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.