The Taskmaster is easily the toughest boss in Insomniac’s newest Spider-Man title, both because of his ability to perfectly copy Spidey’s combat style and because of the numerous challenges you’ll need to complete to get a chance to truly slug it out with one of Marvel’s deadliest mercenaries.

The challenges themselves fall into four categories, and you’ll be able to get your standard gold, silver, and bronze rewards based on how you score in each challenge. These challenges also pay out challenge tokens, which are the key to getting your hands on the final upgrades for some of Spidey’s most powerful suits and gadgets.

So, let’s talk about how to complete the Taskmaster’s challenges so you can finish fleshing out your gear and get your hands on the real prize, the Master of Masters trophy.

Stealth Challenges

Stealth challenges are probably the easiest to complete once you understand how scoring works. Essentially speed is important, but not nearly as important as chaining together stealth takedowns and not getting caught.

Most of the stealth challenges have a kind of soft route you can follow that allows you to seamlessly target enemies as you clear the area without waiting long for patrols to wander off. We say soft route because it’s difficult to tell exactly where this route is for each challenge and there’s lots of room for improvisation, but the general rule of thumb is that if you have to wait for someone to get into position for longer than a few seconds than you should probably start looking for someone else to take out.

Speed is key because by and large you get your biggest score bonus for completing the challenge quickly, but at the same time it’s almost more important to focus on chaining together, quick, precise stealth takedowns without getting caught.

Chaining these takedowns together is important because it stacks up to a combo multiplier at the end of the challenge that can make or break a run. The rule of thumb is that you want to try and chain two to three takedowns together in about a 10-second window whenever possible. Fortunately, this does include takedowns from gadgets as well, so quickly using your impact webs and trip mines to chain together several quick takedowns is essential for maximizing your score.

It’s worth mentioning that your trip mines can be attached to enemies as well as walls and surfaces. This means that you can use them like a bit of a delayed impact web that will lightly alert enemies in the area for a quick takedown.

That said, trip mines don’t activate immediately, and often won’t detonate until whoever you attach them to moves enough to trigger the sensor. With that in mind try to use them from a place where you can safely duck behind cover or on a guard that’s already on the move. Alternatively, you can stick them to a guard that’s actively looking at another guard and when they react it’ll stick the two together for a quick double takedown.

Drone Challenges

Drone challenges are easily the most difficult challenges on the list, and require both precision, timing, and an incredible mastery of web slinging to pull off at all, much less to bring home the gold with.

As far as scoring goes there are only two important things to keep in mind, speed and your combo multiplier. Not only do you need to make it from point A to point B, but you also need to hit every single spy camera along the route to maximize your combo modifier.

As a result, getting gold is all about learning the route and executing it precisely while still whittling away at your total time. These can be incredibly frustrating, but it gets better once you learn to relax and focus on precisely hitting each camera station rather than rushing from point to point. The routes are already designed to allow you to move through the course at high speeds, so it’s often more important on following the route created by the developer than focusing strictly on speed.

It’s also worth mentioning that if you hold L2 in the air that you’ll both slow down time and engage targeting for your zip to point ability. This lets you precisely target certain zip points when a camera’s perched on top of a light post or something similar and gives you more time to think about how you want to move during difficult portions of each route.

Additionally, you’ll sometimes need to press circle to air break, and R3 will let you immediately fall straight down faster than you would normally. This is useful for some of the more difficult challenges that have you wasting precious seconds falling through the air. As a final tip, when you’re getting close to the drone itself at the end of the mission spamming the triangle button will allow you to do a point zip attack that’ll get you to the drone faster than trying to swing their alone.

Bomb Challenges

Bomb challenges have Spidey sprinting across the map after a series of bombs Taskmaster has placed throughout the city. Once you arrive, you’ll need to web grab the bomb and toss it into the sky while shooting it with your web shooters to keep it from hurting civilians when it detonates.

These challenges are all about speed, and there’s not much more to it than making it from point A to point B as fast as possible and then moving on to the next objective. It’s important to always target the closest bomb on the map, rather than trying to take a more circuitous route, but other than that you’re free to choose whatever route makes the most sense to you.

