MARVEL’S SPIDER-MAN 2

Spidey is back! After 2022's Spider-Man Remastered and Spider-Man: Miles Morales, the world's most popular superhero returns... with a partner! In the new game from Insomniac Games (developer) and Nixxes (responsible for porting to PC), Peter Parker and Miles Morales share the duties of defending New York City from all manner of villains while trying to put the traumatic events of their past behind them and put their lives back on track. And while their intentions are always good, in practice it turns out that you can't have it all. Especially when the threats are both external and internal.

Insomniac has decided to go ahead and adapt some of the best stories from the comics and introduce both the infamous Kraven The Hunter and the symbiote! As you can imagine, things are going to be particularly difficult for Peter and Miles this time around as they become targets in both their personal and superhero lives. The developers have shown great courage by taking on amazing comic storylines such as Kraven's Last Hunt and the Symbiote Saga as there was a great risk that the inevitable comparisons would be unfavorable to the game. And while I certainly won't claim that the game's storytelling is equally good, I can say with certainty that the writers' effort was very good and their respect for the original material was evident. Marvel's Spider-Man 2's campaign has all the elements that make a quality Spider-Man story, with the sacrifices required in the life of a superhero at its core. The only thing I'd like to mention as a point of critique is that the escalation of events from a certain point onwards happens a little faster than I would have liked, and could have been given a little more time to allow some events to breathe, even if it slowed the pace down a bit.

Apart from the writing aspect, the presentation is naturally of a very high standard. Acting, voiceovers, direction, music, everything contributes harmoniously to creating the right atmosphere and achieving immersion. In fact, the attention to detail extends to both the main campaign and the various sidequests scattered across the open map of New York. Speaking of the sidequests which was one of the elements I criticized in the first game, I noticed some progress this time around. The 'ubisoftey' activities are fewer and several of the sidequests have mini questlines. In fact, the developers have clearly analyzed the criticism they received and made sure to reduce the quick-time events and significantly improve some of the more tedious missions such as the base missions that forced the player to face multiple waves of enemies with no margin for error. I wouldn't say that Marvel's Spider-Man 2 revolutionizes open-world games, but it certainly makes engaging with side content flow more enjoyably.

The complaints I have are mainly two: the effect of the open world in the gameplay and the campaign and sidequest missions that you play with characters other than the two Spider-Men. The map is larger than the first game and definitely more visually beautiful as the detail of the graphics has been increased on all levels, moving around on it is enjoyable with the improved web swinging and the new addition of web wings, there's just... not much reason to wander around in it. The city looks more alive than ever but that vibrancy is superficial, as aside from the various missions and collectibles you can't interact with the map in any meaningful way like in, say, Rockstar's games. Obviously I don't expect Insomniac to allow us to beat up civilians and steal cars, but I think some alternative activities and interactions should be found to give the "city that never sleeps" a more prominent role.

As for the missions with the supporting characters... Look, the developers obviously had good intentions and wanted to give the rest of the cast a chance to shine. Much like the first game, I don't think they were particularly successful. The problem isn't in the writing but in the gameplay because, quite simply, these characters aren't Spider-Men and therefore can't do more than basic stealth or some simplistic actions that make their missions a chore. They don't even need to offer action-packed gameplay, they just need to have more to offer than button prompts at predetermined points that continue the story. In these cases Insomniac needed to show a bit more creativity and imagination.

The combat system hasn't changed much from the previous games, it's still inspired by the Arkham games with the familiar loop of punching-dodge-gadgets and of course it's still a lot of fun. This time around extra abilities and gadgets have been added to give even more options for dealing with enemies, although I have to say I felt slightly overwhelmed by the amount of moves available. Let's not forget that the game has two Spider-Men with different skill trees as well as a plethora of special moves in combat and traversal, so I couldn't remember everything and some abilities were never used. Of course, it's possible that the developers' intention was not to use the entire arsenal but to create different "builds" depending on each player's play style, so I won't count that as a negative. I just felt guilty at times for not taking full advantage of the range of options the game gives me.

Now, let's talk about the technical aspect because there is good news and bad news here. First the good: Marvel's Spider-Man 2's graphics are noticeably improved without that much of a drop in performance. On my own computer, a laptop with an 8-core AMD CPU and RTX 3060 with 6GB of VRAM, the framerate was lower compared to Spider-Man Remastered and usually hovered between 40 and 60 fps depending on the on-screen action. However, I feel that there is a proportionality in graphics quality to performance, meaning I didn't feel the game was unreasonably heavy. Also, the game supports the essential technologies of upscaling and frame generation. The FSR frame generation I had access to generally does a good job without many artifacts and helped to smooth out the framerate, however caution is needed if you have limited VRAM. If you see a big drop in performance with frame generation try turning it off because you may be exceeding your VRAM limit. Finally, it's a positive thing that ray tracing is not mandatory and can be turned off so that the game can run on older GPUs.

However, there are some issues. First of these in severity, although I personally did not encounter it, multiple crashes especially with ray tracing enabled. The developers addressed most of these with two hotfixes within the first three days, however several players report that stability still isn't as good as it should be. Perhaps there was an issue with the nVidia launch driver (which I didn't install and maybe that was the reason I was spared from the crashes), however since the game prompts the player at launch to update the drivers, the responsibility is shared between nVidia and Sony. Frametimes are also not particularly smooth, with Digital Foundry speculating that there is an issue with the DirectStorage implementation. Finally, I noticed some visual glitches especially with the advanced ray tracing options enabled. At the time of writing this review a patch was announced that fixes some of these, however from all of the above it becomes obvious that Sony should have given the developers more time before setting a final release date.

My overall assessment is that Marvel's Spider-Man 2 is a worthy sequel, even if it doesn't innovate much in open world games, and a very good purchase judging solely on the basis of its content, but the state in which it was released somewhat spoils the positive feeling and forces me to put the asterisk that you might have to wait a bit for the first patches before investing your money. We've said it before but since the phenomenon repeats itself we are forced to say it again: it's a shame that the developers' effort and talent is unfairly diminished, it's sad that the player's first impression is ruined because it was decided to release a game without being 100% ready. I had every intention of giving Marvel's Spider-Man 2 a higher rating than Remastered but once again, releasing a game that isn't fully baked has a cost. Too bad.

Thanks to Playstation Greece for providing the review code.

Go to discussion...