‘Marvel’s Spider-Man 2’ Finds the Fun in Spider-Stress
No other game has captured the struggle of the Spider-life quite like ‘Marvel’s Spider-Man 2’—and no other game has made it so fun or fulfilling
The prerequisites to serve as Spider-Man include a long list of superhuman traits: outsized strength, speed, and durability; powerful precognition; extreme stickiness, and so on. But just as essential as the qualities that come from bites by special spiders is a more mundane knack: Spider-Man must be an amazing multitasker. And no on-screen Spider-story has captured that quality more viscerally than Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, Insomniac’s latest, greatest, fastest-selling PlayStation superhero opus. Graphically, mechanically, and most of all tonally, it’s an unsurpassed Spider-Man simulator, a game that represents how it feels to be Spidey in civvies with as much care as it conveys how it feels to be Spidey inside the suit.
Both in print and in his many movie and video game incarnations, Spider-Man always struggles to juggle his job, his schooling, his friendships, and his love life while moonlighting as a crime fighter. It’s what makes him so relatable: He’s the youthful, harried hero who has trouble making rent and racks up massive sleep deficits. Saving the city pays poorly, and the hours are awful. Those are the biggest drawbacks to being Spider-Man, aside from the unceasing exposure to supervillains and the way one’s aunts and uncles tend to die in one’s arms.
Spider-Man 2 gets that. The first scene featuring Peter Parker and Miles Morales opens on a clock: Time ticks away as Miles tries to focus on composing a college essay, and Peter, a newly hired teacher at Miles’s school, arrives late for class. Flustered, Peter tries to teach physics, starting with a lecture on surface tension. Soon, tension surfaces in Spider-Man 2, as a crisis forces student and teacher to play hooky. Together, they defuse the threat, and Peter gets fired for his trouble, without completing a single lesson. There’s a lesson in that, though: Good luck holding down a day job while being constantly on call.
Insomniac’s follow-up to Marvel’s Spider-Man and Spider-Man: Miles Morales embraces the “bigger and better” approach to sequels. Compared to its predecessors, the game features more boroughs of New York City, more combat mechanics, more traversal systems, more enemies, and more upgrade options. And, most importantly, more Spider-Men: Both Miles and Peter are playable this time. The newly expanded city isn’t just big enough for both of them; it’s too big for both of them.
Spider-Man 2 rarely lets you forget that you’re falling down on at least one of your jobs. As you sprint, swing, and glide across the city as Peter or Miles, you’re bombarded by requests and notifications. Texts and calls come in, podcasts pop up, and an app alerts you to active crimes in your vicinity. Everyone wants to know who and where you are. Everyone asks for your help. Everyone tries to steal some of your time. The need to maintain some semblance of work-life balance becomes a common refrain.
“Don’t push yourself too hard, Parker,” MJ urges Peter.
“When you get caught up in one part of your life, it’s easy for the rest to fall away,” Martin Li cautions Miles.
Even the Spider-Men—who, adorably, address each other as “Spider-Man,” their formality suiting the Sisyphean task they tag team—express their uncertainty aloud. “It’s just a lot right now,” Miles laments to his mom. “So much to take care of in the city. Super stressed about my college essay. Pete’s busy doing other stuff.” In one side activity, Peter confides, “It’s hard to balance your own personal life with other responsibilities. Believe me, I know.” In another, he muses to himself, “I should keep an eye on her. And the other on these cultists. I need more eyes.” Most spiders have eight, but Peter and Miles have four put together. It’s not enough.
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Miles suffers from impostor syndrome with a side of grief and writer’s block. Peter, the more seasoned Spidey, takes on too much responsibility and frequently comes up short. One can see why Peter might be seduced by a symbiote, which can’t help him pay the late Aunt May’s mortgage but can make him feel like he’s “finally everything everyone needs me to be.” The real Peter would never sound so sanguine about satisfying a city full of dependents—with no assists from fellow superheroes, including the conspicuously absent Avengers. (Additional Marvel licenses must be pretty pricey.)
It’s not as if the movies give short shrift to Spider-Man’s overstuffed calendar, but it’s even easier to empathize when you’re steering the Spideys yourself as they’re pulled in conflicting directions. At some of the game’s quieter moments, the stunning set pieces and colossal brawls take a backseat to more intimate moments befitting a friendly neighborhood Spider-Man: revisiting Peter’s high school, or taking in Coney Island, or reuniting a woman with her loving but fading grandfather, or exploring Harlem’s musical legacy. But Peter and Miles have a whole city to safeguard, and pressing demands always interrupt these reveries. The pressure is enough to compress a Spider-person into a tiny white cube.
