games / Reviews
Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 (PS5) Review
Image Credit: Insomniac Games
Loading...I’ll be honest, I really enjoyed the first Spider-Man game. While it did have some busy work, here and there, it was a great power fantasy of playing Spider-Man, had a wonderful story and performances, and ranks right up there with Batman: Arkham Asylum as one of the best superhero games ever made. Miles Morales came out a year later and was a slightly paired down experience from Spider-Man, but given that it was a lower cost product and, essentially, a glorified expansion on it, it was still great. Well, Spider-Man 2 is the new fully priced/featured product, now with two Spider-Man and it’s slightly less Amazing than before.
To get it out of the way quickly, my thoughts on this game can be summed up with the axiom “One step forward, two steps back”. While it does generally do everything right, and has a few improvements here and there, it generally just felt to me as a lesser experience. And that’s not even taking into account some of the bugs (no pun intended) I ran into while playing the game.
Spider-Man 2’s basic setup involves a few popular Spider-Man villains popping up and making life miserable for the titular Spider-Men. In this game, you can generally freely swap between Peter Parker and Miles Morales and each has a slightly different skill set available to them. Peter’s skills are slightly more combat focused with access to robotic spider legs and (eventually) symbiote powers. Miles is a bit stealthier, due to his cloaking ability, and can also generate bio-electricity to combat foes. Functionally, they play pretty much the same, but if you’re trying to infiltrate an enemy base or something, Miles usually makes the job a bit easier.
The actual story involves Kraven the Hunter wanting to hunt down various animal-themed/powerful prey in New York City, so him and his extremely large gang go there and bust some villains out. While Peter is more focused on stopping Kraven, Miles focuses more on The Negative Man (Martin Li) who was broken out of jail by Kraven to be used in one of his hunts. Both Spider-Men have to contend with Kraven’s gang of hunters as well as the normal crimes of New York City and helping some folks along the way.
Oh, also, Harry Osborne shows up as well, and now has an interesting biological suit that gives him superpowers and is black. Gee, I don’t see this ending badly at all…
The story itself falls under the “eh, fine?” category for me. Both Spider-Men are well acted but both are written kind of poorly in spots. Miles is obsessed with Li, and Peter kind of ignores Miles once Harry comes back and it leads to issues. Also, hanging a large chunk of the story around a B-lister like Kraven doesn’t help. Nor does it help that they didn’t do anything really new with him. I liked in the first game that you actually got to work with Doctor Octavius before he became Doctor Octopus, and you actually saw his descent into madness. Here, Kraven is just kind of sectioned off for most of the game.
Onto a different subject, the combat in the game is generally the same as in the last two…but worse. You can still use webs, punch enemies, dodge attacks, and so on, but you’re only limited to four spider abilities (usually energy punch, a few AOE attacks, etc.), and five technology (web) powers. That’s…not a lot. In the first Spider-Man game, I think you had access to 8 combat options and could use them from a radial menu. Spider-Drone, electric webbing, impact webbing, web bomb, are just straight up gone.
One thing they hyped up a lot in the previews for this game was basically “We got 60 Spider-Man suits in the game!”, with both Miles and Peter having access to dozens of different suits and many of them having alternate color schemes as well. Only…who cares? I don’t mean to sound flippant but in Spider-Man 1, the suits were generally better, especially the Spirit Spider suit, but most of the suits in Spider-Man 1 actually had suit powers. The Spirit Spider one, for example, could set enemies on fire for damage, the Stark Suit could summon a temporary drone (Spider-Bro) to attack foes, the Spider-Punk suit could push enemies into the air/away from Spider-Man due to the sound waves. Plus, you could mix and match suits and powers. So, if you really like the Spider-Man 2099 suit but enjoy the Fear Itself suit power, Quad Damage, which increases your melee damage for a period, you could just slot that into it just fine.
Here? Nothing. It’s all cosmetic. And a lot of the suits are pretty ugly, especially the end-game Miles suit that he built himself, yet leaves a third of his head uncovered. Outside of crafting all the suits to earn a trophy, I didn’t care at all about swapping suits or anything like that.
