Playing video games isn’t as easy as it used to be for me. There’s a difference in playing video games when you’re 25 compared to 15. As a kid you can spend hours and hours playing a video game, guzzling down liters of root beer and gorging on pizza.
But when you’re 25, time…is scarce. You have a job, school, social life. Balance is hard, and it’s not easy to find games that are worthy enough to become that same kind of time-sink. However, I’ve spent almost every minute of the last week playing Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 for the Playstation 5 — and it’s been an incredible reminder of just why I love video games. While these days I have great responsibilities, sometimes you just have to make room for the great power of video games.
Spider-Man 2 finally pays off the teases of the first games and finally has both Miles Morales and Peter Parker playable. Taking a page from Miles Morales, the stories are more personal this time around. While Miles struggles to balance heroing with writing his college essay, and a now 25-year old Peter juggles his career ambitions alongside all the inherent complications of adulthood, Peter’s old friend Harry Osborn returns from a long bout of sickness that almost took his life — and introduces our heroes to the strange black bio-suit that’s kept him breathing this whole time. While the mystery of the symbiote hangs over our heads like a ticking time bomb, Kraven the Hunter arrives in New York to hunt the many beasts, villains and heroes that make New York their home.
Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 excels in all the ways a good follow-up should. Everything is larger from the first games, with the open-world setting of New York being twice the size as it was in the first two, including recreations of Queens and Brooklyn in addition to the ultra-detailed Manhattan of its predecessors.
As a video game fan, the idea of exploring New York City is daunting: the medium has a bad habit of assuming we want more, which just leads to all the bloated maps and cookie-cutter missions that hurt other superhero games. I still get nightmares remembering the transversal of Batman: Arkham Knight’s giant Gotham City and that horrid Batmobile that turned promising action and stealth gameplay into a glorified tank sim.
But the developers at Insomniac are too clever for that, delivering more of the same traversal elements that made the first two games a zip to move through. With the addition of a web glider, both Spider-Men are able to move through the larger city in a more dynamic fashion than ever before.
While the movement systems are clearly the star of the show, just seeing the density of the city shows the power of the Playstation 5 in a really impressive way. I was unimpressed with some of their recent exclusives due to the need to also be playable on the Playstation 4 with God of War Ragnarok and Horizon Forbidden West. These games look gorgeous, but don’t seem to really stretch the limits of the tech that the system provides them. This isn’t the case for Spider-Man 2. With no loading times, amazing graphics and speed being key to every system all the way from travel to combat, the basic gameplay continues to be addictive.
While still consistently entertaining, the story is all over the place in terms of tone, structure and even quality of some levels. Don’t ask me about how many times I died during the Kraven boss fight, or even some of the more difficult boss rushes towards the endgame: especially with the frustrations of trying to learn the new combat systems.
The new parry system is clunky, with having to remember specific colors and timing in a way that can be confusing based on the rhythm of the combat. In the first, the simplicity of only using square, circle and triangle made combat and gameplay a breeze. The parry mechanic offers greater opportunities for button mashing, but works only half the time, and makes complicated boss fights agonizing.
The gadget wheel is very much missed during some of the harder fights, with the wheel being replaced with R1 and the face buttons. Instead of the precision I had grown accustomed to, it became even more button mashing than the previous game. When the main story takes about fifteen hours to complete, that tires you out.
Even though the combat and gameplay can get repetitive, it’s the little moments that shine and keep me coming back after the main story. Be it Miles helping out fellow students at Brooklyn Visions or Peter assisting out the community on scientific research, the game works better when it goes smaller. With a mission helping a man suffering from dementia recall the love he had for his wife and the fight to hold on to what matters. The game understands that being Spider-Man means looking out for the little guy and telling their stories. Unlike other action-adventure games, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 gives names and stories to the little guys on the ground and allows their voice, history and personality to give the game a smaller scale feel in the best possible way.
The fact I had such a grin on my face after the credits roll took me back to when I was fifteen: when I could still let myself not worry about my future and just keep playing until I got that 100%. Because while time slips past us, we can always hold on to who we were, where that great responsibility can wait… and we can play just one more hour.
