I dunno about this one fam. For every step forward here, there's another step backward, and just enough so that the first game still remains so much tighter and powerful as a cohesive experience.
It reminds me of Raimi's Spider-Man 3; while not as actually extreme as that, a lot of the signs feel dangerously close here in terms of just how much was trying to be crammed into one story here. Kraven feels like filler for what basically should be his game because he lacks any direct emotional connection to Peter and Miles other than being a ridiculously insane threat to the city. The symbiote plot line is so close to reaching the emotional highs of that first game, but it feels like several main missions are missing from the game that would make it click cohesively together as well as Tony Todd's Venom being severely underused. Nearly every single side quest plot line serves to either tease for a sequel or DLC with next to zero payoff for anything you do in this game, and continues to make me more sick and tired of how every Marvel property these days is so laser targeted on creating some kind of expansive universe without actually making a good story that stands on its own first.
New York City has been made bigger, but you end up flying through so much of it so quickly that frankly a lot of it just feels weirdly samey? Admittedly I don't really know how much of this could be solved or how much of the feeling is on me, I've never been to New York and while the attention to detail and scale can be seen if you really slow down and just walk around to take things in, this is also a game that increases the speed of your web swinging and adds a whole other mode of flight through gliding that essentially ensures you rarely ever will give the city that chance. I definitely used fast travel a lot more here compared to the first game and even Miles Morales where I never did.
What doesn't help the city either in this game is that it just feels more lifeless compared to those previous entries? The sense of progression that it went through as you got through that main storyline feels absent here as you end up continually fighting the same dudes from beginning to end. Enemy variety was never the strongest suit of these games, but even the first game made Sable so much more of a threat by increasing their presence and aggression in-game compared to the regular goons you were fighting before their arrival; the most 2 ever does is one single segment towards the end of the game that spams a faction's spawns to ridiculous degrees without actually making them a threat you should be dealing with since they all disappear for post-game.
I also specifically want to know whose fault it was to essentially completely remove the police from the city? Was it an overreaction from Sony or Insomniac? Both? Regardless of who should be blamed, their removal makes solving crimes and the events of the main story all the more ridiculous that the two Spider-Mans are the only ones doing anything to help the city now. 9/11-level disasters are essentially happening every 10 minutes with the absurd shit that happens in this game and out of my entire 32 hour completion playthrough, I only saw a cop car once. They don't even appear for car chases anymore! You knock over some gangster's car and just leave it on the street! Nobody cares and nobody arrives to arrest them! If the concern was because of complaints thrown at the first game for Spider-Man being a cop sympathizer and being okay with city-wide surveillance, frankly not only is that point moot by the end of that game's main story, but it's also made moot by the inclusion of the friendly neighborhood app that Ganke made back in the Miles Morales game that was carried over to this one. The problem was solved! If the concern was because of real life politics, that's a whole other can of worms that you are never going to satisfy anybody with, but from my point of view, this fictional rendition of New York has always aimed to show the city and its people in a positive light, the entire third act of that game was about how that level of extremity doesn't benefit anybody and only hurts them, even the police in that game. A fictional police force that was represented the way they were in those previous games never felt offending, and whatever element there could have been that was close to being so was already fixed by new story elements added from the Miles game and this game.
Combat is just okay. It's more of the same with some steps forward and backward that basically just even out. I don't really have too much to comment on other than believing that the removal of the gadget wheel was a mistake. I don't really care for having such a limited selection of them bound to combinations on the face buttons, and especially with their ammo being tied to random chance drops whenever you knock out enemies, and none of this still solves the combat feeling incredibly easy when the solution to big hordes is spamming every ability and gadget until they slow down. The hordes are more frequent in this game compared to the previous two games and I'm not really the biggest fan of that. The last enemy faction the main story adds are incredibly spongey on health and I don't like that Peter's the only one who is given a mechanic that specifically reduces it, completely ignoring Miles who is still playable at that point and the post-game.
This is the buggiest game Insomniac has released, and is the only game I have played on my PS5 that made my console hard crash not once but twice. That second crash was so bad that it made my system boot to the storage repair screen for a minute. The cube suit glitch is funny, but too many of the other bugs lead to frustration like obnoxious collision glitches, pathfinding that breaks when you try to interact with objects sometimes, an overly aggressive targeting reticle that occasionally will completely ruin a stealth segment you were doing because it launched you somewhere else that you weren't even aiming at, or the camera spinning at lightning speeds during certain animations that drops the framerate to single digits.
Giving this game a score like this feels overly mean and harsh, because I don't think Spider-Man 2 is bad, far from it. But it's a game that desperately needed another few months for bug fixing bare minimum, and frankly another year to extend and smooth out the emotional core of this story. What I loved so much about that first game was not just that it was a Spider-Man story, but it was an incredibly well told one that nailed just the right pacing, just the right number of villains and how they all tied together, and the cast of characters that mixed together so well in a way that I hadn't seen any other adaptation of the character and his world pull off before. While Spider-Man 2 is trying to be a more ambitious game, it also feels like it's a product of executives higher up starting to get their grubby little fingers into it to make something bigger and grander that connects to more properties without fully earning it. There are moments and segments that come so close to reaching those highs of the first game, but there's too many other moments that lost me and felt like new lows that I wasn't wanting. I initially thought back when this game was first shown off that it was going to just simply be fine, a safe sequel that I would still be more than okay with playing because of how much I loved that first game, but I guess I just didn't really realize until now how much fine actually does a disservice in comparison to that first title.
