Marvel's Spider-Man 2 Review

The Web Wings alone justify the sequel. Unfolding them at the peak of a swing and riding the air currents across all of Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens at full speed is one of those genuinely new gaming feelings, the kind that makes you stop and realize you're grinning. Combined with near-instant fast travel and a map that's substantially larger, getting around New York never felt better. Insomniac also fixed the problem people had with the first game's combat variety. Both Peter and Miles are fully playable in the open world, and their movesets are distinct enough to feel like genuinely different characters to pilot. Peter with the symbiote plays differently from post-symbiote Peter. Miles's Venom powers interact differently with the same enemies. You're learning multiple combat systems across a single game. Tony Todd as Venom is a casting choice that deserves more recognition. The voice is enormous and genuinely unsettling, and the symbiote's audio design, the wet, layered quality to every sound it makes, is some of Insomniac's best work. The sequences where Peter is losing control to the suit are uncomfortable in exactly the right way. And then the third act happens. The Peter-symbiote arc needed more time. His corruption, his confrontations with Miles, the moment the suit comes off, all of it is rushed. Story beats that should land with weight are compressed into cutscenes that don't earn the emotional conclusions they're reaching for. The final hours feel like a game that ran out of development time and had to resolve three major arcs in thirty minutes. It's not bad. It's just noticeably less careful than everything that came before it. The gadget system is also simpler than the original. More automated, less tactical. Combat feels spectacular, the animations and scale are extraordinary, but there's less player decision-making moment-to-moment than the first game had.