Got somewhere to be but I'll forget to write this if I don't do it right now, so to keep it brief:

This game doesn't handle the emotional beats of the story nearly as well as the first game, to the point where several character decisions are just completely unmotivated and nonsensical - however it's still engaging and never suffers any downtime, not bad by any means, but nothing quite comes close to the Martin Li and Otto Octavius storylines in the first game.

None of that matters however because Insomniac have made the best action game of the year - learning from Miles Morales that you should actually start the player off with all of your combat moves instead of having to unlock them for a hollow sense of progression that makes the first hours of the game boring, and now only having the skill trees unlock special moves that feel a lot more suited to a slow unlock. Combat is smooth, constantly throwing new things at you and always asking you to push it to the limit - and the traversal is maybe one of the best open world traversal systems ever put on a controller - with just a few changes and additions and the option to add fall damage and turn off swing-assist to make the web-swinging more physics based, I could spend an entire day JUST zipping around New York. Even beyond the traversal and combat, choosing to do an encounter stealthily has also been improved and all they did was add one mechanic - the web-lines had me giggling and kicking my feet like a schoolgirl when I realised I could put together an actual spider-web to trap my foes in; there really isn't a part of this game that hasn't been improved. They even improved the MJ sections, universally known as the worst parts of the first game, to the point where I was excited to do them.

Pushing my time here, so suffice to say that this is easily one of the best games of the year, as if there was ever any doubt that'd be the case.

Much like Alan Wake, the gameplay has a lot of good ideas, and this includes some really cool combat abilities and mechanics, but still feels a bit clunky to use, it's almost there, just needs a bit of refinement (see: Control). This game is also an insane visual spectacle, this could come out now, an entire generation later, and people would still praise it's visuals, and not just because of the graphical quality, the set pieces and VFX are outstanding and really create a sense of excitement, but never make it hard to tell what's happening in combat.

The issue comes with the story, not only are the characters extremely dull and the story snoringly straightforward - the story takes up the vast majority of the game. For a game that includes an entire 4 episode live-action TV show that plays between the acts, it's an absolutely bewildering decision to also make more of the time during the game portions walking around listening to people talk than actually engaging in the fun combat. Seriously, I think about 75% of this entire game, even when not including the TV show episodes, is just story dialogue, which is a huge shame. So it should really speak to the absolute height of achievement this game reaches as a technical spectacle that it still recieves the score I've given it. Don't get me wrong, I think including live-action segments is not only on brand for Remedy but is a really interesting idea, it just adds nothing here and creates a sense of tedium.

Anyway, might replay Control again.