WAYYYYYY back in 2023, Insomniac Games and Sony Interactive Entertainment released Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, a sequel to the 2018 hit, and it was a resounding success. Ben Sheene had the pleasure of reviewing it and declared it a perfect 10, a declaration I can stand behind. Following on the coattails of the Miles Morales game (which I thought was better than the first Spidey – fight me for it), Spidey 2 had a lot to live up to with tech achievements, story, and overall gameplay.
While the story upped the drama, creativity, and a hefty dose of emotion, the gameplay didn’t take a giant leap other than adding more tweaks to movement and fight. Now, the big question with that last part is, did it need to take a giant leap? The answer is a resounding ‘no’. The first Spidey was a tech marvel of sorts, as it took a good page from the Arkham games with controls, action, and keeping things simple for the user. The Miles Morales game perfected that style and the second Spidey brought it along by adding more skills, costumes, and a bigger world to swing around. There wasn’t much else needed to keep things entertaining, and it constantly reminded the player of that around every story turn.
All this said, this gorgeous game made it to PC a week or so ago and brought all the above with it. It’s still a fun game, with a meaningful story, and the combination of playing both Peter and Miles was and is still ingenious when it comes to including the best of both games/characters in a single experience. The only road bump with this release has been the steadily patched problems that started at launch with the game struggling to be playable but quickly turned into nearly a perfect experience thanks to Insomniac working out glitchy kinks. I’m not a huge fan of releasing an unpolished game to the public but I am glad it was rectified in an ample amount of time.
While this review won’t be the epic masterpiece Ben’s initial review, as my writing couldn’t live up to the great and powerful Ben Sheene, it will touch upon the above points and talk about the translation from PS5 to PC.
Let’s get right into this.
Story and Gameplay
The story of Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 is a complicated one. It nearly falls into the same fate as the third Raimi Spidey film, as it packs a lot of twists, turns, and villains into one single package. You should never pack too many villains into a story, as it’s tough to explain their purpose, create a crisis, and then conclude it all correctly.
Somehow the devs at Insomniac found a way.
The story follows Peter Parker after the death of Aunt May, and how he is trying to move on. It also follows Miles Morales dealing with the death of his father and all the anger gathered in the process. There is also an underlying storyline of Peter’s relationship with MJ, which is getting serious, as both are trying to maintain their individuality, while also maintaining a healthy relationship. In addition, the story delves into the survival of once-terminal Harry Osborn, his relationship with Peter, as well as his bond with his savior symbiote, Venom. To cap all this complication, Kraven is also part of this scenario and his need to hunt down new prey. All these storylines meet in the middle of New York and somehow get entangled, create a hefty and healthy amount of context, and crisis, and get sorted out (well, mostly sorted) by the end.
On the story side, I was worried that the devs were throwing too many plot points into the mix. While I know they wanted to make this a bigger and better experience than the previous two games in the series, especially after catching flack for Miles’ game reportedly being nothing more than a glorious DLC, launching the above characters and storylines was a big gamble. Thankfully, all of them paid off. How the devs juggled and carefully crafted the pieces and parts together and made sure to make every moment count was a credit to their creativity and their respect for the content. Maybe Sony Pictures can hire them to make films because Insomniac knows what they’re doing. Yeah, that was an unnecessary knock but one that was deserved. They took all of the plot points laid out above and did a great job of crisscrossing them with each other while giving them enough time to cook. While I understand there are far more hours to work within the video game medium while giving stories enough time to develop, it’s still a large gamble to properly tie up loose ends, especially the number left dangling with this story.
Anyway, the story’s journey is properly well constructed and impactful. After nearly two years out in the wild, the story works well and nails every single point it was trying to make. While not as personally grounded as Miles Morales, a story I still think was the best of the bunch, it’s impressive to see how Marvel’s Spider-Man 2’s story was established and treated by its conclusion. It certainly makes you want part three to arrive quickly. We’ll have to wait, though, because I must see what they’re doing with Wolverine first. I heard he has a good story or something.
Now, going along with the story, the gameplay is still phenomenal in every way. The controls are the best part of this game, as swinging through the large cityscape of New York City is still fun, easy, and dazzling to behold. Getting that full-swing motion going, flipping up in the air, and timing web slings while figuring out how to get speed going, all while turning around corners is just breathtaking control design. The controls feel good with travel and they’re addictive because they’re so well done.
When you aren’t web-swinging everywhere, the combat is on point. The ability to punch, kick, pull off special moves, and even dodge enemy attacks is easy-breezy. The controls are designed to feel like they’re not a burden, something that Rocksteady perfected with its Batman series, and Marvel’s Spider-Man 2’s design allows you to keep focused on story and action in the same way. In short, it’s fun as hell to get into a fight. The only hiccup is when the story gets in the way, and you must wait for the next fighting sequence to begin. Kidding, the story is great, but the fighting is out-of-this-world spectacular. It’s so easy and fun.
