There aren’t many great Spider-Man games on PC, despite the announcement of Marvel’s Spider-Man II for PS5 last week – we were supposed to get a Spider-Man 4 in 2011 but that was cancelled along with the movie it was supposed to be based on. Now gameplay from the cancelled Spider-Man 4 game has finally appeared online.
Spider-Man 4 was meant to be the next movie in the Sam Raimi-directed series, starring Tobey Maguire as Peter Parker, with either The Lizard or The Vulture as the villains. It was meant to come out in 2011, but due to story problems it was cancelled and the series was rebooted with The Amazing Spider-Man.
As Obscure Gamers chronicles, the movie was meant to get a tie-in game for PC, Xbox 360, and PS3 developed by Prototype developer Radical Entertainment. It was canned in 2010, roughly two years into development. An early build of the Spider-Man 4 360 version was apparently leaked earlier this year, and gameplay has now finally made its way online.
Obscure Gamers has uploaded 18 minutes of this preview build, and it looks very much like a Spider-Man game – swinging around New York hasn’t changed much over the years, and still looks good. There’s also a fight with a helicopter gunship and a docks battle with some guys who look like Bane from Batman: Arkham Asylum.
Apparently a number of assets were re-used in Radical’s own superhero game Prototype 2, which is why a few elements in there – such as some attacks and animations – might seem familiar to people who have played those games.
Similar circumstances befell the Factor 5-developed Superman game from around the same time, which also had gameplay released online recently. It’s sad that the PC was once again denied a Spider-Man game, especially as fans shouldn’t expect to see the PS4/PS5 games on PC anytime soon – or in the Avengers game.