It reminds me of Raimi's Spider-Man 3; while not as actually extreme as that, a lot of the signs feel dangerously close here in terms of just how much was trying to be crammed into one story here. Kraven feels like filler for what basically should be his game because he lacks any direct emotional connection to Peter and Miles other than being a ridiculously insane threat to the city. The symbiote plot line is so close to reaching the emotional highs of that first game, but it feels like several main missions are missing from the game that would make it click cohesively together as well as Tony Todd's Venom being severely underused. Nearly every single side quest plot line serves to either tease for a sequel or DLC with next to zero payoff for anything you do in this game, and continues to make me more sick and tired of how every Marvel property these days is so laser targeted on creating some kind of expansive universe without actually making a good story that stands on its own first.
New York City has been made bigger, but you end up flying through so much of it so quickly that frankly a lot of it just feels weirdly samey? Admittedly I don't really know how much of this could be solved or how much of the feeling is on me, I've never been to New York and while the attention to detail and scale can be seen if you really slow down and just walk around to take things in, this is also a game that increases the speed of your web swinging and adds a whole other mode of flight through gliding that essentially ensures you rarely ever will give the city that chance. I definitely used fast travel a lot more here compared to the first game and even Miles Morales where I never did.
What doesn't help the city either in this game is that it just feels more lifeless compared to those previous entries? The sense of progression that it went through as you got through that main storyline feels absent here as you end up continually fighting the same dudes from beginning to end. Enemy variety was never the strongest suit of these games, but even the first game made Sable so much more of a threat by increasing their presence and aggression in-game compared to the regular goons you were fighting before their arrival; the most 2 ever does is one single segment towards the end of the game that spams a faction's spawns to ridiculous degrees without actually making them a threat you should be dealing with since they all disappear for post-game.
I also specifically want to know whose fault it was to essentially completely remove the police from the city? Was it an overreaction from Sony or Insomniac? Both? Regardless of who should be blamed, their removal makes solving crimes and the events of the main story all the more ridiculous that the two Spider-Mans are the only ones doing anything to help the city now. 9/11-level disasters are essentially happening every 10 minutes with the absurd shit that happens in this game and out of my entire 32 hour completion playthrough, I only saw a cop car once. They don't even appear for car chases anymore! You knock over some gangster's car and just leave it on the street! Nobody cares and nobody arrives to arrest them! If the concern was because of complaints thrown at the first game for Spider-Man being a cop sympathizer and being okay with city-wide surveillance, frankly not only is that point moot by the end of that game's main story, but it's also made moot by the inclusion of the friendly neighborhood app that Ganke made back in the Miles Morales game that was carried over to this one. The problem was solved! If the concern was because of real life politics, that's a whole other can of worms that you are never going to satisfy anybody with, but from my point of view, this fictional rendition of New York has always aimed to show the city and its people in a positive light, the entire third act of that game was about how that level of extremity doesn't benefit anybody and only hurts them, even the police in that game. A fictional police force that was represented the way they were in those previous games never felt offending, and whatever element there could have been that was close to being so was already fixed by new story elements added from the Miles game and this game.
Combat is just okay. It's more of the same with some steps forward and backward that basically just even out. I don't really have too much to comment on other than believing that the removal of the gadget wheel was a mistake. I don't really care for having such a limited selection of them bound to combinations on the face buttons, and especially with their ammo being tied to random chance drops whenever you knock out enemies, and none of this still solves the combat feeling incredibly easy when the solution to big hordes is spamming every ability and gadget until they slow down. The hordes are more frequent in this game compared to the previous two games and I'm not really the biggest fan of that. The last enemy faction the main story adds are incredibly spongey on health and I don't like that Peter's the only one who is given a mechanic that specifically reduces it, completely ignoring Miles who is still playable at that point and the post-game.
This is the buggiest game Insomniac has released, and is the only game I have played on my PS5 that made my console hard crash not once but twice. That second crash was so bad that it made my system boot to the storage repair screen for a minute. The cube suit glitch is funny, but too many of the other bugs lead to frustration like obnoxious collision glitches, pathfinding that breaks when you try to interact with objects sometimes, an overly aggressive targeting reticle that occasionally will completely ruin a stealth segment you were doing because it launched you somewhere else that you weren't even aiming at, or the camera spinning at lightning speeds during certain animations that drops the framerate to single digits.
Giving this game a score like this feels overly mean and harsh, because I don't think Spider-Man 2 is bad, far from it. But it's a game that desperately needed another few months for bug fixing bare minimum, and frankly another year to extend and smooth out the emotional core of this story. What I loved so much about that first game was not just that it was a Spider-Man story, but it was an incredibly well told one that nailed just the right pacing, just the right number of villains and how they all tied together, and the cast of characters that mixed together so well in a way that I hadn't seen any other adaptation of the character and his world pull off before. While Spider-Man 2 is trying to be a more ambitious game, it also feels like it's a product of executives higher up starting to get their grubby little fingers into it to make something bigger and grander that connects to more properties without fully earning it. There are moments and segments that come so close to reaching those highs of the first game, but there's too many other moments that lost me and felt like new lows that I wasn't wanting. I initially thought back when this game was first shown off that it was going to just simply be fine, a safe sequel that I would still be more than okay with playing because of how much I loved that first game, but I guess I just didn't really realize until now how much fine actually does a disservice in comparison to that first title.