I have enough PSN credit for either Nioh Collection or Spiderman Ultimate Edition. Is the Nioh collection worth the upgrade if I have the PS4 versions on disc (w/o DLC)?
I know you didn’t ask about Spider-Man, but I’m gonna throw my three cents in anyway, since most of the opinions I’ve been reading in this thread lately have been positive.
I spent $10 on the DLC-included PS4 version a couple years ago. I don’t regret paying that price or the time I spent on it, but it left me with no desire to play it again or seek out any sequels. The things that set the game apart most from similar Ubisoft-style open world games are the traversal system, which is probably the best thing about the game, and the combat, which is fun with caveats.
The traversal system, while mostly great when you’re just swinging from place to place in the city, isn’t quite accurate enough (in terms of getting to precise spots quickly) to make speedily following a relatively tight path simple, though this is what you have to do in a few mandatory chase sections, as well as several optional map activities. I failed most of those at least a couple times before managing to eke my way through—and many of them I failed several times, which was, as you might imagine, quite frustrating. It doesn’t seem to be a matter of a learning curve, either—I did every single optional activity in the game and DLC, and I never felt like a gained a sufficient level of control over quick and precise movement to do well at those sorts of challenges. I want to stress that getting around outside of these speed challenges feels great—you don’t have to be super precise super quickly for that—there just isn’t a whole lot you can do with it. Some more map activities that made use of it and that weren’t precision speed challenges would have gone a long way to making the game more fun for me.
As for combat, it feels kind of weird at first—or it did to me, anyway—but that
does have a good learning curve, and by the middle of the game it felt good. It does suffer a bit from the same precision issues as traversal, but it’s generally not as big of a deal. The main problem with combat is that by the end of the game there’s just way,
way too much of it. There’s probably a couple groups of enemies in every city block, and by that point in the game they have sniper rifles and rocket launchers that can hit you from a significant distance and do a ton of damage, so it’s hard to avoid them and impossible to ignore them. And that’s not even including all the combat-based map activities at that stage of the game, and there are a ton. It goes from fun to tedious really quick. This is a bit more nitpicky, but the combat system actively encourages you to jump around a lot in a fight, which makes sense, this is a Spider-Man game—except roughly halfway through the game, it introduces a new regular enemy type that actively punishes you for trying to get airborne, and that enemy type gets relatively common after that point. It’s hardly a dealbreaker, but it’s pretty obnoxious.
As for the rest of the game... it’s fine. It’s a pretty typical, though competent, Ubisoft-style open world. Doesn’t do anything groundbreaking. The story is decent enough, though suffers a bit from being in a video game—there’s too many villains for it to be entirely cohesive; there are references to other superheroes in the city (as you’d expect in a Marvel New York), but even in the worst situations in the game you don’t see any trace of them; that kind of thing. It makes sense for the structure of a video game, it’s just a bit nonsense if you stop to think about it. Uh, graphics are fine, and I’m sure they’re better in the remaster. I know they redid Peter’s face in that, not sure if they did anything to any of the others, but all the faces in the PS4 version were pretty uncanny valley. I think it was the animations more than the 3D modeling, but regardless every character in that game just looked kinda yuck to me. The DLC story was pretty garbage. Seemed really thrown together, had some pretty inconsistent characterization, just overall bleh.
Uh, tl;dr:
Traversal is fun but the lack of precision makes the several speed challenges throughout the game annoying at best.
Combat is pretty fun but oh my god there is too frigging much by the end of the game.
Rest of the game is okay. Rate it as good if you’re into Ubisoft-style open world.
DLC sucks.
