On September 7th, 2018, Insomniac Games released Marvel’s Spider-Man. The game became an instant classic with over 20 million copies sold. Insomniac Games followed up with Marvel’s Spider-Man Miles Morales in November of 2020, which also received mass praise and left fans waiting for another installment in the franchise. During Playstation Showcase 2021, Spider-Man 2 was revealed to the public and had a release date of October 20th, 2023.
To kick things off, Spider-Man 2 is visually stunning. Because of the Playstation 5’s hardware, the game looks great. The city and its environment are vibrant and lively. The game offers ray tracing and modes like Performance and Fidelity. Performance mode tones down the ray tracing and graphics in order to give players 60 FPS (Frames Per Second). Meanwhile, Fidelity mode amps up the ray tracing and graphics but lowers the frame rate to 30. On the topic of hardware,the game loads incredibly fast.The Playstation 5’s SSD allows for the loading screen time to be short and players can quickly travel around the map in seconds. Unfortunately, the charm of fast travel in the first two games is lost, but most players are willing to sacrifice it for high speed fast travel. All these accessibility features are a huge upgrade from the first two games.
The games’ narrative is action-packed and engaging. The game features 2 Spider-Men. Peter Parker can barely hold his life together as he struggles to hold a job and balance saving the city, and Miles Morales struggles with his school work as college slowly creeps up on him, but he is too busy helping Pete save the city. What makes this worse is Miles’ constant guilt and anger at his father’s death and killer, Martin Li, aka Mr Negative. Peter gets a surprise when his best friend Harry Osborn shows up and re-enters his life. Because of Harry’s sickness, he hosts a symbiote that allows him to be basically cured, but later Peter will be the host of the symbiote, which creates a more chaotic and unstable version of himself. All the while, a big game hunter named Kraven and his army take over the city and hunts down the Spider-Men and their villains. All of these events eventually lead to Venom, a powerful form of Harry and his symbiote, and the pair set out to “Heal the World”.
The games’ narrative is impactful and straight to the point. Although there are fewer villains compared to the first, Kraven and Venom are excellent additions to the roster. “I liked the fact that Kraven was just an unapologetic badass. I didn’t really know much about the character, but I ended up enjoying his story and character”, Senior Angel Rodriguez said. Kraven’s story on a surface level is basic and straight forward, which lends well to his character because this allows him to just be a menacing villain that the player can have fun watching and fighting. The player can learn more about his story and background through side quests. Venom is also an amazing part of the game. Venom’s design and incredible voice acting by Tony Todd make him a menacing and intimidating villain. His close connection to Peter also enhances their story, allowing for impactful and personal story beats. The game even allows us to play as venom, which although its short and very limiting, it still offers an experience that leaves players satisfied and amazed.
Traversal in this game has also been greatly improved. A major addition to the game is the web wings. The web wings allow the player to glide through the city, which adds a ton of momentum to the swinging. The swinging has also been improved. It is faster and flashier, which web with the webwing creates a super immersive and fast-paced swinging experience, making it the best traversal in a Spiderman game. With a bigger map than the first, these new features are welcome.
Unfortunately, the game seems to regress in many areas. One of these being the suits the player can obtain. The game features many new suits for both Peter and Miles, all of which are only cosmetic, which is a major downgrade from the first game. In Spider-Man 2018, all the suits had a special ability tied to them, making them have more of a purpose than just for looks. These powers were correlated with the history and design of the suits, making them fun and engaging. Instead, the game gives Peter and Miles their own abilities. Peter has 10, which consist of mechanical spider legs and his venom abilities. The venom abilities are great as they feel great to use. You can really feel the impact of these abilities making them fun to use for a good while. After that, they tend to get stale and number of the limited number of abilities, there is no real way of making them fun again. The same problem is with miles, although it is to a less extent because Miles’s venom and lighting abilities are all flashy and fast paced, which pairs well with his character. One big controversy with the game is Miles and a special suit. At the end of the game, Miles creates a new suit that he calls a “Miles Morales original”. The suit design is awful. The exposed hair and weird colors made players dislike the suit. The suit made no sense because a major part of Miles’s game and story was that he eventually became his own spiderman, which sees him create his iconic black and red suit, so him saying that this new ugly suit is a “Miles Morales original” makes no sense and devalues the story in his own game. What made this worse was that it was soon revealed that the suit was an Adidas promotion, which pissed off the fanbase as this awful suit that made zero sense in the story was just an advertisement.
Overall, Spider-Man 2 is a great game with a compelling narrative and fun immersive gameplay that shows off the Playstation 5’s abilities. The game plays it incredibly safe by removing features and aspects that made the first extreme unique. Instead of experimenting with their two Spider-Men skills and abilities, they instead opt for the same sorta feeling as the two, which diminishes the combat, stealth, and overall quality of the game. The game does not try to reinvent the formula, instead choosing a more simple style. With Spider-Man 3 being set up at the end of the game, here I am hoping Insomniac Games goes all out for the “Final Chapter”.
