Sony has had a pretty good track record in bringing over its PlayStation exclusives to PC, ranging from highly demanding yet excellent titles like Returnal, to the wonderfully optimised God of War games. There have, however, been missteps along the way, notably with The Last of Us Part 1. Unfortunately for Sony, it looks like Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 has more in common with the missteps than it does with the homeruns. Despite the several complaints of lack of optimisation and other issues, however, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 still is a fundamentally excellent game. Not only does it meet the expectations that were set by its two predecessors, but it also downright surpasses them.
The first thing I should note is that I had little in the way of performance issues from the game. I was able to largely max its settings out, minus ray tracing, while playing it on an AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D, 32 GB of DDR5 6000 MHz RAM, and an AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT GPU. The frame rates weren’t quite able to make full use of my 144 Hz display at a resolution of 1440p, I was still getting well over 60 FPS, with the general open-world gameplay stabilising at around 70-80 frames per second. While performance wasn’t an issue, I did face a few crashes, at the time of writing this review. While I’m unsure of what caused these crashes – I wasn’t able to replicate them on purpose, and even play time seemingly wasn’t an issue – it does indicate that there are some technical issues with the PC port.
“The first thing I should note is that I had little in the way of performance issues from the game. I was able to largely max its settings out, minus ray tracing, while playing it on an AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D, 32 GB of DDR5 6000 MHz RAM, and an AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT GPU.”
At the time of writing this review, many others still have reported quite a few technical issues with Spider-Man 2, including crashes, video artefacts, visual glitches, and even poor performance. Unfortunately, there doesn’t yet seem to be a hardware-related throughline discovered as of yet, with both AMD and Nvidia GPU users facing these problems. There also seem to be software-related issues, with both DLSS and FSR users pointing out visual jittering, especially with the hair on characters.
The keyboard and mouse controls are also surprisingly well thought out. I wouldn’t, however, recommend it over a controller. In fact, the title has downright fantastic integration with the DualSense, bringing over essentially all of its key features. My personal favourite has been the game’s use of the adaptive triggers on the DualSense, letting you feel just the right amount of pressure for some of its quick-time events and prompts.
With all the PC-related things out of the way, now is a good time to look at Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 as a whole a little over a year after its release. As was the case with the last two titles, Spider-Man 2 also features a completely original story, this time around involving Kraven the Hunter. The game focuses on spending its first couple of hours by letting you get reacquainted with its open world, however, introducing a host of side-activities and collectibles you can start going for right off the bat. Once you’ve had some time to settle in, the game throws its second major set piece at you, introducing Kraven to both Peter Parker and Miles Morales in the process.
Throughout the game’s thrilling story, there are a couple of understated B-plots happening; Parker is still figuring out how to manage his life and balance things like having a job while also occasionally trying to save the city from supervillains, while Morales on the other hand is dealing with a bevy of personal issues, from mundane things like figuring out his college applications to more complex emotions, like testing his limits for forgiveness when he comes face-to-face with the man responsible for his father’s death. Both of these side-stories tend to not get too much of a focus while still giving us some fun, complex character arcs to follow throughout the more bombastic main storyline.
“Gameplay is where Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 truly comes alive, with just about every aspect of the original two titles being improved in one way or another.”
It is worth noting that a lot of the more interesting and nuanced parts of the story come from the B-plots that run throughout the game’s side content. There are even hints of a larger story happening in the background, with things like random criminal activities involving cultists trying to brand people or committing random acts of arson.
Gameplay is where Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 truly comes alive, with just about every aspect of the original two titles being improved in one way or another. Web-swinging is more fun than ever thanks to a bevy of new unlockable moves, and even combat gets an uplift with the addition of new powers for Peter Parker. The best new feature in purely gameplay terms, however, is the ability to glide through the city thanks to the new web wings that both Parker and Morales are equipped with. Interestingly enough, while the ability to glide through the skyline of New York is both fun and intuitive, the wings never feel like they make plain old web swinging obsolete. Rather, the wings feel like they were designed to work in tandem with swinging, since you can only really attain the heights and speeds that you’d need to make the wings work by building up momentum through swinging.
The combat side of things has also been given a major facelift from previous titles. Taking a page out of Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales, Peter Parker now gets in on the action of having special on-cooldown powers in Spider-Man 2 as well. This new system allows for a wide range of powers, ranging from sprouting mechanical spider-legs to aid in combat, to more situational ones like being able to throw all enemies into the air for longer combos. Interestingly, these new abilities do make the classic gadgets that Parker had from the first title feel less useful; not only are most of these gadgets much more situational than the new powers, but they can also be easy to forget about in the heat of battle.
“The only downside here comes for PC players: you might want to wait for a patch or two to iron out the technical problems.”
When you get down to it, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 ticks just about every box a sequel should; it’s bigger and better in just about every way you can imagine. Even its main story manages to be more impressive, since it’s able to hit some great emotional and bombastic beats for two protagonists simultaneously. Both Spider-Man and Spider-Man: Miles Morales were tough acts to follow, but Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 managed this almost effortlessly. Even the new rogues’ gallery you take on during Spider-Man 2’s story and side-missions are more interesting, from both the gameplay and story standpoints.
The only downside here comes for PC players: you might want to wait for a patch or two to iron out the technical problems. While not all PC hardware is created equal, and you might have an experience like mine where just a couple of crashes throughout my time with the game were the only problems I had to deal with, it is worth noting that many more have reported quite a few severe issues. Even if you’re one of the lucky ones with few technical issues, you might also want to make sure that you have a decent controller lying around; a fast-paced third-person action game like Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 just doesn’t feel particularly good with a keyboard and mouse despite the studio’s best efforts at making a sensible control scheme.
This game was reviewed on PC.
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