Spider-Man 2 offers an open-world action adventure game that is as close to perfect as anyone could ask for. While not without its flaws, the depth, polish and outright fun on offer here are a true testament to Insomniac’s skill (if not their vision).
Spider-Man 2 is the sequel to 2018’s Spider-Man. In many places it builds upon, and in other places remixes, many of the aspects that make the original game great. You’ll find web-swinging around a lovingly realised New York city. You’ll find Arkham-style combat. You’ll find hanging from a thread stealthily webbing up grunts.
To begin with one of the game’s most striking features: it is beautiful. The textures are highly detailed and shine in close up shots. The city looks fantastic from a distance and crawling on its surface. Notably coming off Assassin’s Creed Mirage, the facial animations are realistic and effective. The game performs admirably on all of its three graphics settings. The cut-scene lighting and cinematography are truly best-in-class, and even non-scripted moments of swinging through the evening city are themselves cinematic.
The combat develops further on that of the previous game, this time featuring gadgets, rechargeable skills and what is essentially a super meter. The wide variety of enemies encourage various strategies, keeping the combat fresh, along with extra XP available for completing specific objectives (“Perform 3 Web Yanks”) in some combat encounters. The options available, along with combos, are almost too many to remember and, while I did find myself revolving toward a few old reliables, stayed interesting for the duration.
Sections of the game feature essentially back-to-back boss battles, which are fun and challenging but I found a bit exhausting (admittedly on the hardest difficulty). I would say gameplay suffers from a common affliction: the skills and abilities necessary for the majority of the combat (crowd-control, buying time, isolation of enemies) don’t apply to the boss battles. This results in a sense not that the boss battle is testing your skills to the highest level, but requiring you to develop a whole new set of tactics, strategies and reflexes. Perhaps a matter of preference, and indeed the boss battles feel unique, but I would have preferred the former.
The game’s weakest aspect – one that reduces SM2 to the rank of almost perfect – is its story. While it is well-acted, well-executed and punctuated with some absolutely thrilling cut-scenes, it is undermined by its near total predictability. It nicely portrays the conflicting demands of being a Spider-Man, but one can see events coming several acts ahead. At first this provides a nice sense of impending doom but sadly evolves into a plodding inevitability. This is of course a problem that is faily unique to Spider-Man, whose story has been told and re-told for decades and where creativity is likely to be limited by some licensing agreements. Nevertheless the game has to be assessed on its own strengths and weaknesses, and this is one of them.
Furthermore, the story feels bloated – partially due to the easily predicted story beats described above. Kraven and his Hunters, featured heavily in the game’s marketing, appear extensively and often but see little development or depth. Despite being a major chunk of the story, they could easily be replaced with any other source of jeopardy that would result in imperilled New Yorkers and some fun set-pieces. Frustratingly, he actually does very little hunting himself, preferring to send his thousands of grunts out to do it for him. Indeed, I wasn’t clear at all on Kraven’s motivation until a line was dropped in passing very near the end of his story arc, which brings me to another minor narrative criticism.
Substantial chunks of dialogue are delivered during combat, especially boss battles. Even on the lower difficulties SM2 is not easy, so it is to be expected that exposition delivered during combat might be missed. Some of this miss-able material is actually really important to the story, and I repeatedly found myself thinking “wait – what just happened?” while trying not to be pounded into the Brooklyn sidewalk.
In some ways SM2 can be at odds with itself. The breath-taking realism is in contrast to the more comic-book aspects of the story and gameplay. I couldn’t help thinking that a more stylised, Spider-verse visual style might have leant itself better. Perhaps that is a nit-pick, but some suspension of disbelief is required here and hyper-realistic graphics don’t help that.
I also found the character of Peter a little contradictory. [MINOR SPOILERS] There is some intentional, shall we say, internal conflict in Peter’s arc, but I found myself irked by the portrayal of his “Nerdiness”. In the world of Spider-Man, science and technology are basically presented as magic, that can do almost anything with a few narratively convenient limitations, and the scientists are the wizards. Peter is Head Wizard, who can contribute meaningfully to any field of science he is presented with. This is literally highlighted in a sequence where he meets a parade of specialists and their research, and he casually tells them one-by-one how they can improve on their life’s work. All of this in itself is not a big deal and just requires a bit of suspension of disbelief (see above).
However, I cannot forgive the contrivances of a story if they are not self-consistent. Having made the observations from the last paragraph, I was then irritated when a whole act of the story is dedicated to finding a missing scientist, because a particular science problem cannot be resolved without him! Instead of just using his Big Brain(TM) to solve the problem himself as Peter, he instead becomes Spider-Man to find the scientist. This can probably all be excused in service of some exciting gameplay, but it stood out to me as a bit of thoughtless writing.
For SM2018, some criticism was levelled at the stealth parts involving other playable characters like MJ. Insomniac have made significant improvements here, adding more mechanics than just creeping around and thereby providing more player agency. They are also used to deliver exposition and character development and at their best felt like scenes from The Last of Us. These parts certainly provide a change of momentum, but in a game so action-packed that is not always a bad thing. I never found myself sighing and rolling my eyes when these sequences began.
An interesting and unexpected failure of SM2 on release was the significant presence of bugs and glitches. Reportedly, these were absent from review copies but introduced in the Day One Patch. I personally experienced no less than:
- Numerous random crashes to dashboard
- Broken and missing parts of UI
- Inability to punch
- A timed challenge where the last enemy didn’t spawn so I couldn’t complete (perhaps the most frustrating)
- Missions would disappear when I reached the starting point
- An on-screen button prompt that didn’t respond to pressing the required buttons, leaving time frozen
None of these were gamebreaking and could usually be rectified by restarting at last checkpoint, or at worst a quick Google for a workaround, but it did take a layer of veneer away from a flagship title.
With all that said, I’m conscious of focussing too much on the negatives of what is really overall a remarkable game. And look at it this way: if the comments I’ve made above are the worst things a reviewer can say, that’s still pretty good.
Additional positives were the nice variety of side-activities. A particular favourite were New York photo opportunities, designed to communicate the spirit of New York independent of its spidery protector. These are accompanied by a little dialogue discussing the nature of the city and its inhabitants and add some nice (if a little rose-tinted) flavour.
I would like to conclude with what may be for me the highlight of SM2, and the substrate on which all other qualities are fixed: the swinging. This is the part of the first game which I thought about the most since its release and here in the sequel it is refined to perfection. Utilising the power of the PS5 we see the speed and elegance of Spidey’s web-swinging in its full glory. The game has a fast travel mechanic which I almost never used since getting around was such a pleasure. The traversal is fairly forgiving (and has some assistance which can be switched off in settings) but requires just enough thought to be continually satisfying when you get it right (and amusing when you splat into the side of sky-scraper). The swinging – along with the rest of the game – uses the skill-set of the PS5 DualSense controller to its maximum to add to the immersion of the experience.
When all is said and done, Spider-Man 2 is a blast from start to finish. It is the first game that I have platinumed on PS5, and that is saying a lot. While not a complete work of art, it does everything a game like this should in the best way possible.
JH 