If you’re looking to shave some time for the gold medal, we recommend trying to throw each bomb towards the next bomb you’ll need to defuse so that you come out of the quick time event facing the direction you’re going to need to run next.

It’s also important to note that you can usually point zip to a spot directly beside each bomb where you can immediately grab and throw the bomb. It’s also worth occasionally holding L2 mid-air to slow down time and engage the point zip targeting so that you’re absolutely positive that you zip to the right spot.

Combat Challenges

These are probably the most straightforward challenge out of the bunch, and your goal is just to beat the crap out of several waves of enemies as fast as possible.

For higher scores you’ll need to string together a high combo multiplier throughout the battle and you’ll also get a small bonus to your score by making sure your health is full by the end of the fight.

For the most part these battles are all about maximizing your DPS by using your gadgets and suit ability to their full potential. The second the battle starts it’s always worth throwing out a couple of spider drones, then immediately using your impact webs and trip mines to throw any enemies into nearby walls and obstacles.

It’s also worth it to find a good AoE combo for clearing out big groups of enemies. The web blossom suit ability is great for challenges when enemies are in generally cramped quarters, but if that’s on cooldown you can always throw a few web bombs and then spam your concussive blast to throw webbed enemies into walls and obstacles for quick takedowns.

Try to save your focus bars for taking down brutes or other beefy enemies, and if you’re having trouble consider equipping the webbed striker and battle tech suit mods for the bonus focus as well as scavenger for bonus gadget refills mid combat.

Bringing Taskmaster to Task

Before we dive into the actual Taskmaster battle, it’s important to note that you fight the Taskmaster twice, first after gathering a few of the challenge tokens, and then a second time after completing every challenge with a gold (spectacular) rating. You only get the Master of Masters trophy for beating him the second time, so that’s the one that really matters.

Taskmaster himself is a bit of a doozey in terms of bosses because he’s packing a nearly impenetrable block ability, all of Spidey’s lightning quick combos, and a few tricks that will rip more aggressive melee centric players to shreds.

Both fights are pretty tough, but there’s no doubt that the Taskmaster cranks it up a notch on the second round. What makes it worse is that the Taskmaster has no problem hunting and kidnapping you for each battle, which means that if you’re not properly prepared you’ll need to do some crafting and that sort of thing in the middle of the fight. So, we recommend taking a chance to fill up your gadgets before finishing off your final challenge so that you know for sure you’re walking into the fight with plenty of tools to work with.

For gear we went with the standard battle focus suit ability for the extra health mid battle, followed by web striker, gel padding, and discharge power cells for suit mods. Web striker gives you bonus focus for web attacks, gel padding reduces the Taskmaster’s considerable melee damage, and discharge power cells gives you a temporary bonus to damage for nailing a perfect dodge.

Which brings us to the Taskmaster fight itself, which is just several different flavors of the same advice: Dodge, a lot. It sounds a little dumb, but Taskmaster’s defense is pretty much impenetrable, so the only chance you have to pack on some damage is after nailing a perfect dodge then flipping around and webbing him or slamming his with an electric web. Frontal attacks are useless so take things slow, defensive, and focus on watching Taskmaster and Peter’s spider sense for indications of what attack he’s going to pull off next.

Throwing items in the environment, deploying spider drones, and using your focus to keep yourself constantly topped off on health are also great strategies, and we highly recommend doing them any chance you get, but the rule of thumb is to focus on pulling off as many perfect dodges as you physically can. Otherwise, you’ll likely get intimately familiar with the many ways Taskmaster has copied your finisher moves and melee combos.

As far as attacks go, keep your eye out for any time Taskmaster hops into the air because that signals he’s about to pull off a ground pound attack in a small radius around him. If you’re near the edge of the circle you can dodge out of it, but otherwise you’ll need to either take the hit or try to web-sling away.

Keep up the defensive pressure with a lot of counters and you’ll steadily whittle away his health and walk away with the win. The Master of Masters trophy will finally be yours along with a secret cutscene that teases what we might see in a potential DLC or Spider-Man sequel.