first console-exclusive hero in action through gameplay recordings provided by Square Enix and Crystal Dynamics. And while we can’t do a beat-for-beat rundown of what we’ve seen, we can offer some impressions on both Spider-Man and the raid.

The most obvious point of comparison for Spider-Man’s appearance in Marvel’s Avengers will be Marvel’s Spider-Man by Insomniac Games — which is, naturally, a lot to live up to, given the highly polished, single-character focus of Insomniac’s games. Spidey’s fighting style looks pretty familiar in Marvel’s Avengers, but has some clear differences from Insomniac’s approach.

First, Spider-Man seems significantly slower to move around areas or in combat. Everything in Marvel’s Avengers is a little sluggish, so this shouldn’t come as much of a surprise, but for a hero known for his speed it’s a little jarring. However, he’s just as acrobatic as you would expect, and we saw plenty of fancy mid-combat flips and handstands.

Second, and perhaps the biggest difference in Marvel’s Avengers’ Spider-Man and Insomniac’s Spider-Man is the team role Peter Parker plays in his new hero event. Since he’s always playing with allies — be it AI or matchmade players — Spidey gets to play more of a supportive role. We saw him regularly web enemies up, stunning them for his allies.

Stunning enemies in a variety of ways seems to be Spider-Man’s main way of contributing to the Avengers. We saw him regularly juggle enemies mid-air, use takedowns to get them out of a fight early, and web them to walls to keep his teammates safe. Spidey’s role looks to be crowd-control support rather than raw damage.

Image: Crystal Dynamics/Square Enix

Without being able to get into specifics, Spider-Man looks like another solid addition to Marvel’s Avengers roster. But just because of the way Marvel’s Avengers works, don’t expect Spider-Man to be a completely new kind of hero. Everyone in Marvel’s Avengers uses the same combo system and gameplay, albeit with hero-distinct toolsets, and Spider-Man looks no different.

But players won’t have a lot of Spider-Man-unique content to play with him, and will instead need to replay familiar activities and content to level him up. Crystal Dynamics revealed on Monday in a story on IGN that Spidey won’t have any of his own story missions like the other add-on heroes, and will simply have an event surrounding his release.

But once players level up their Spider-Man they can take him into the new Discordant Sound raid. Players have been waiting over a year for endgame content that’s not just a rehash of something players experienced in the campaign, and we noticed at least some new things in what we’ve seen of the raid.

Discordant Sound looks like it’ll be broken into group combat, proper boss fights, and puzzle rooms. It seemed similar to a raid in Destiny, which focuses more on a handful of bosses and puzzles rather than the traditional, sprawling MMO labyrinth.

Both the new raid and Spider-Man will hit Marvel’s Avengers on Nov. 30 — although it’s worth reiterating that only players on PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 will be able to play as Spider-Man.

A variety of other heroes like Ant-Man, Doctor Strange, Captain Marvel and other duplicate heroes like War Machine and She-Hulk were data-mined last year around the game’s launch — a data mine that included details about a Klaw-focused raid in Wakanda, lending it some credibility a year later. But with Spider-Man being the last hero Square Enix and Crystal Dynamics have spoken publicly about, it’s impossible to say which of Marvel’s mightiest heroes might join Avengers in 2022.