Sony Interactive Entertainment and Insomniac Games Present: Marvel’s Spider-Man was a super good game. I didn’t play it right at launch, because we were thoroughly occupied with newborn childcare mode at the time, but I do recall picking it up later in 2018 after all the DLC was out and enjoyed it immensely. Love a good open-world game, love Spider-Man, love adaptations that manage to fit in a huge cast of characters from the source material, and the movement in the game was the most satisfying I’ve seen in any open-world game since Prototype / inFAMOUS. I skipped the Miles Morales game at PS5 release-time because it was insanely priced, but honestly I might go back to it on the heels of how outstanding this game was.

Spider-Man 2 is everything you would expect and/or hope for from a sequel to Spider-Man. It’s everything good from the first game, and everything good from the first-and-a-half’th game, but at the same time, and more of it, and a better engine, and less of whatever was bad from the previous game(s) (but like, was there anything truly bad? Load times? idk?). It’s a tight 15-20 hour adventure through New York. They struck a great balance between exploration / main-quest / side-quest / leveling. There’s basically zero grind, there’s not 4 billion map-markers to chase down, there aren’t any towers to unlock the map (it’s all open from the start), and the side-quest stuff is all super breezy and quick. It’s there if you want to go do it, and if you do everything in the game you end up at max level with everything unlocked right around when it’s time to roll credits. (Personally, I had like an hour of cleanup post-game to get the Platinum Trophy.)

Combat is a solid balance between stealthy and brawl-y combat encounters, you approach anything however you want. Enemy diversity is pretty good, far better and less annoying than the original. It’s been five years, but all I remember from the original was that you had like garbage-tier goons, beefier goons, then Thicc Boiz, then the DLC added Thicc Boiz with a huge minigun and are a huge pain to deal with, then finally Roxxon dudes with even more annoying guns.

Spider-Man 2 instead introduces four distinct factions worth of enemies:

  • Normal Goons
  • Disciples of The Flame (who are basically normal goons, but with some flamethrower beefy-boiz)
  • Hunters (who have fewer basic goons, and introduce a ton of different sub-types like machete-havers, snipers, mechanical birds, mechanical sabretooth tigers, shield-bearers, giant axe dudes, and probably several others I’ve forgotten)
  • Symbiote Spawn (who are spoilers, duh, but there’s like four distinct sub-types)

The world is populated by the first three of those groups basically all the way through, like as soon as you get dropped into the game you can run into a random encounter vs some Disciples of The Flame who absolutely WILL rip you apart with no hesitation. By late game you might find a random encounter that’s a brawl between any two groups. Unlike the first game, none of these enemies really stood out as being extra annoying, they’re all fair and straight forward, good telegraphs, good counters, good flexibility in modes of attack, and yet it’s still challenging you can’t just roll in and hit attack over and over until everything’s knocked out.

The real big addition to the game is the ability to seamlessly swap between Spiders-Men at will. All general exploration and most of the side-quest stuff can be done as Pete or Miles, and the swap process is immediate. Certain open-world challenge things can only be done as Pete or Miles (Pete gets Science Experiments, Miles gets Mysterio Combat Encounters, Drone Chases, and Prowler Caches), and each character has their own small line of story side-quests (Pete gets to investigate The Flame, Miles gets to help out at a local Cultural Center). All these missions are nicely varied, even stuff like Prowler Caches are all unique little environmental puzzles, not just “go to location, collect treasure chest”.

The Main Quest bounces back and forth between Pete Missions and Miles Missions, periodically leading to a big set-piece mission that might see you seamlessly swap out which Spidey you’re controlling as the mission unfolds. Mary Jane Missions are here again, but thankfully there are fewer of them and MJ’s kit is VASTLY improved almost to the point of being outright silly. In the first game a random security guard looking at you wrong would lead to an immediate game over, but now MJ has a stun-gun that one-shots dudes, and can tank a couple hits from Hunters before going down.

Game was great whole way through. I really have zero complaints. Similar to the first game it seems like they left a couple obvious hooks for DLC content, and some bigger hooks for an eventual third game, but I don’t expect a sequel for quite awhile. But even while we wait for more content, the game is already amazing value, as it’s an incredibly consistent and solid game. Highly Recommended.