Mini-games make a return in this game and are a nice, if small diversion. These games typically involve shooting enemy bees with a bee drone, solving a few logic puzzles, blowing up atoms to make new molecules, etc. Each different district has usually one or two of these for you to solve.
There are also the actual side missions/content in the game. There aren’t a ton of side missions overall, but they are almost all written well and worthy of checking out. As for the other content, this usually involves clearing out hunter bases, finding Prowler technology stashes, completing “Mysteriums” (combat rooms) for Mysterio, etc. Completing this stuff nets you tokens which you can use to upgrade your suit powers or you can use the tokens to craft new suits. If you do everything in the game, you’ll have just enough currency to buy everything the game offers.
An odd thing about the side content is that there really isn’t any traversal/race type of stuff in here. Probably the biggest new addition to the game is that Peter/Miles can summon “Web Wings”, which let them glide in the air, or ride air currents to get speed or vertical lift. Outside of one very specific side mission thing, fairly late in the game, there’s no real agency to use them. There is one trophy to get from one corner of the map to the other but that’s about all I can think of that required me to actually use them. Spider-Man 1 actually had race events for you to complete but this game omits them.
The MJ/stealth sections do come back here and are a bit more improved. Thankfully, there’s only 2 or 3 of these sections in the game, and they just involve Mary Jane Watson sneaking around environments, taking out enemies with a taser pistol and completing goals. They still aren’t exactly “fun”, but they are unobtrusive enough and aren’t really annoying.
Stealth when playing either Spider-Man is still great though. You can sneak around bases or outside environments, webbing enemies up and having it be a methodical and fun thing to do. Thankfully, like the past games, this game does give you a bit of a grace period when enemies go from “safe” to “danger” when moving around, so if an enemy turns to a danger sign right when you press the takedown button, you’ll still be within the safe window.
Speaking of unsafe though, I encountered a few nasty bugs in the game which actually put a hamper on my enjoyment of it. The first was pretty early on, right after the big Sandman fight when Spider-Man (PP) is trying to get a grip on everything. About 10 guys are trying to break into a bank and he goes to stop them with a few piles of sand around. I eliminated 9 of the 10 guys but somehow, the 10th guy was stuck “inside” the sand pile and the game would not progress until all the goons were knocked down. Webbing him didn’t work, nor did trying to get him out of it. I eventually completed it by awkwardly punching the sand pile with the enemy clipping through it enough, so that he got hit with occasional punches.
Another fun glitch happened during the “Coney Island Date” sequence. Peter, MJ and Harry go to Coney Island to ride some rides, do a few minigames/hang out, etc. There are a few benches around where you can sit with a character and talk only when I tried it, I got soft-locked. I sat down with MJ and nothing happened. There is supposed to be dialog here but it didn’t activate, so it was just Peter/MJ sitting on a bench and I could move the camera around a bit but that was all. I couldn’t leave the bench and after about five minutes of waiting, I just reset the game.
Probably the most frusterating glitch occurred very much in the late game. Peter, to no one’s surprise, gets the Venom symbiote and gets corrupted by it. Miles and Peter have a pretty good fight scene where Miles is trying to save Peter by getting rid of the suit. Right as I hit the last blow against Peter, my screen immediately turned to black. I could still hear game audio but not see anything. I restarted the game and it thankfully picked right back up at the cut-scene but man, what a way to kill an emotional moment in the game.
On the note of the Venom powers also, it just feels like kind of a let-down. Symbiote Spider-Man does have new abilities but they are basically all variations on his other abilities. When I eventually got the suit and started messing with it, I just kept thinking of Spider-Man: Web of Shadows for the 360/PS3. That game had a very clear delineation between regular Spider-Man powers and Symbiote powers. This game, there is like a 15-20% difference between the two, while in WoS, it was like 50%. You already kind of know how Spider-Man plays and the fact that the Symbiote version is so much the same, is a bit of a letdown.
Aside from the bugs, the weaker side content, the somewhat weaker story, etc., my biggest actual gripe with this game is just that it plays it too safe to the suit, so to speak. They added a few new tricks to the Spider-Men power set and it is a bigger map than the past two games but if this is somehow the game they’ve been making for the past 5 years, minus the Miles Morales game expansion, that’s kind of a big letdown.
