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

Marvel's Spider-Man 2 is the highly anticipated follow-up to Marvel's Spider-Man from 2018. It's been 5 years since the first game (and 3 years since Miles Morales), and the main question most people will have is, is it worth the wait? 100% yes. From the moment you start playing, you can instantly feel how much better it feels. The movement system has been majorly sped up and has had additional moves added to make it feel a bit more complicated than just holding R2 and pressing X. Such as the Web Wings which, when deployed, allow you to glide. You can use them at any time. And those, combined with the wind tunnels around the city, allow you to get around so much faster. Combat feels generally the same aside from the addition of a parry. It's not really super needed. However, there are a few times in which it did save me from getting hit. Playing two games where your only option is to dodge, makes getting used to it difficult. They do attempt to make you use it by giving enemies different attack types. There's your standard attack which can be dodged or parried, Heavy Attacks which they said can *only* be parried (however that is not true they can be dodged), and Crush Attacks which *must* be dodged and cannot be parried. As you can see, dodging is still your best bet. Really, parries are only useful in boss fights as they will lead to more openings to attack. Something else that was changed is how gadgets now work. Both in the Miles Morales game and the original, you had a weapon wheel of gadgets you had access to. In this game, you are now limited to 4 gadgets only. These can be accessed by holding R1 and pressing one of the face buttons. Now, technically, you could say this is a downgrade from the first game's many gadgets; however, I feel it was done in the name of balance. In the first game, there were a lot of gadgets that instantly took out enemies (like the Web Trip Line, Impact Web, and even the Web Bomb to an extent). Now you have fewer gadgets, but they are more focused and balanced, making this game overall more challenging than the first. I can't forget to mention Web Lines. These are a pretty neat addition to stealth, which allows you to create a walkable line of webbing anywhere. This leads to some really cool stealth arena design as they don't have to have a million things for you to perch on. Now, moving onto things like world design, I have to praise them for trimming the fat from the previous game. The first thing I noticed once I got past the opening sequence is that there are no more Ubisoft Towers™! Not having to go all around the world just to unveil the map and have it be cluttered with icons is so great. Now, you just stumble across most activities and collectibles within the open world, which is great. There are still a couple of side activities that do get marked on the map, but most of them are done in the way I described. Not only that, but the available side content has been streamlined. No longer will you have to grind random crimes in order to 100% a district. While there are probably fewer overall side activities, I feel like what's there is strong and makes for a much more lean experience. I have to mention one of the cooler features, which is the fast travel system. Although you do have to put some work in to unlock it for each district, it's so worth it. Unlike other games that only allow you to travel to predetermined points on the map, once unlocked, Spider-Man 2 literally allows you to fast travel to ANY point on the map, and it's legitimately instant. And the story, WOW! No spoilers, but I loved it. While the first one was probably a more personal story, this game felt like a bombastic superhero movie that you get to play. Not to say it doesn't have emotional moments or more personal moments, but the core of the experience (I feel) is not focused on that. And man, some of the stuff they set up for the future has me so excited! But now I'll get into the negatives. Firstly, and this is a bit of a nitpick, there's a lot of scenes in this where you're just not Spider-Man. I understand having moments to break up the nonstop action, but I feel like they should be toned down a bit, especially since these moments show up in the side quests at times. Another thing that kind of irked me is the suit selection. Now, don't get me wrong, they do have some bangers in there, but I feel a lot of the selections are kind of lackluster. Like, do we really need every suit Tom Holland ever wore? I would've preferred more suits from the comics and bringing back more of the animated style suits, especially since none of them returned in this. And now the big issue I had with this game is that it was pretty buggy. I know this stuff will get ironed out with patches, but man, I've never had such a buggy time with a Sony first party game. From multiple times where I had to restart due to the progression trigger not working or getting fused into objects that I can't escape from to the one actual crash I had, it's surprising how this game launched. It felt to me that this game definitely needed at least another month or two of polish before launching. However, overall, I did really love this game. It's such a definitive Spider-Man experience and effectively replaces the last two games. I *really* enjoyed my time with this game and can't wait to see what Insomniac is cooking up in the future.