As for the missions, and outside of the crazy storylines, you still get the side gigs that help keep the game going. You will have Prowler missions to uncover and collect tech that he leaves behind. While not my favorite because they’re a change of pace (more methodical and slower), they’re still good puzzles that have decent rewards. There are also random crime incidents around the city that will keep you leveling up quickly. This part of the game is probably the most repetitive, as you will run into the same type of enemies (robbers, weapons dealers, crazy cultists) but the action/controls help to keep it feeling new each time. This portion of the game improves slightly once Venom is on the scene, but you’re still looking at a lot of repetition. There’s a solid chance you won’t get tired of it, but it is still there and noticeable.
All missions combined, there is enough variety to keep the game interesting, even if you have been through it before. It’s still a blast to play and I didn’t blink an eye of disinterest when it came to replaying missions repeatedly. That’s not to say some won’t, but, damn, this game is fun regardless.
On the backend of the game, the skills tree is impressive, as it gives you plenty of moves and upgrades to go along with both main characters in the game. It does a great job of keeping you motivated to go through various missions, action-packed or not, and makes you feel like you’re truly upgrading your heroes.
While the upgrades are nice, give me costumes any day. I know that most people were not in love with all the costumes when this was initially released in 2023, I guess they had to cry about something, but the bevy of costumes available to the user is nutso. If you want your 2099 costumes, they’re there. If you want to go back to a Noir style, it also exists in the game. The more you accomplish in the game, the more you get in this category, and the better the experience of saving lives in NYC becomes. I’ve never been a huge fan of costumes in a game, but I’m impressed and delighted with what Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 delivers in this gameplay category.
Overall, the game delivers what it did in 2023 in terms of gameplay and story. You will get much of the same and shouldn’t be disappointed.
PC Conversion
We received our review code the day the game launched to the world. Right out of the gate, the game was struggling to maintain a proper graphical expectation and frame rate. I was concerned that we were getting into another Last of Us situation, which took months to rectify on the PC platform, but was hopeful this would be quickly fixed and fit nicely with games like God of War and Returnal, masterpieces in their PC conversion process.
Now, dear readers, please note the specs on my machine:
Processor: AMD Ryzen 9 7845HX
GPU: 4070
RAM: 64gb
This machine should be able to handle pretty much anything thrown at it right now, and it has for nearly a year. It runs Unreal Engine like no one’s business, and I have the fan noise to reinforce it. In other words, this machine is more than capable.
When I launched this game for the first time, it automatically put me in ‘High’ graphics mode. It knew and saw my hardware and did what it thought was best. In that mode, and when there was large amounts of movement, scenery, and action, the game’s frame rate dropped below 15fps. Assuming this was a pre-patch situation, I moved the game down to medium, but still, it did the same thing. I shifted to low, and it still brought the same issues. It was baffling to me, and I went through my system to make sure the resources weren’t getting pulled in a different direction. I even made sure an Adobe product wasn’t running, which is notorious for RAM hogging.
Nothing, nada. It was all fine. So, I held this review until the first patch hit, allowing the game to get properly patched. That happened shortly after the launch. When that initial patch landed, the above problem was nearly all but obliterated. I could run the game smoothly on high and I had no frame issues whatsoever. When I tempted fate and moved it to very high mode, the fps dropped, and I was back to the same initial issue. Not a big deal, but slightly annoying considering the above hardware specs.
And then another patch dropped this past week, and everything feels like it has been corrected.
I can now run this game on the very high setting, my ray tracing shines through beautifully, and I have yet to run into a stutter. The game is now completely and gorgeously functional and playable, though occasionally I will find weird, random glitches like hitting a building and randomly getting stuck in it. It has happened once and it spit me out after I found the crack I came in on. While the journey to get this correct was merely a stutter in the scheme of things, and nowhere near the amount of time TLoU took to get its problem worked out, I do wish these patches would be wrapped before launch. As a newbie to the PC world, I’m assuming this is business as usual for most games, I mean, a gazillion Skyrim fans can’t be wrong, so I had better get used to this.
Anyway, long story short, the game seems solidly patched now on PC. No doubt you will run into a few things that I haven’t yet, but it is now up to snuff when compared to its PlayStation counterpart. As of right now, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 is one of the most beautiful games I have had the pleasure of playing on the PC since I delved into this world a few years ago. Hopefully, it gets better as updates roll in.
On that note, let’s wrap up this review.
Conclusion
Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 on the PC from developer Insomniac Games and Sony Interactive Entertainment is solid, thanks to multiple patches, on the PC. While it didn’t launch in the best state, it has since reached a point comparable to the PS5 version. It maintains a great story, fun gameplay, and graphical gorgeousness that is somewhat better than its PlayStation counterpart.
