Marvel's Spider-Man: The City that Never Sleeps is a collection of downloadable content (DLC) developed by Insomniac Games and published by Sony Interactive Entertainment for the 2018 video game Marvel's Spider-Man. Based on the Marvel Comics superhero Spider-Man, it is inspired by the long-running comic book mythology and adaptations in other media. Released in three distinct chapters, The Heist, Turf Wars, and Silver Lining, the DLC seves as an epilogue to the main game, and follows Spider-Man as he contends with a new crime wave led by the physically-enhanced mob boss Hammerhead, receiving help from several allies, including master thief and ex-girlfriend Black Cat, Police Captain Yuri Watanabe, mercenary Silver Sable, and reporter and girlfriend Mary Jane Watson. During this time, he also deals with the personal problems of his civilian persona, Peter Parker, and begins mentoring the novice superhero Miles Morales.
The game is presented from the third-person perspective with a primary focus on Spider-Man's traversal and combat abilities. Spider-Man can freely move around New York City, interacting with characters and undertaking missions, and unlocking new gadgets and suits by progressing through the main story or completing tasks. The player is able to complete side missions away from the main story to unlock additional content and collectible items. Combat focuses on chaining attacks together against numerous foes while avoiding damage, using the environment and webs to incapacitate foes.
The City that Never Sleeps was released monthly for the PlayStation 4, from October to December 2018, and received generally positive reviews from critics. A remastered version of the DLC along with the base game is included with the Ultimate Edition of Marvel's Spider-Man Miles Morales on the PlayStation 5, released in November 2020 and was later available as a standalone release.
The DLC features a dedication to Spider-Man co-creator Stan Lee, who died shortly before the release of the second chapter.
*** WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD!!! ***
The City That Never Sleeps
Spider-Man: The City that Never Sleeps features a large ensemble cast of characters from the history of Spider-Man comics. Peter Parker (voiced by Yuri Lowenthal) is a 23-year old research assistant, who gained superhuman abilities after being bitten by a genetically-modified spider. Employing a secret identity, Parker uses these abilities to protect the citizens of New York City as the superhero Spider-Man. Taking place shortly after the main story of Spider-Man, The City that Never Sleeps follows Parker, who is coming to terms with the loss of his Aunt May to a bioweapon released by his former friend and mentor Otto Octavius. Parker has also romantically reunited with his ex-girlfriend Mary Jane Watson (Laura Bailey), a reporter for the Daily Bugle, who occasionally aids Spider-Man and is aware of his secret identity.
The City that Never Sleeps introduces the first appearances of Parker's former lover and master-thief Black Cat / Felicia Hardy (Erica Lindbeck, who has a voice-only role in the main game), Felicia's father and retired thief Walter Hardy (Daniel Riordan), and mob boss Hammerhead (Keith Silverstein), who is taking advantage of the power vacuum left by the absence of villains to attempt to seize control of the city's criminal underworld from the other Maggia crime families. It also features several returning characters from the base game, including NYPD Captain and Spider-Man ally Yuri Watanabe (Tara Platt), Silver Sablinova (Nichole Elise), leader of the private military company Sable International, and the social media-using villain Screwball (Stephanie Lemelin), who escaped from prison.
Episode 1: The Heist
A few months after the events of the main game, the Maggia crime families are looking to fill the void in the criminal underworld left by Wilson Fisk's capture and Martin Li's defeat. While trying to stop one of the families from stealing a painting on display at the Manhattan Museum of Contemporary Art, Spider-Man encounters Felicia, who smashes the painting and steals a USB drive hidden within the frame before escaping. Mary Jane later informs him that Hammerhead's family is in possession of the drive, implying Felicia is working for them. Spider-Man pursues Felicia as she steals more drives, ultimately catching her, at which point she reveals that Hammerhead is holding her son hostage. Believing himself to be the father, Spider-Man agrees to help rescue the boy.