Yet as stressful as Spider-Man 2 makes it seem to be Spider-Man, the game is a great hang (pun partly intended). Yes, it’s sometimes overwhelming, as when the game’s wide array of sidequests and collectibles compete for your attention, or you suffer from decision fatigue while trying to decipher several skill trees, or wave after wave of tough-to-target goons surround you (“How are there this many?” Peter asks in one encounter), or a boss has health bars galore, or you dodge when you’re supposed to parry, or yet another supervillain emerges from the woodwork. At one point, a glimpse inside Peter’s psyche reveals one of his deepest, darkest fears: that the bad guys he keeps putting away will keep escaping from custody. I would worry about that, too, if I fought Vulture, Lizard, and Doc Ock and Co. as often as Spidey does.
Plus, one would think Spider-Man fans would be as subject to superhero fatigue as those of any masked, spandexed character, what with 10 movies and many more games saturating the Spidey market over the past two decades. (Calling this game Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 helps distinguish it from Spider-Man 2, and the other Spider-Man 2, and The Amazing Spider-Man 2, and the other Amazing Spider-Man 2.) Yet all three on-screen Spidey universes and multiverses—the animated Spider-Verse, the MCU (which now links to the live-action Sony Spider-Man Universe), and the Insomniac Spider-Man timeline—are firing on most cylinders, which makes the repetition tolerable. Yeah, you kinda know where things are going when Otto or the Osbornes or the symbiotes show up, but to varying degrees, each panel of this Spidey-IP triptych leans into the sense that we’ve seen stories like these before.
On that score, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 benefits from featuring Kraven the Hunter as one of its Big Bads. Kraven comes to NYC in search of quarry that can put up a fight. (It’s so hard to find good prey these days.) Naturally, he assembles a selection of the most dangerous game: supervillains. Kraven, a character created in 1964, feels fresher than the rest of the roster because, unlike the other five members of the original Sinister Six—or Venom, for that matter—he hasn’t yet appeared in a movie (notwithstanding a couple of close calls in Spidey flicks and an extended delay for the 2024 solo film that was previously scheduled to be released this month). There’s no competing portrayal to spoil his first impression.
Nor can the previous Insomniac Spider-Man games, deservedly celebrated as they are, steal the sequel’s thunder. For one thing, they lack web wings. Spider-Man 2’s tweak to the franchise’s winning formula for traversal sounds gimmicky: suit extensions that let Spidey soar across the city? He’s a spider, not a bird or a plane! In practice, though, they’re exquisite, adding a dose of depth and strategy to what were already joyous journeys. Crossing the city is an exercise in stringing together a combo of swings, glides, and point launches, a gameplay loop so fulfilling it’s sometimes deflating to reach your destination. Spider-Man may be a street-level hero, but in Marvel’s Spider-Man, you’re usually better off airborne.
That’s especially true in the latest game, because on a clear day in Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, you can see for miles. Three years into the PS5’s lifespan, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 is one of the first releases for the system to feel fully next-gen, after years of cross-generation releases that straddled the divide between past and present PlayStations and Xboxes amid chip shortages that made shiny new consoles difficult to find. Built by an accomplished first-party studio to take advantage of the PS5’s power, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 is a gorgeous game whose use of spatial audio, adaptive-trigger integration, and nearly unnoticeable loading combine to provide a distinctly PlayStation experience. There’s no time to stare at loading screens when Peter and Miles are forever running late.
“We are tired, anxious, stressed, numb,” MJ says. “But we have never lost hope.” If you’re tired, anxious, stressed, and numb while playing Spider-Man 2, you may need to put down the controller, or at least turn down the difficulty level (which can be customized extensively). The game is too fun to feel numb about. But a good deal of its magic comes from illustrating why Spidey’s existence is so taxing, despite the quips and suits and swinging. Spider-Man is never really off duty, and being constantly on would wear anyone down. To paraphrase something often said about Spidey’s hometown: It’s a nice life to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live it. For part of this all-time-great gaming year, though, I was happy to walk in multiple Spider-Men’s shoes—and, better yet, glide in their web wings.
