<\/div>This content is a little repetitive, but it’s fun and playful and has a bit of a twist at the end. I’ve always assumed that Black Cat was just Catwoman with the serial numbers filed off. I mean, they’re both sexy female cat burglars with “cat” in their name with a black leather costume who have an ongoing relationship with a major superhero that swings between flirtatious and antagonistic. Catwoman is a popular character that predates Black Cat by almost 40 years, so it’s understandable that people might assume that Black Cat is just a ripoff. But the truth is that she was originally devised as a foil for Spider-Woman<\/a>. While I haven’t read the Black Cat stories myself, I get the sense that she wasn’t a conscious attempt to recreate Catwoman. Rather, once writers had Spider-Man facing against a woman, they were naturally pulled in the direction of Catwoman by simple convenience.<\/p>\n Hey, we’ve got this sexy lady going against Spider-Man. Why not have them flirt? We can’t actually have Spider-Man date a thief because that’s incompatible with his values. We can’t have her stop being a thief because then she stops being interesting. So I guess we just have them flirt without the relationship going anywhere. If that gets boring, we can make it seem like maybe she’s going to go straight, but then she turns back to crime. She can constantly skate the line between good and bad to keep the reader guessing.<\/i><\/p>\n Spider-Man has to explore the city, investigating places where Black Cat has pulled heists. At each location he finds a cute little cat plushie. Spider-Man tells the police about it and they apparently go out and collect the plushie as evidence.<\/p>\n Once you’ve found all the locations, Spider-Man is able to use his computer to look at all the robbery locations and determine the location of her secret hideout. Yes, that’s silly. Whatever.<\/p>\n In her hideout, he finds all the loot she stole. It turns out she didn’t want the loot at all. She left all the stolen goods behind on purpose so Spider-Man could recover them.<\/p>\n Those plushies you’ve been rounding up were actually a trap. They had computer chips in them. Once they were all gathered up, they networked and took down the police security from the inside. Once the security was down, Black Cat slipped in and recovered her costume and gear from the evidence room. It’s a fun twist, and plays into her playfully ambiguous alignment.<\/p>\n At the end Yuri laughs at Spider-Man, claiming that Black Cat “played him”Oh, so that’s what the “play me” message was all about at the start. That’s cute.<\/span>. I get that this was the intent of the twist, although it didn’t work for me. Spider-Man gave the location of the plushies to the cops, but he never handled them himself and securing the evidence lock-up is not his job. Still, I liked the sentiment behind it.<\/p>\n I hate this over-serious skull-faced tryhard. He leaves challenges for Spider-Man around the city. Some are timed races where you have to round up and disable bombs before they go off. Some are checkpoint races where you need to pass through fixed waypoints. Others are timed fights or timed stealth encounters.<\/p>\n The challenges aren’t bad, but Taskmaster takes all of the fun out of it. His dialog is one-note and he doesn’t have anything clever to say. Spider-Man doesn’t even do a great job of poking fun at him.<\/p>\n Once you complete enough challenges you get to fight Taskmaster himself, and his boss fights are even worse. In a good boss fight, the game will push you to explore the full range of abilities and powers. When Batman faced off against Mr. Freeze in Arkham City<\/i><\/a>, the game never allowed you to use the same trick twice. The result was that the designer rewarded you for fully exploring the gameplay systems. That would be a brilliant way to handle Taskmaster. His gimmick is that he can learn any move just by seeing it performed. The game designer could use this to justify why you can’t ever use the same trick twice.<\/p>\n Instead he’s just magically immune to all but two kinds of attacks. Don’t worry, the game won’t make you figure it out. You just need to read the on-screen prompt telling you to throw objects at him because your punches and webbing and gadgets won’t work. It’s a shallow fight against a shallow guy and I’d ignore it entirely except you need to complete some Taskmaster content to get access to the late-game upgrades.<\/p>\nTaskmaster<\/h3>\n
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