There’s a stretch in the middle of the game that easily reaches a 9/10 (everyone that’s finished it knows where it is) where I was hopping from main mission to main mission like I haven’t done in a long time, actually eager to see where the plot was taking me, enjoying some major high budget spectacle along the way. The climax isn’t super satisfying and ends up going down the only path that Insomniac has left to explore. I’ll be there for Spider-Man 3, no doubt about it - these titles are all rock solid 8/10s for me. This iteration in particular performs amazingly well, the combat is reactive, the traversal is better than ever and the whole thing generally looks superb (particularly at night/sunset, whilst some daytime moments can look a bit plastic and less flattering on the character models). There’s a lot of really nice music here too by John Paesano and his team, much of the best stuff sadly not included on the official soundtrack release. There’s also generally just too much music, actually, with the experience being filled wall to wall with some occasionally heavy handed musical accompaniment - it’s ok to let the writing and actors breathe for a bit!

Somewhat spoiler territory here: both this game and its predecessor suffer as soon as the story focuses on Martin Li. The issue stems entirely from the treatment of Miles who is often pushed to the side and given missions that feel out of place. In the same way that the writers clearly wanted to tell a Doc Ock story the last time around, this was obviously their Venom story. Much of Miles’ arc doesn’t really fit in with that, so he’s left to deal with the uninteresting Mr. Negative once more. A mission towards the very end of the game really stops the pacing dead in its tracks, and I don’t think it ever quite picks back up.