Meanwhile, Mary Jane learns that the drives contain the Maggia families' collective fortune, and that Hammerhead has recently purchased a large impregnable vault that could be used to hold Felicia's son. Spider-Man and Felicia storm the warehouse where the vault is kept, but the latter betrays and locks Spider-Man inside, revealing that she lied about having a son to persuade him into helping her break into the vault, which contains the final drive: Hammerhead's. As Spider-Man escapes, he overhears Hammerhead ordering his goons to kill Felicia for her betrayal. He attempts to warn her, but arrives too late and watches as she is seemingly killed when explosives planted in her penthouse detonate. Later, Peter tells Mary Jane that Felicia's body wasn't found among the wreckage, implying she survived, and that he is relieved to not be a father, though Mary Jane reassures him that he would make a great one someday, at the right time and with the right person.
Episode 2: Turf Wars
Shortly after a full-blown gang war between the Maggia families erupts, Spider-Man assists Yuri Watanabe and her police task force in a raid against Hammerhead, though it turns out to be a trap, leaving only Spider-Man and Yuri alive. The loss of her men under her watch leaves Yuri emotionally compromised, and Spider-Man asks her to take a leave of absence to grieve and recover, promising to apprehend Hammerhead on his own. Spider-Man learns that Hammerhead and his gang have been stealing Sable International's equipment and weapons to gain an advantage in the gang war. After abducting the other Maggia Dons, Hammerhead's forces attack police convoys across the city. While Spider-Man is dealing with them, Hammerhead attacks the police precinct which is holding Sable International's "Project Olympus", killing numerous police officers in the process. Frustrated by her men's deaths and Spider-Man's lack of progress, Yuri decides to go after Hammerhead personally.
Later, Hammerhead, powered by the Project Olympus armor, decides to execute the Maggia Dons on live television to achieve his goal of terrorizing New York City into submission. Spider-Man foils Hammerhead's plan and defeats him, but before the police can apprehend him, a vengeful Yuri arrives and almost shoots Hammerhead dead, missing and hitting him in the head only because of Spider-Man's interference. Later, while Hammerhead's body is being taken away, one of his henchmen infiltrates the ambulance and resuscitates him.
Episode 3: The Silver Lining
Following her dismissal from the police force, Yuri has become a ruthless vigilante, tracking down and executing numerous Maggia gangsters. Meanwhile, with Sable International's advanced equipment and weaponry, Hammerhead's gang rules over the city. Learning of this, an enraged Silver Sablinova returns to take revenge on Hammerhead for stealing her supplies, which she needs for a civil war in her home country of Symkaria. Worried that Sablinova's violent methods would result in more chaos, Spider-Man tries to convince her to work together. Hammerhead, who has now upgraded himself into an advanced cyborg exoskeleton, leads Spider-Man and Sablinova into a trap and overpowers them. Felicia, who has faked her death, arrives to save Spider-Man, though Sablinova is captured by Hammerhead. Apologizing for her actions, Felicia gives Spider-Man a USB containing information on Hammerhead's weaknesses before disappearing again.
Spider-Man rescues Sablinova and they learn that the carbon steel plate inside Hammerhead's head is sensitive to heat. Sablinova takes Spider-Man to her stealth carrier on the Hudson River and they prepare a trap for Hammerhead, outfitting Sablinova's VTOL fighter jet with a heated laser array just before Hammerhead attacks them. While Spider-Man holds Hammerhead in place, Sablinova blasts his metal plate, weakening him, and crashes her jet into him. With Hammerhead subdued, Sablinova reclaims her supplies and returns to Symkaria, telling Spider-Man he inspired her to be more heroic. Meanwhile, Mary Jane also leaves for Symkaria to write a story on the war there and raise awareness, and Peter begins to train Miles Morales on how to use his newly acquired spider-powers, preparing him to become the next Spider-Man.
The Verdict:
Individually, each one of these DLC episodes/add-ons to base game of Marvel's Spider-Man would have be purchased separately if you didn't purchase the Season Pass or didn't buy the Game of the Year Edition of the game that has become standard with the game currently on PlayStation 4 and on the remastered version on PlayStation 5.
I have had a lot of free time since I'm on holiday break from work for the rest of 2020 and I wanted to knock these out before I decide to jump into Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales in the very near-future.
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| I was glad to see that Black Cat got some time to shine in this game (debuting in The Heist) as her presence was painfully missed in the base game when she was limited to a voice over at the end of her side quest. |
The game doesn't really make it obvious how you access this new content as it's accessible by selecting the DLC tab in the main menu and selecting the corresponding episode. Your progression between the base game and each of the episodes are all independent of each other, but the unlockable costumes carry over to all campaigns without a problem.
