Insomniac Games does it again with Spider-Man 2
Spider 2 Men is good!
Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 recently released, and it is excellent. It’s not perfect, nor would I call it game of the year, but it is such a fun time that PlayStation 5 owners would be remiss not to play this one. As a sequel to 2018’s Marvel’s Spider-Man and its 2020 spinoff Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales (what a mouthful of a title), it improves upon the duo’s excellent gameplay and open world, and as the release following 2021’s Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart it continues to prove that Insomniac Games really has mastery over the PlayStation 5 hardware.
A familiar story with a few new twists
Spider-Man 2 follows the stories of Peter and Miles as they struggle with personal issues and the arrival of the hunter Kraven to New York City. Kraven is looking for the ultimate hunt and believes he will find it somewhere in the concrete jungle, and Peter and Miles oppose him as he hunts down former villains. Meanwhile, Peter’s old friend Harry Osborn has returned, miraculously cured of whatever terminal disease ailed him previously, and offers Peter the position of co-founder of the Emily May foundation, so they can “heal the world”, which leads into the symbiote plotline. Miles struggles with writing his college admission essay and his hatred of Martin Li.
The first half of the game that focuses on Kraven’s hunt and later Peter’s Symbiote suit is fine, nothing too crazy but serviceable and was enjoyable enough to keep me playing. There’s prison breaks and Coney Island attacks and I had a good time playing through it, alternating between Miles and Peter as the story dictated. I think most people know how the Symbiote Spider-Man story goes at this point so for the most part I was able to predict most of the story beats, but once Venom showed up in the story and replaced Kraven as the main villain, I was actually kind of surprised with how the plot progressed, they really went wild with it. Kraven isn’t as exciting as Venom is so it’s not as if it’s a huge loss when Venom becomes the focus over him, but honestly, I wish we had seen more of Kraven, he ends up taking a backseat to his henchmen most of the time. Still, the Venom half of this game is so nutty, and I was having a blast in the later sections of the game. When Venom wasn’t on screen, I was asking, “Where’s Venom?”
Let’s talk about Peter Parker in this game. I thought Peter’s relationship with Harry was written pretty well. They really did feel like friends reconnecting for the first time in ages. Peter's relationship with Mary Jane felt off. They felt really awkward as a couple, and I preferred the will-they-won’t-they of the first game. Peter’s corruption by the symbiote is fantastic and Yuri Lowenthal does an excellent job with his mean Peter voice, coming across as actually intimidating at times. (While we’re here, essentially all of the voice acting in this game is good. I’m trying to think of a bad performance, and nobody comes to mind.) There are some fun flashback sequences where we get to play as high school Peter and see his horrible nerd haircut, and those are a joy to play. Hard to be disappointed here as a Peter fan.
Miles Morales feels like he was done dirty. Peter gets this plot about being corrupted by a powerful alien suit, and Miles gets a plot about struggling to write a 500-word essay and his sudden hatred of Martin Li. The essay thing first - why was this a plotline over the entire game? This should’ve been something solved in the first hour or so. I should not have been hearing “I gotta finish my essay!” past the halfway point. I get he’s a high school student trying to figure out who he is, but there has to have been a better way to explore that. His other plotline, revolving around Martin Li and how he hates him felt so strange to me, because on paper it makes sense, he should harbor some resentment towards Martin Li for getting his dad killed, but something about it just didn’t work for me at all. I don’t even remember if Martin Li is mentioned in the 2020 Miles Morales game, he definitely wasn’t a major part at least, so for Miles to suddenly become fixated on this felt so strange to me. I’m disappointed with how he was handled in this game, especially considering he is the co-lead.
The main story is overall solid and fun to play through, there’s no stinker missions here (even the Mary Jane levels in this game are tolerable), and the side content is well designed too. Miles and Peter each get their own side missions, and Peter’s “The Flame” side quest is especially good. There are also the Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man app missions where you get to experience smaller scale stories and I ended up enjoying these quite a bit. There’s one in particular I found interesting where you play as Miles’ deaf friend Hayley. The audio is extremely muffled during this sequence, and we see emoticons appear above her character model since she can’t vocalize her thoughts like the Spider-Men do. Insomniac went for quality over quantity here as there’s significantly less filler content in this game compared to the PS4 title (Screwball is happily absent), and it makes for a more focused experience.
Overall, I’m happy with the main story and the side content. It’s good stuff. I don’t like the narrative as much as I did the first game’s story, but I did like it. Miles deserves better, though.
