Can you truly say you have lived until you have lamped someone with a manhole cover in Insomniac's new Spider-Man game? Sure, you may have known happiness to a certain degree. You may have known love, even. You may have rolled the dice, as the saying goes, and landed a few sevens. But lamping someone with a manhole cover? It's top-tier. Top of the shop, as an older generation might put it. Bam!
The tension of the thing! It is beautifully done. And it is a risk. To grab the manhole cover with your webs you must first find a highlightable manhole cover and then squeeze R1 and L1. Brilliantly, this takes a bit of time to pull off - you have to wait for a brisk little meter to fill up. While this is happening, whoever was already attacking you is presumably still attacking you. Your spidey-sense will be tingling and warning of an incoming punch or kick or burst of suit-shredding gunfire. But if you intend to lamp someone with a manhole cover, you cannot interrupt the flow of the meter to counter or dodge. You must be bold or reckless. You have to hope that you can get the manhole cover into the air before your enemies can pull a pre-emptive strike together.
Yes, it must all take less than a second, but man, that less-than-a-second really counts. It plucks at you. And then you've been successful and the manhole cover is attached to springy, flexing webs. You fling it around in an arc to clear the immediate area, and then you launch it at someone. After hours of playing this game, I still don't know what black magic is involved in the selection here. I suspect the manhole cover receiver has to be somewhere near the middle of the screen, but really, it mostly feels like intuition. The game simply knows who you are aiming for. And then? Oof. A truly Platonic clobbering. Metal against flesh, and hopefully that deep hollow boom, lifted, along with the basics of combat, from the Arkham games, which tells you that this particular baddy is down for good. He will be headed to A&E. The manhole cover will probably be headed to A&E with him, in order to be surgically removed. Hopefully one of them has health insurance.
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