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| Stronger together. |
Marvel's Spider-Man 2 is the hotly anticipated sequel to Insomniac Games' 2018 Marvel's Spider-Man and its follow-up Spider-Man: Miles Morales. This time, it stars not one, but two Spider-Men as together, they must face a slew of new threats in NYC. Packing in new gameplay revamps and brand new villains, it's easily among the year's most anticipated games. I was a fan of 2018's Spider-Man so it was no surprise I'd be excited for the sequel. So how is it?
After the events of the previous games, we follow both Peter Parker and Miles Morales working together as Spider-Men to protect New York City. Things aren't so peaceful when a new enemy emerges in the form of Kraven the Hunter, who plans to hunt the city's villains as trophies while also searching for the hunt of his life. It gets even worse when a mysterious alien symbiote gets close to Peter and plans on invading NYC. Not to spoil the story, but I found it to be alright. It doesn't reach the emotional impact and plot-twists of 2018's for me, though it remained an enjoyable enough affair.
I liked the mentor-student dynamic between Peter and Miles and while I wasn't a fan of the side cast in the past games, they grew on me here with Mary-Jane, Ganke, and Miles' mother having lots of great scenes. The likes of Kraven and Venom were nice villains, though I hoped to see more story missions utilising the latter.
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| The spiders will have their work cut out for them. |
Spider-Man 2 is an action open-world game where you control either Peter or Miles as you swing around the city, beating goons, helping people via side-quests, and scouring the city for collectables. A new addition is gliding after executing a web swing, which allows you to cover more ground while keeping your momentum. Combat remains unchanged with you beating enemies with combos, dodging attacks, and using gadgets to take them down. The Levelling system returns where you earn experience by doing missions that will unlock new suits for the heroes and gadget upgrades. Each character has his own skill tree, with Miles still using his electric attacks and Peter now accessing new Symbiote attacks, which are more aggressive and a lot of fun. Stealth is also an option during enemy encounters, though I found it kind of lacking compared to Miles Morales.
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| The new symbiote attacks were vicious and fun. |
The city's bigger and packed with side activities to do and they're... painfully boring. It's mostly the same "clear all enemy outposts", photo-op locations, secret stashes to find, chasing after birds (this time robotic ones), and all felt tedious. The side-stories are the same-- though I did up loving the Howard and Daily Bugle Flashback quests. More exciting side stuff like races between the spider men and something like pizza deliveries would've been cool. I hated the MJ sections in 2018 and here, they were so brain-dead easy and unnecessary that I would've traded them for more Venom missions-- or even ones where you hunt as Kraven! All in all, the game took me around 25 hours to beat with me getting 100% completion, which is rather short considering its $70 price.
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| Boring side-content aside, exploring the city is much more interesting this time around. |
As you'd expect, Spider-Man 2 is technically impressive as the city looked amazing with backgrounds showing-off reflections, character models showing lots of detail, and the visual effects being stunning. The load times were quick and fast-travel was insane as you just point to a location on the map that you want and you're instantly there. Aside from a bunch of audio and visual glitches, the game ran smoothly at 60 fps on Performance Mode. The voicework is great with plenty of commendable performances namely Peter's. As for the soundtrack, it was decent but nothing I'll be remembering.
Overall, Marvel's Spider-Man 2 was a worthy follow-up to Insomniac's previous games with it improving upon traversal and keeping the combat fun to play. While I didn't enjoy the story that much, it was decent and I can't wait to see what's in store for the heroes next. It was also visually impressive, amidst some shortcomings. Fans of the web-slinger and the superhero genre should give Spider-Man 2 a look.
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