Spider-Man: The Heist DLC Review

Black Cat smiles for the camera in her costume.

Insomniac released the first of three Spider-Man DLCs, giving those of us who have completed the main game some homework to do.

If you couldn’t tell by the thumbnails out there, Spider-Man: The Heist focuses on Black Cat, an anti-hero in the Marvel universe. This DLC provides more context to her past and relationship with Peter Parker. In the main game we did not encounter her, but rather were made to follow her clues leading up to her lair and discovering that she’s back and in business, implying that at this point she had already come and gone from Peter’s life.

Have you ever wanted to be tossed into the middle of Peter Parker’s romantic drama and love life? Well, this is the DLC for you!

As established in the ending of the main game, Peter picks up his relationship with Mary Jane after a 6-month sabbatical, making this encounter with Black Cat more than awkward as she uses her sexuality in any way to get him to do her bidding. If that wasn’t bad enough, we get a little pregnancy scare thrown into the mix.

Oh, no Black Cat has a son!? Is it Peter’s? Stay tuned…

Black Cat pushes up close against Spider-Man

The entirety of the DLC revolves around Peter’s relationship with Mary Jane in juxtaposition with Black Cat pawing all over him. There’s a sense of nostalgia that we’re supposed to pick up on, but for those of you who don’t know about Spider-Man’s love life you’d be missing out on the bulk of the emotion.

Story-wise there isn’t much outside the drama between our precious little love trio. It’s just some banter between Peter and M.J. via phone conversations while all of the cutscenes are dedicated to showing off Black Cat’s fine, fine body.

Essentially the DLC is an extra laundry list of things to do including finding lost paintings and participating in a new mini challenge with Screwball, one of Spider-Man’s psycho villains. Screwball’s challenges, while fun, are stressful due to having to correlate your attacks and knockouts with your psycho-groupie’s streaming equipment. Time your knockouts right, and get extra points for being flashy. That was the general gist anyway. I wasn’t a fan of these ones as I tend to lean towards stealth than I do hand to hand combat. Screwball constantly nagging me in my ear while I tried to fight massive hordes of baddies had me hissing shut up over and over while clutching my controller with a white-knuckled grip.

Screwballs social media stream of Spider-Man fending off escaped convicts.

This DLC did its damn best to really be as aggravating as possible. I figured that there wasn’t much more for me to have to prepare going into the DLC as far as stats and equipment were concerned, being around level 50 seemed sufficient enough. Imagine my surprise when the DLC really power punched me in the gut!

This time around the gameplay beefed up the number of enemies coming at you while also throwing these minigun carrying meatheads into the mix at every opportunity. The entire “final boss” was a literal cluster &*$# that took me a few times to have to complete.

An enemy with a mini gun.

If you’ve got some spare time and are prepared for some challenges, Spider-Man’s: The Heist should take a good afternoon to complete. The story for it as well is far from done as it ends on a cliffhanger and the ever foreboding “to be continued”.

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