PlayStation 5 is put through its paces
The big thing this console generation has brought us is ray tracing, but for the majority of titles, ray tracing is limited to Fidelity modes running at 30 frames per second, at least ray tracing in any way that the average person could notice. When developing Spider-Man 2, Insomniac Games decided that limiting ray tracing to Fidelity mode was a coward’s move, and so their performance mode has almost the full suite of graphical features that its Fidelity counterpart does. You miss out on some more advanced ray tracing reflections, and you do take a hit in resolution and crowd density, but for the most part you a very comparable experience at 60 frames. That being said, I did play through the game on Fidelity mode, which runs at 40 fps on 120 Hz enabled monitors. I normally opt for higher framerates over graphical fidelity, but I thought this game looked too good to sacrifice any graphical features.
And this game is a very graphically stunning video game. In the screenshot above, look at the way the lighting from the sun reflects on the pier and the buildings to the east. Look at the smoke trailing the boat, and the subtle reflection of the buildings in the river. The shadow work is very impressive too- notice that the buildings facing us in the distance are darker, while the sides of them are illuminated. These all combine for a stunning impression of New York City as you swing through it at blistering speeds. I didn’t even mention the reflections of the skyline and Spider-Man himself in the building windows, which look so good when viewed up close.
It’s more than the open world that looks pretty; indoor environments also look fantastic. In this second screenshot of Symbiote Spidey petting a tiger (it makes sense in the story, I promise) note the way the lighting is darker in the corners of the room, where light from the ceiling doesn’t reach as well. Notice the wooden textures of the bookshelves and the backwall, and the metallic, gold plating on the front of the table. The characters themselves are also so visually impressive; strands of fur on the tiger look distinctive from their neighbors, as do most hair effects in this game (especially on Fidelity). The Symbiote suit on Peter, as does Venom’s “skin” (is that what it is? Skin?) has this disgusting, gooey texture to it, like you could sink your fingers into it.
It’s not the graphical fidelity that awes me most about this superhero game, but its spectacular set piece design. In the opening fight against Sandman, Miles gets tossed across the city by Sandman, from one edge of the map to the other, then he zooms back to the fight by slingshotting himself with his webs. This isn’t some prerendered cutscene though - this PlayStation is just powerful enough to load the part of the map needed that quickly. I won’t spoil specifics, but a later chase in the game puts the same technology used in Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart’s rift system to use, which was just a crazy mission to play through. There are a few set pieces that are more subdued in scope but still wowed me just the same, such as one halfway through the game where you play as Mary Jane trapped inside a dark, collapsed tunnel.
For the last 3 years there haven’t been many games that have really wowed me from a technical standpoint and have made me think “this is why I bought a PlayStation 5.” Many of the best games released since the PlayStation 5’s launch have also been available on PS4 (GOW Ragnarök, Elden Ring, etc.). This is a game that makes me think “this is why I bought a PlayStation 5.” It really does feel a next generation experience.
Spider-Man and his gameplay pull no punches
Enough about the stuff that nobody cares about like “graphics” or “narrative”- at the end of the day, what matters most in a Spider-Man game is how much it is to play as Spider-Man. And how much fun is it to play Spider-Man 2? Well, like Spider-Man from 2018, it’s a lotta fun.
Worst part out of the way first: stealth. It didn’t really feel too exciting to me in the PS4 game, and it’s more or less the same thing here. There’s a new gadget that lets you create web lines that you can trapeze across, but these encounters still end up being really easy. There’s no real punishment for failing stealth besides "now you have to fight normally.” Still, stealth isn’t super important in this game so it being worse in scope compared to regular combat isn’t that big of a deal to me.
The hand-to-hand combat where Spider-Man can get loud is a lot of fun. Players of the previous two games should find the systems to be very familiar here. You can punch bad guys, evade them, launch them in the air, and shoot webs at them. Spidey also has access to a new parry mechanic which allows you to keep your fight momentum going, where otherwise you would have to evade and take a second to reassess the situation. The number of web gadgets has been trimmed down from 8 to 4, which I know some might not be a fan of; impact web was my favorite gadget to use in Spidey 2018 and it’s gone in this game. Suit powers are no longer customizable as they were in the first game; Peter now has Symbiote Surge and Miles has his Mega Venom Blast. These are stronger than anything in the first game, but I miss the customizability. If you liked fighting goons in the first game, you’ll like it here, but I don’t think the Parry mechanic, as cool as it is, will be enough to win over new fans. Still, if the combat ain’t broke, there’s no need to fix it.
