When comparing Marvel's Spider-Man vs NieR: Automata, the Slant community recommends NieR: Automata for most people. In the question“What are the best story rich games on PC?” NieR: Automata is ranked 38th while Marvel's Spider-Man is ranked 69th. The most important reason people chose NieR: Automata is:
The combat in NieR: Automata is fantastic. It has a hack-and-slash feel to it, with an emphasis on agility and showy acrobatics. With the fluid and responsive controls, you can switch seamlessly from using swift attacks with your weapon to devastatingly strong attacks as you combo them together. You also use customizable ranged missile attacks from your personal robot pod, such as powerful laser beams or a giant hammer attack. It can be difficult to win battles sometimes, especially on the harder gameplay settings, but it's worthwhile to keep at it and watch yourself progress and improve.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Swinging around Manhattan as Spider-Man is tons of fun
Traversing across buildings with Spider-Man's web-slinging ability is thrilling. Zipping across town from quest marker to quest marker is quick and convenient: with simple aiming and button presses, you aim your web at the top corner of a skyscraper, for example, and then you swing through other buildings and across the busy streets to get there. Keeping up this momentum lets you get from one place to another in record time. The rumble feature and the rattling camera effects from your boots in speed give you the perfect amount of feedback to help you feel like you're really in Spider-Man's shoes. It's so fun that you might find yourself swinging from place to place for no reason, just to have that thrill.
Pro Interesting story that shows the human side of Spider-Man's life
The game's story is pretty impactful, showing what happens behind-the-scenes in Spider-Man's life outside of his positive and optimistic superhero persona. While you do get to see plenty of his typical silly snarks as with his mask on, what happens when he's just Peter with his friends is equally as interesting, if not more so. You get to watch as he gets to know other side characters in New York City, like his friends and his eventual enemies, all of whom work either with him or against him. Everyone has their own fleshed out, personal struggles, showcasing the actual people who both help and fight Spider-Man in his goals to save the city from the villains who come up throughout the 15-20 hour story.
It's a surprisingly riveting plot that goes much deeper than the comics and movies, and it's absolutely worth experiencing for both Spider-Man fans as well as players getting to know him for the first time.
Pro Strategic and engaging hand-to-hand combat
Fighting against goons on the ground is a solid experience that keeps your attention for the most part. Since Spider-Man can't take many hits before going down, that's all the more reason to keep an eye on exactly which buttons you press. Chaining combos is your best bet, rewarding you with fancy and flashy acrobatics that are great to watch as well as a good deal of invincibility as you take down one bad guy after another. Boss battles are great too, with lots of excellent cinematic fights that really do a great job of showing off the whole city with their setpieces.
When you're overwhelmed in battle, you can make use of Spider-Man's nifty gadgets to help you out, like a drone you can use to get rid of anyone who's giving you too much of a hard time. Once you get the hang of using combos and gadgets to your advantage, things can get a little repetitive, but you can always up the difficulty if you're looking for more of a challenge.
Pro Impressive visuals
Spider-Man is a really great-looking game. The skyscrapers across Manhattan in New York City gleam in the sunlight and moonlight, the streets are densely packed with shining cars and busy civilians, and the character models are all realistic enough to believe. Swinging around the city with Spider-Man's web is even more fluid with the way the camera zooms in and out to show you a full vantage point of the city, filled with tons of details that make you feel like you have a real bird's-eye view of the area. Everything has an incredible amount of polish and doesn't get old to look at.
Pro Great game, based on Marvel Universe
Pro Fast-paced, action-packed combat
The combat in NieR: Automata is fantastic. It has a hack-and-slash feel to it, with an emphasis on agility and showy acrobatics. With the fluid and responsive controls, you can switch seamlessly from using swift attacks with your weapon to devastatingly strong attacks as you combo them together. You also use customizable ranged missile attacks from your personal robot pod, such as powerful laser beams or a giant hammer attack. It can be difficult to win battles sometimes, especially on the harder gameplay settings, but it's worthwhile to keep at it and watch yourself progress and improve.
Pro Unique storytelling with a real emotional impact
NieR: Automata's outlook on storytelling is incredibly special. To get the full experience, you have to run multiple playthroughs of the game, each of which offers a new experience and perspective. Your world view of the story events and characters expands drastically as you complete each playthrough, playing on your expectations to help you develop a deeper emotional bond with the protagonists and become invested in their plight.
