3/5 ★ – hcolesmith's review of Marvel's Spider-Man 2.

Unfortunately never rises to meet the variety of influences or expectations set for itself. As a result, I spent most of this game wishing it knew it's identity a little more and instead wished I was playing the Arkham games again. The world is currently so flush with Spider-Man content that it's difficult to feel like you'd really be wanting more. The past few years' slate of films that range from pretty good (No Way Home) to exceptional (Into the Spider-Verse), and with the now three games that have released there's quite a bit of webslinging to go around. Generally speaking, I like Spider-Man a lot, but wouldn't consider myself particularly well-versed in the lore. Beyond all the films and the games, I haven't dug any deeper, and never read the comics. And yet, the tipping point of saturation has definitely hit--to the extent that even the also very good Across the Spider-Verse left me feeling just ever so slightly burnt out. Needless to say, I wasn't feeling particularly rushed to play Marvel's Spider-Man 2. I liked this game, but found it to be color by numbers. While many noticed the obvious similarities between these games and the Arkham games, I was somewhat overwhelmed how, in this sequel, there was very little evolution between those games and it's own predecessor. In fact, I struggle to think of anything that Spider-Man 2 does that differently from Spider-Man: Miles Morales. And while I really liked Miles Morales, I similarly mentioned that it felt so iterative that one could be excused for feeling as though it's a bit of a footnote. Since that game was mostly an interstitial and came packaged with the PS5 Remaster of the first game, I wasn't too torn up about it. Here, I'm miffed. A question I often thought while playing the 27 hours it took me to get the platinum trophy was: what makes Spider-Man (the character) unique, and does Spider-Man 2 (the game) capitalize upon those difference in a meaningful way? Unfortunately, I struggle to think of a game in which I experienced such a disconnect between design structure and character beats. Instead, Spider-Man 2 is very satisfied to settle for a very solid action game, while drawing heavy influence from one of the most influential game series in recent history. I'll get my biggest gripes out of the way first. The combat is unbalanced. Miles is entirely overpowered, while Peter feels half-functional. I was concerned about this coming to fruition after Spider-Man: Miles Morales began to flesh out Miles' electricity abilities, and it seems like I was right to be concerned. Because while Miles's abilities get steadily amped up throughout the game, Peter's are stuttered and non-linear. As a result, by the end of the game I was tearing through enemies when playing at Miles, but struggled to remember which abilities I even had access to as Peter, and how best to string them together. One of the big new additions both characters have access to is the new parry system. It's broken. I found it often didn't work, or the process of me determining which attack I was actually seeing my Spidey-sense light up for (when you're fighting hordes in any given fight) meant that it was often frustrating to know that I missed a parry that would have been required to avoid all damage. Spider-Man 2 opts for the Sekiro approach here, where some attacks can only be parried, others can only be dodged, and some have to be jumped over. However, unlike Sekiro where you don't often fight more than one complex enemy at a time and each one has ample wind-up time for the player to prep, in Spider-Man 2 you are fighting so many enemies at once so it's difficult to determine which one is even going to hit you first. The combat is one of the obvious similarities to the Arkham games, but those games had a much more straightforward solution to combat. There are combos and gadgets required to handle certain enemies, but in general the combat is more about flow-state (hence the titling of "flowmotion", lol) than about mechanical complexity. In Spider-Man 2, combat becomes a much more twitchy affair--where one where you settle back into the rote, overdone system of cooldown abilities and a couple basic combos. It's unfortunate. Thankfully as the game progresses you gain access to enough other abilities that you can stop relying upon the parry in group fights. Outside of combat, the open world design similarly struggles under the expectations a sequel brings. When developing a new entry to a popular game, I can only imagine the weight it brings to meet demands from players for games to get bigger, and bigger. And in Spider-Man--a game in which the open world is a massive playground to showcase your movement mechanics--it certainly is a choice to half-ass this delivery by cramming in both Brooklyn and Queens in such a lackluster way. For reference, both Brooklyn and Queens are at least double the size of Manhattan. But both boroughs also are mostly without the signature tall buildings that allow Spider-Man to zip around. In response, Insomniac squishes the new areas and adds in the web wings, which functionally allow the player to ignore the best part of the game: the web-swinging. The quest for making games bigger is a pointless one, in my opinion, but if Spider-Man 2 must be larger than it's previous games, then I would have much preferred for the devs to just make Manhattan a bit more to scale rather than to have the additional boroughs added in. And I say this as a resident of Brooklyn. When combining the map expansion with the relatively fewer number of collectibles in this game from the first game, the open-world is stretched so thin to the point where I felt like there was very little to do. I'm the type of person who likes to do a good chunk of side content in between main missions, but there's not that much side-content so I ran out and often just had to swing around while I waited for the next mission to load up through its prerequisite phone call--which was very funny when Peter or Miles would be like "ok let's go do all this other stuff I have to do now that I've handled [insert main mission reference here]", because very often there was nothing left for me to do. It ran into odds with the narrative the game was telling. Speaking of, the plot in Spider-Man 2 is bloated under the weight of handling two Spider-Men, Harry Osborne, Kraven, and Venom. The basics boil down to: Peter continuing to struggle the juggle of personal life and superhero-ing, and Miles struggling to feel needed when he's ignored by Peter once Harry surfaces, then Kraven enters to spice things up. In effect, there was so much to track and character development is jumpy. Miles will be feeling like he's not needed while Peter is handling some massive catastrophe alone. Villains pop up when required by plot beat, but motivations are left for audio logs, and they're often dealt with in cutscenes. None of this is to say the story is bad. It's actually pretty good, and I love Miles Morales as a character! But it runs into stark conflict with the gameplay, and falls into the trap of feeling like I'm playing a video game adaptation of a television series that plays in-between gameplay sequences. Ok, I don't have much more to say here. I still enjoyed this! It's a fun, blockbuster-y game, but it's hard to take it as anything greater than that when the execution is so underbaked as a piece of artistic game design. It will never not be hilarious to me that this was nominated for a game of the year award alongside genuine revolutions of game design like Baldur's Gate 3 and Tears of the Kingdom. This is a very pretty looking game, but has almost nothing going on under the hood. What you see is what you get. And that was mostly just fine for me! It's a good palette cleanser between other games. p.s. I didn't know when to put this into my review but the bosses were kinda lame, and Peter's skill tree is so boring lol.