The absolute best part of these Spider-Man games, without a single doubt, is the web swinging. If the combat in this game was replaced with a series of dialogue trees with options like “Spider-Man punches a guy”, I would still recommend these games off the web-swinging alone. It is that much fun to just pull R2 and swing through New York. But you can do more than that! You can web zip to points by pulling both L2 and R2, then tap X to immediately launch back into the air, you can do a momentum carrying aerial web zip while swinging with X, you can web swing into a wall and keep holding R2 to run alongside it; that’s just the basics of it, and you have a lot of control over how Peter and Miles move through the city. The biggest change from the 2018 and 2020 games is the addition of the Web Wings, which you unlock pretty early in the game and allow you to glide through the air just by pressing Triangle. The web wings allow you to traverse through the building challenged Queens and over water without having to stick close to bridges. They’re pretty sweet, and you can really zoom with this new toy. Supposedly Insomniac was experimenting with the web wings on PlayStation 4 when developing the first game, but with how fast you move while using them in this game it’s hard for me to imagine how they would even work on that console’s old HDD.
Almost everything about the Insomniac Spider-Man series feels very authentic to the character, which is the main draw of playing these games. The two playable Spider-Men control like butter. You know what they say, Insomniac Games’ Spider-Man 2 makes you feel like Spider-Man.
Best in class?
I think most people, without even playing Spider-Man 2, will assume that at its worst it’s still a very good game. And I’d agree! But the question some might have: how does it compare to its contemporaries? In terms of graphical fidelity, it’s going to be hard to beat, but these are games, which we primarily play for gameplay. So, let’s discuss!
Is it better than Marvel’s Spider-Man and Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales? I think this is a yes. I think you could debate back and forth whether the 2020 Miles game was better than the 2018 Peter game: Miles may be shorter, but it trims a lot of the fat from its predecessor, while maybe you prefer the mission design and the story of Peter’s adventure. (For what it’s worth, I think I’d say I prefer the 2018 game.) Spider-Man 2 is really the best of both worlds here. The traversal has been improved, the combat is just as fun, stealth is… better, and it looks so much more visually impressive. The main reason you’d play Spider-Man or Miles Morales at this point is if you wanted to replay the story of either of those games. (Which is probably worth doing!)
The main thing this game lacks compared to Spider-Man on PS4 though is freshness. Spidey PS4’s open world, its characters and story, they all felt like such a breath of fresh air, especially after a long drought of excellent superhero games whose titles didn’t begin with “Batman: Arkham.” Spider-Man 2 is great, for sure, but replicating that feeling I got pulling R2 to swing for the first time in the PS4 title was going to be impossible.
Is it better than the Batman: Arkham series? This is a tough one and I think it really comes down to preference. There are definitely things each series does better than the other. For one, I’d say the stealth in Batman: Arkham is much more fleshed out and rewarding. Spider-Man can use a web-line ability to create new vantage points, but his toolset is still really barebones compared to Batman’s, and the punishment for breaking your stealth is just transitioning to a regular combat encounter- I don’t even remember if there’s a part of the game where stealth is mandatory. In the Arkham series however, Batman’s foes in Predator sequences are all armed and can easily kill you if you’re not careful. Spidey’s foes will happily fall for another ledge takedown, while Batman’s enemies will adapt to your over reliance on one gadget. Top this off with more intelligent enemy AI in Batman, and the stealth is so much more exciting. As for the combat, I think they’re comparable enough to where this is a preference thing, but for Freeflow combat in Arkham Knight is hard to top. The biggest advantage Spider-Man has over Batman, and this is a major one, is how much fun his traversal is. Yeah, gliding around Gotham is great, but swinging around New York? C’mon, you can’t beat that.
Personally, I’d say every Spider-Man game is better than Arkham Asylum and Origins, while Arkham Knight is better than Miles Morales and 2018. (Yes, I like the Batmobile.) Maybe Spider-Man 2 is better than Arkham Knight? I’d have to replay Knight again to decide. I still think Arkham City tops them all, though.
Is it better than Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart? Insomniac’s most recent release prior to Spider-Man 2 was a good time and a graphical and technical showcase for the PlayStation 5, and the Rift technology made possible by the PS5’s SSD is one of the highlights of the game. That same fast-loading SSD and ray-tracing technology is put to use here in New York though, and I think this game is more fun to play than Ratchet. Rift Apart is still a fun platformer though.
The verdict / TL; DR:
Overall, I would say that Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 is a must play for PlayStation 5 owners and an excellent sequel, improving upon the foundation of the previous two Spider-Man games with improved traversal, a bigger city to play in, and efficient use of the PlayStation 5 hardware. It’s a graphical and technical showcase for the system, and most importantly, a very fun video game in its own right. It’s one of the better games I’ve played this year, and I can’t wait to see what Insomniac does next. Pick this one up if you have a PS5.