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

It’s fun!!! These games continue to deliver for me. And yet it’s strange, because I feel like a lot about this game is mediocre, and yet I still really enjoyed it, so what do I know. They get the important stuff right and I think that’s all that matters. It’s Spider-Man after all! Hard to not enjoy this. And everything that’s good about the other games is good here too. Traversal is still amazing and the improvements with web wings, increased speed, and new animations only make this even better. Travelling around New York never gets old and still feels incredible. I’d even go as so far as to say this is the best traversal system in any game I’ve ever played. Combat is still pretty good too. It’s very very simple, but it works and it’s fun, and these games are thankfully not long enough for it to get stale. Spider-Man 2 even fixes the biggest problem I had with the other games’ combat - boss fights. I thought these all kind of sucked in 1, being mostly about swinging and web shooting. Now, these are far more engaging. Im on the floor more and having to react to each move not just by dodging, but by jumping and parrying too. These movesets are just far better, and the PS5 allows them to be much more of a spectacle too. The only gameplay related thing I wish they did more with is the stealth. The web lines are great, but everything else here is just barebones and uninteresting - no interesting new challenges being thrown in like enemies you must/cant stealth takedown, medics or anything else to keep it fresh. Even though I’m a huge stealth fan, by the end I’d just rush in and fight everyone, avoiding stealth completely. Speaking of avoiding completely, I think the side content in this game is pretty bad. I did get around to doing it all, but only after I beat the game. There’s 2 major side quests, one for Peter and one for Miles, and both are really barebones. Other than that there’s the smaller side missions, some being OK, but mostly boring on average. The Sandman and Symbiote side activities are just fight a few goons, the EMF stuff is painfully boring, and the other stuff lacks anything interesting at all - Prowler’s scanning of a rooftop or the chasing down the drones did nothing at all for me personally. What’s worse is that two of these quest lines end in a reveal of a major villain, just to…not use them at all. This game needed something to keep the side content fresh, and just using it to set-up stuff rather than make this game better was really lame. The game doesn’t give you a great reason to even do these either, just rewarding you with suits to wear. Maybe I’m boring, but I actually prefer to just wear the normal suits most of the time to feel immersed in this version of the characters. So these rewards didn’t get much use from me, and I don’t think it helps that a whole lot of these suits are pretty ugly. But all of these optional missions gave me a reason to keep swinging around New York as Spider-Man so what was I going to do, not complete them??? Thankfully, the writing in the main story is better. I really enjoyed it for about half the game, and then it sort of goes all over the place and gets pretty messy. There’s a huge amount of plot lines here, and not all of them get the time they deserve, resulting in them feeling quite rushed through. This goes for the two major antagonists and Miles too, who all had a lot of promising set-up, but all three of their stories didn’t really wrap up in a wholly satisfying way to me. Regardless, it definitely works and kept me engaged. It’s not as emotional or watertight as the first games, but the main missions did have me enjoying playing them to see what was going to happen next. They’re fun! Just not perfect. Spider-Man 2 offers a mostly good story with a mostly good combat system. But it nails its characters, with a stellar traversal system through some of the grandest set-pieces and direction there is. All in all, I think it had potential to shine much brighter than this, but it’s still pretty great.