While The Amazing Spider-Man, Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions, and other Spider-Man-related games have offered exciting mechanics and designs for the wall-crawler, Insomniac Games’ Marvel’s Spider-Man has delivered on what many fans believe to be the definitive and untouchable Spider-Man iteration in games.
Marvel's Spider-Man's fluid traversal and dynamic combat mechanics are designed appropriately for the environment that he exists within and make New York City feel like an open-world jungle gym as a result. However, there is at least one mechanic that Insomniac’s iteration currently lacks that players wish was featured in Marvel’s Spider-Man.
Twitter user Yassin's admiration for Fortnite's iteration of Spider-Man has presented the knowledge of a unique maneuver that is only capable with Fortnite's Web-Shooter item. Instead of pendulum-based or physics-based swinging from multiple consecutive perch points, Fortnite’s web-swinging launches a web-line to a single grapple point that the player then arcs widely around before the player launches back into the air to fire the next web-line. The most interesting part of this web-swinging traversal, however, is found as players web-surf behind vehicles in Fortnite.
Fortnite's web-swinging functions mechanically with moving vehicles, where Yassin shows that Spider-Man can hitch a ride behind a vehicle with a web-line and begin web-surfing through the island's snowy neighborhood streets. Yassin references Sam Raimi's Spider-Man 3 when they cite this maneuver as "websurfing from sm3," from when Tobey Maguire's Spider-Man attempts to catch up to an armored car that Thomas Haden Church's Sandman is attacking. Fans have since shared their appreciation for the maneuver and want it featured in Marvel's Spider-Man.
While Insomniac has not debuted web-surfing to the same degree, there are cinematic QTEs during stolen vehicle pursuits in Marvel's Spider-Man that effectively emulate a similar web-surf animation on a much smaller scale. These brief animations have Spider-Man skid along the road behind a car with webbing attached to it and keels the car to a stop after enough exertion from the player's button-mashing.
Insomniac's regular vehicles move too slowly to adapt Fortnite's traversal maneuver, but it would be difficult to have openly swaying web-surfing in scripted car chase sequences as well due to the claustrophobic nature of New York City traffic and the rigidity of different streets. With Marvel's Spider-Man 2 planned to release sometime in 2023, it is possible that new mechanics and traversal maneuvers such as this may find practical application, though only time will tell if it is eventually considered.
Fortnite is free-to-play on PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S. Marvel’s Spider-Man is available now on PS4 and PS5.