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| All of the unlockable suits that can be acquired as part of this DLC. |
Out of all of the costumes that they have added to this game, it kills me that they STILL haven't added the Spider-Man Unlimited costume. Is it really that much of a hassle to add into this game?
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| Is it really THAT hard to put this costume in the game, Insomniac? |
Each of these DLC episodes can be completed in little more than a hour or two if you focus exclusively on the story-based missions, but you will spend at least another hour or two doing the new street crimes (mostly involving the Maggia crime families and Hammerhead's thugs) and side missions that open up across these campaigns. There's three new "seasons" of Speedball challenges across all of these DLCs that ends with a mildly entertaining chase after her throughout the city at the end of Silver Lining.
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| Silver Sable steals the show in The Silver Lining, starting with an intense boss fight against her until she becomes an unlikely ally by the time the credits roll. |
The story across all three of these campaigns definitely lay a strong foundation for the inevitable sequel to this game and it's spin-off/expansion - Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales. The narrative sends Yuri down the dark path that she is fated to take similar to her comic book counterpart, brings Spidey's old flame, Black Cat/Felicia Hardy into the limelight outside of mere mentions in the main campaign via a minor sidequest, gave Silver Sable more screen time that she desperately needed in the main campaign, while establishing that Insomniac Games have the balls to take their own continuity with these established Marvel Comics characters into their own unique direction(s) following the fates of Hammerhead and Silver Sable. To be fair though, I mentioned in my review of the base game that they had balls in the first place when they killed Aunt May during the main story campaign.
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| You run into these minigun toting thugs a bit FAR too much for my taste during these three episodes. If you don't know how to prioritize taking them down first and foremost, they are going to be a constant source of aggravation. |
If I had one major complaint about this trifecta of content is that they rehash the same material across the board in terms of enemy variety. It's the same issue the base game had towards the endgame phase of the story campaign. There's only so many combinations of Demon, Sable, and Prisoners that you can throw out before combat gets either extremely redundant or extremely frustrating from everything that's going on. I haven't played this game since it initially released via a weekend Redbox rental and I had totally forgotten how much I loathed fighting the rocket launcher thugs, shield-wielding armored thugs, and big bodyguards wielding miniguns. Those three enemy types deal MASSIVE damage to Spider-Man from any hit whatsoever and it's pretty goddamn cheap of the enemy AI to have several of these enemies swarming you at any given time to confuse and bungle Spidey's Spider-Sense. In a bizarre way, that's INSANELY comic book accurate as Spidey has a known weakness that his Spider Sense can be "overloaded" by too many surrounding threats around him to distinguish one over another. So kudos to the developers of this game over at Insomniac to get that detail down. By the end of this DLC content, it feels like deja vu to the reliance on so many thugs abusing Silver Sable's stolen technology and weaponry, much like her soldiers/mercenaries that were brought into the later half of the base game's story campaign.
Play It or Don't Bother?
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| After giving you the cold shoulder for most of the base game and then in The Silver Lining, I got a good laugh out of this scene here. |
Since this content is essentially part of the game now that it is bundled together with the Game of the Year Edition of Marvel's Spider-Man on both the PlayStation 4 and the remastered/upscaled version(s) for the PlayStation 5, there's absolutely no reason for you NOT to play this content to be perfectly honest when it's part of the game by default.
If you purchased the game at launched and didn't purchase the Season Pass, then this is a different matter altogether. Separately, I can't condone suggesting purchasing these at full price, but they are definitely worth rebuying the entire game over for as a complete package. They add hours of gameplay to an already amazing Spider-Man game - no pun intended - and set the stage for what's to come whenever Insomniac Games decides to drop a proper sequel following the success of Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales. Each episode runs about an hour of gameplay time, but with the extras and side quests littered throughout each episode campaign, you have at least another 10 to 20 more hours of gameplay to this game if you didn't already 100% complete every activity in the base game.
I don't see why you wouldn't want more from an already amazing superhero game. This is an excellent excuse to dwell in this world for a few more hours until you decide to move onto Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales.
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