Insomniac Games' Spider-Man 2 is a continuously epic ride where I kept thinking it was near the end cuz it just never stopped getting better. Every new boss fight and every new story reveal was so good! I did not find the bosses themselves to be super difficult or anything but I'm a long time gamer that is rarely surprised by game mechanics. ("There's nothing new under the sun.") I did find each boss fight to be epic and fun.
While I generally enjoyed the story aside from the typical propaganda that's in everything, there was a specific part where Peter and Miles discuss focusing on their education over being super heroes. That was deeply stupid to me and I couldn't possibly disagree with such a moronic idea more.
"I was too stubborn to see I had become what I despised most."
I'm a fan of stories about characters that have inner conflicts between "good and bad" or "right and wrong." It's a common theme in most hero stories but I still always enjoy it and I thought they did a good job with it for both Peter Parker with the black suit symbiote and Mr. Negative. I can also relate since I have come to hate the entire world but don't want to. I know who the real enemy is, it's the ones you think of as heroes. That's how brainwashing works and I have no hope in fighting it after what I have witnessed and been a part of in the past few years alone.
The amount of villains that are in this game was surprising to me, again. I remember thinking the same thing about the first game. It's very cool and nice to play a game that has so many different characters and stories to deal with. A lot of games just have the protagonist and the one main villain with little nobody characters in-between. These games throw so many major villains at you! I love it. That said, I was not a fan of this version of Mysterio. I found him to be boring, stupid, and annoying. The character portrayal was just such a huge disappointment after seeing the incredbile version of Mysterio in the Spider-Man: Far From Home movie. I did like Mysterio's mini-games, though. The stages were very cool with a couple of unique ones and were overall as fun as I would expect.
I really enjoyed the new game mechanics in Spider-Man 2, including the bicycle riding parts. There's a new drone chase mini-game that's pretty much an upgrade of the pigeon chasing from the first game. You can also create several web nets of your own for stealth take-downs. There are random tag-team events where you fight alongside with the Spider-Man that you are not currently playing as in the open world when you stop Crime missions, that's pretty cool.
The most surprising thing to me in Insomniac's Spider-Man 2 were the new Mary Jane missions. I didn't hate them in the first game but I didn't love them either. I also find it a bit annoying to be forced to switch from a very powerful character to a dinky crap character for missions that I have no interest in. I do think it's good and smart of developers to try and add variety to gameplay when possible, though. The Mary Jane missions were okay before, but now they're badass! Mary Jane kicks so much butt in this game with her tazer. I absolutely loved her stealth take-downs and the missions, story, and environments while playing as her were great of course.
Most of the gameplay was solid as expected. There are some minor and uncommon issues with web-swinging here and there and some bugs. Most of the bugs are easily fixed with a quick checkpoint reload. One specific bug I kept encountering was with missions where you have to follow one of your spidey-sense holographic looking trails. Every single time I had started one of these missions, the trail did not show up. I had to reload the checkpoint four to five times to get the trail to show up but that was easy enough. Fortunately, the checkpoint was exactly at the point where the bug would happen. And once you reload the fix, the trail is instantly noticeable so you wont question if the reload worked or not.
I also encountered a bug where looting one of the open world chests would instantly despawn a Crime mission that I was going to head to after looting. Not a big deal, was just a tiny bit annoying. (Assuming it's a bug.)
One thing I loved about the combat was how much more powerful the symbiote suit felt. It was instantly noticeable how much more powerful than our regular hero it was. It is specific to the story parts where the suit feels that way. Once you get past that initial power boost, enemies get tougher, as what happens in video games. But it was very cool and gives you a new ability to boost your powers for more damage and such. There are also new animations specific to the symbiote. In general, it's totally badass.
One of my most favorite new things in Insomniac's Spider-Man 2 are the color variations you can choose for your spider-suits! They're not fully customizeable but it's really cool to be able to pick different colors for most of the suits you get to choose from. There are already so many different and cool suits to pick from and adding different colors just adds that much more to play with! Awesome. I would have liked some of the suits that didn't have color variations to have them but it's understandable that they didn't and that's just how it goes sometimes. My favorite suit in this game is the Noir one, the one with the trenchcoat, not the stealthy one. That said, it is extremely hard to pick a favorite suit in each of these games. There are so many cool ones! Oh yeah, and they don't cost an extra $15, $20, $30, or $70! Is that a miracle at this point or what?
Some of the minor and stupid things that bugged me... first, there was a single elaborate drawn out mission that was actually pretty cool but the entire point of it was just to help some random gay dude ask a guy out on a date. That was deeply stupid. The mission was cool but that's all the story was, help a gay dude ask a guy out. It's literally the only mission in the game like it. There are no variations of that mission.
There's also a stupid mission where you play as the deaf girl and the devs (or whoever) decided to simulate deafness by having no music play. That kind of "representation" is pointless and stupid in my opinion. It reminded me of a game called "The Quiet Man" which I wanted to enjoy and I thought the combat was really cool but that stupid game is completely ruined by twenty-minute-plus cinematics with no audio. It's ridiculous. So, at least this little mission wasn't as bad as that. It was cute. I like the character. Just going as far to "represent" deaf people by having no audio is stupid to me.
Overall, I am truly impressed by what Insomniac has done with these games. I can't believe they went from a practically perfect game with the first Spider-Man and somehow managed to improve on every single aspect of that game in both Miles Morales and this sequel. In the current state of all the evil trash in our world, it's nice that something good still exists. We'll see how long that lasts. I'm grateful that a team like Insomniac still exists and they still have the passion to improve on what was already perfected. Well done.
It has been odd to me to realize games like this and the Saints Row series played on the same exact world map. I didn't even realize that for awhile in the Saints Row series because the games were so much fun but once I did realize that I couldn't help but think of it as recycled content. So, that part is a little strange. That said, while they are played in the same map, they are definitely improved upon, especially in these Spider-Man games. An example would be the newer weather and day/night cycles which is always a nice touch. Improved visuals, of course. I remember being deeply surprised at how many combat improvements were made in the Miles Morales expansion. I don't remember enough of the specific details as to what exactly changed but I do remember not being able to believe how they had actually improved on so much that did not need to be improved upon.
I have seen the forums full of people complaining about optimization and such. I currently have a pretty good "rig" that will soon be outdated, I imagine. I didn't encounter many performance issues. In the last two hours of the game I did encounter several stutters during the cinematics but they were brief. PC is a pain to deal with. As far as comfort and ease, I will usually recommend playing on console. But if you're like me and prefer getting the most impressive graphics, PC is usually the way to go. Console exlusives are the only games that ever really compete with PC graphics and we're basically at the point where exclusives don't even exist anymore. Battle won? Nope. I was never a fan of "console wars" but now I miss them. The real ones between the platforms, not people's opinion on which is better. The actual games. Everything being multiplatform is pretty damn stupid. It's literally for greed. Any gamer that thinks multiplatform is "consumer friendly" is a complete moron.
As a quick note, I really enjoyed the artistic credits at the end of this game.
Thanks for reading. Game on. Below, you will find a video with me rambling about this game. I like to ramble cuz I love talking about games. I wasn't planning to write this "review" out but I realized that I rambled way too much in my impressions video so I decided to get a bit more to the point with this post. I shared a lot more random thoughts in the video than I do in this post.
Let me know what you think. Trust your instincts. Trust yourself. You live in a world ruled by evil and everything is a lie.
Thanks for the comment! You should definitely play both. The expansion for Miles Morales was really good.
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