4/5 ★ – CinephilicCynic's review of Marvel's Spider-Man 2.

As with Insomniac's first SPIDER-MAN, the primary gameplay is excellent, the movement in particular bordering on sublime. It would be better if the game wasn't constantly interrupting it! Brian Intihar has explained in his press tours for this game and the first SPIDER-MAN that the constant interruptions to the core gameplay by puzzles, mini-games, and Mary Jane missions is borne from a philosophy of breaking up the rhythms of play. To paraphrase only slightly, you can't always be at a 10. This is a good notion, but Intihar and Co. keep bungling how to put that philosophy into practice. This game fares better than the original by opting to focus on more gameplay-minimal, prestige-style sequences. Think Peter's intro to the Emily-May Foundation or Coney Island. I like these bits quite a lot -- they have the benefit of slowing down the pace while also adding to the characters and world. If we popped into Mary Jane's shoes every once in a while to do enjoy some chill walk-simulating, I promise that her bits wouldn't be so reviled. The MJ sequences suck because -- rather than letting us luxuriate in the immense production value and charming characters (the writing, as in the last two games, is bad, but the characters cannot help but be likeable) -- we instead have to play a much worse video game for a while. Insomniac only learned the lesson halfway this time around; maybe it'll finally stick come SPIDER-MAN 3. It must also needs be remarked that MILES MORALES had no equivalent to the Mary Jane missions and scant mini-games, and a lot of people seem to actually prefer that one to the original SPIDER-MAN. Go figure! But, on the whole, the gameplay is an obvious strength -- even stronger than the prior games -- and I continue to boot SPIDER-MAN 2 up to this day to get my swinging fix. Weaker than ever, though, is the narrative, which takes liberal shortcuts throughout. There are several conflicts that are alluded to or touched on briefly and then abruptly resolved. We get hints of a simmering tension in Peter and MJ's relationship in one or two scenes, then we skip right to the climax of that story via dialogue in a boss fight; et voila, resolution. Ditto Peter and Miles. Other storylines aren't even truly brought up, just mentioned in the same breath in which they're solved -- think Ganky and Miles deciding to hang out more early in Act 3. Was that even a conversation before that moment? The Miles/Li story is the only one that feels like it's properly seeded and explored throughout, likely because it's the only given sufficient time to stew before resolving. There are simply too many storylines and not nearly enough time to make everything work. Hailey deserves particular attention as an extreme example of lacking substance. I'm trying to be very delicate in how I phrase this critique -- I'm sure there is certainly a unique challenge in writers who are able to hear trying to render a personality for a deaf character without using a vocal performance, which is typically the primary means by which writers and actors do just that. Still, it seems the writers have failed twice over to imbue her with any meaningful inherent traits. We know she's an artist because the story tells us she's an artist, and she's perfectly polite and kind in a very generic and bland way. But what is she like? I don't think even the writers know, which makes Miles's attraction to her confounding. It is very much possible to write nonverbal characters interestingly or have performers give them a presence -- see DRIVE MY CAR for a tremendous example. The black suit's narrative potential is also a criminally mismanaged resource. This is only the second time we've seen the black suit used in a project of this scale of production (the other being Raimi's SPIDER-MAN 3), and in both Peter really doesn't have the black suit for all that long. Unless the player waits until the black suit portion of the game to start doing side activities, you get maybe 4 or 5 hours with it tops. (Better than Raimi's 35 or so minutes, but a similar fraction for this game's 20 odd hours.) Perhaps that's just the pitfall of doing both black suit and Venom's origin in the same, non-serialized story. WEB OF SHADOWS really threaded the needle by just having Venom already present so they could play around with the black suit the entire time. For all of that game's problems, that was a pretty ingenious way to have one's cake and eat it. For all its faults -- and they are many -- I do appreciate how wacky the story becomes near the end. Honestly refreshing to see such a high-production project fully embrace the comic book weirdness that so many adaptations are too embarrassed to try. You ain't getting no Shriek in the MCU, I'll tell you that much!