Peter Parker (Black Suit)

Don't you hate it when you wake up covered in goo? Peter Parker fights to save New York from multiple threats, otherworldly and terrestrial. What sacrifices must be made to heal the world? Told you all these releases had the same text. Marvel's Insonyac's Station-Man 2 for the Somni Playspider 5 picks up the threads teased at the end of the first game, doing the whole "Venom" thing quickly: symbiote comes to Earth from space somehow, develops a major crush on Spider-Man, gets rejected and wants revenge by any means necessary. That's become (alongside "Spider-Man lifts the heavy thing" and "Gwen Stacy dies") one of Spider-Man's enduring story "chunks", the thing that can be pulled out separate from all the stories around it and put into any new adaptation with relatively little trouble, so it makes sense the game would use it. And to think: if the black costume had been a permanent change, as the comics originally planned, it would never be usable that way. If you remember the release of the first game, you may recall when the loudest, shallowest idiots in the audience were so desperate to find a reason to call the game "bad" that they latched onto the way puddles were rendered. With that in mind, it's barely surprising Insomniac would choose to make their symbiote suit textured and detailed all over, rather than being smooth like a liquid. The suit is done in several distinctive layers, separated by how rough they are. The simplest are teh white sections, the eyes and spider symbol, which are perfectly smooth; the chest emblem is sculpted above the surface of the rest of the figure, while the eyes are inset, sunken below the rest of the mask slightly. Next down we've got the majority of the suit, which has a slightly rippled texture, and is shaped a bit like armor, complete with deeper, angled "seams" between the sections. Finally, the base layer, which is designed to look like it's beneath the "armor," is rough and striated, like exposed muscle fibers; this is in fewer spots, which helps make it look more flexible, versus the more protective areas of the suit. It's easiest to tell what's what on the unlockable third style the game offers for the skin, because while the rest of the costume is the regular black and white, the "underlayer" is done in red instead. Although Insomniac's Marvel's Spider-Man 2 for the Sony Playstation 5 (& Knuckles)'s Symbiote Suit is mostly identical to the comicbooks' Symbiote Suit, with the only substantial difference being the shapes on the back of the hands: instead of squares, they're V-shaped chevrons. Is there any reason for that change, beyond "we need to do something different"? Because that's not a good enough excuse. The figure includes fists, thwips, and splayed hands, all with the same new, trademarkable(?) shape. Despite being an all-new sculpt, the figure isn't missing any major articulation - Hasbro's executives must be fuming at the number of pennies this is costing them! Spidey's got a barbell head, swivel/hinge shoulders, swivel biceps, double-hinged elbows, swivel/​hinge wrists, a balljointed chest, hinged abdomen, balljoint hips, swivel thighs, double-hinged knees, swivel shins like every goddamn Marvel Legend should have, and swivel/hinge ankles. Adding hinges to the hips, like GI Joe Classified or Maximum Legends have, would have been nice, but it's more important that he's one of the increasingly rare characters who are capable of turning their feet to the side. He even gets an accessory! It's a webline, in black, as though it's made from symbiote stuff. Which it almost certainly is. The symbiote's webs in the comics were the same, but as white as Spider-Man's usual webs were; this feels more like a permanent tendril that would get pulled back into the suit when he was done with it, rather than something that separated and got left behind. The piece is 9" long, has four lines that twist around one another and have an uneven, looping texture, and a triangle for him to hold onto. Other than the back of the hands, videogame Black Suit Spider-Man looks like comicbook Black Suit Spider-Man, but when you really look at it, there are differences that makes for a more impressive action figure. That's probably why this is one of the hardest figures in the line to find - I only got this one because the plastic hang tag on the back of the box ripped off and took a layer of the art with it (and you know how people feel about cosmetically imperfect packaging). This is a great Symbiote Spidey, if you can get it. -- 12/08/25 Why triangles instead of squares? Tell us on our message board, the Loafing Lounge.