Things take a real turn on your third playthrough, putting you on an emotional roller coaster all the way to the true ending. The plot twists and knocks on the fourth wall elevate the story to a truly unique place. Getting all the way to the very end can be a religious experience from how much heart and meaning you discover in the symbolism.
Pro It's got a hauntingly beautiful environment
NieR: Automata is set in a post-apocalyptic landscape after Earth has been overrun by hostile machines, and the artists really nailed what that would feel like. Abandoned and overgrown cities litter the landscape along with old refineries, graveyards, and eerie forests. When you add the beautiful soundtrack to the experience, it fills you with a bittersweet mix of loneliness and hope.
Pro Varied genre-spanning gameplay elements
NieR: Automata has different types of gameplay to keep things interesting. From the very start, you're on an on-rails bullet hell section, and then you switch over to the more traditional action RPG style of fast-paced combat. Things change up again not long after with some side-scrolling platforming from a 2D view. Later on in the story, there's a hacking mini-game where you navigate a tiny ship through a short puzzle, with the music changing to a charming retro sound to fit the theme and mood. This is a game that doesn't stay boxed in a single genre.
Pro An incredible amount of content
Outside of the main story, there's plenty of optional content to dive into. The side quests are the best way to get to know the characters and lore of the world, with some of them giving clever and subtle foreshadowing of the game's most critical events. There are also weapons to collect and upgrade, each of which offer nice little tidbits of lore after you get them to max level. And after reaching a certain point in the story, you get access to Chapter Select that lets you go back and replay whatever you want. You can easily spend 60+ hours exploring the world and still have much more to do.
Pro Gorgeous, ethereal soundtrack with amazing vocals
NieR: Automata's music is out of this world. It's so stunning and elegant in a way that nothing else can really live up to. The soundtrack manages to emotionalize the game through music, from the action-packed tracks with hard-hitting wind instruments and percussion, to the softer, somber songs that encapsulate the hauntingly beautiful environments and story moments you encounter. Vocals in the lore's indescribable language makes the music even more memorable, adding to the ethereal quality of the sound. This soundtrack is definitely one that you can go back to again and again without getting sick of it.
Cons
Con Weak side content
Aside from some fun time trial challenges, most of the side quests and other optional content are pretty boring and repetitive. Many of them are standard quests, like going to fetch pigeons or beating up random enemies. They don't feel anywhere near as engaging as the main story, either. With how standard and procedural they are, they're just there to fill up space and let you earn some rewards to customize Spider-Man's outfit with. Not to mention, it's jarring going from the tense and important story missions to these throwaway side quests, like you're wasting time.
Con Limited open world
Even though NieR: Automata is technically an open world game, it doesn't always feel like it. It's more that there's a big open space in the center of the ruined city you explore, with branches that lead off to vastly different environments, like a desert, a village, and a few other places. These locations aren't that spacious, either, and it's a bit of a stretch to even imagine all of these places being so close together in the first place. It's not too much of an issue as long as you find the story and combat engaging enough.
Con Second playthrough can get repetitive
Once you get to Route B, your second playthrough, you may find that too much is the same. There are some big differences, such as the new way you get to see things play out, but a lot of it rehashes Route A, your first playthrough. There's a ton of hacking you have to do as well, which gets pretty boring after repeating it over and over again. But if you stick with it, Route C and onward are absolutely worth the time spent getting to that point.
Con Some boring fetch quests
The pacing gets messed up when you're forced to run certain fetch quests near the start of the game. This is somewhat forgivable after the fun and action-packed introductory level, but the quests themselves are still a drag to play through. Some of the side quests can also boil down to the same thing. Even though these quests give a lot of useful information about the world, they're not all that fulfilling, and you may dread having to repeat them when playing through the game again.
Con Buggy on PC
Some players complain about the game crashing, freezing, their save files mysteriously disappearing, and more. As of June 2018, over a year after the game's initial release, there is still no patch to fix these problems. Not everyone on PC will have these bugs, but it's still quite prevalent. If you continually run into issues, your best bet is to find a mod or play the console versions instead of waiting on an official patch that may never happen.