Day: September 18, 2023

• The city in Spider-Man 2 offers players a vast playground.
• The open world is designed to feel organic.
• The game brings improvements to web swinging and aerial manoeuvres.

“While the cinematic story delivers some impressive spectacle, it’s the city of Spider-Man 2 that steals the show. Twice the size of the original’s recreation of New York, this new pixelated playground gives web-happy players all of Manhattan, Miles Morales’ Brooklyn, and the all-new Queens to seamlessly swing across, adding some welcome variety to the original’s one-note blocks. “A big thing for us was the organic nature of the open world,” says creative director Bryan Intihar. “You can be on a rooftop and look out and, without any UI, you can see visual cues in the world. If you see something happening down on the street, when you do engage there is now a narrative wrapped around what’s happening. So, hopefully [these side activities] don’t feel just like a checklist.”

It is a welcome change, with the original’s bizarre obsession with chasing down pigeons feeling closer to an RSPCA interview than a Spider-Man-worthy endeavour. What really sold players on the Spidey fantasy was the endlessly satisfying web-swinging, and there has been a nice aerial upgrade. Building on the original’s sense of momentum, webbed wings sewn into our boys’ suits turn these spiders into flying squirrels, allowing for some gleefully sustained soaring as you glide perilously close to shrieking pedestrians.

While the demo’s story threads prohibit me from doing so, Intihar also informs me that players can seamlessly swap between Peter and Miles as they zip across their respective corners of the big Apple – a feat that would feel more impressive if Grand Theft Auto V hadn’t already achieved this on PS3 a decade earlier. Thankfully, when you come down to street level, the PS5 difference becomes immediately apparent. Where in 2018, shopfronts and buildings felt like little more than cardboard cutouts, this time, you can peer inside individual shopfronts, each with authentically different exteriors and interiors. From a dimly lit game DVD shop – complete with authentically indecisive customers – to a homeless man swaying drunkenly outside a hipster furniture store, this Marvel-ready Manhattan feels impressively lived-in.

“It’s not 1-1, but things are where you expect them to be. Obviously we want [our New York] to be familiar, but at the end of the day, this is Marvel’s New York – there’s the Avengers tower here – so we just want to make the city fun to traverse.”

Yet Spider-Man isn’t the only superhero that Marvel has allowed Insomniac to play with; its sister studio is working on a secretive Wolverine game. While Intihar has nothing to say about Logan’s antics, he does reveal: “There will be more Marvel Easter eggs in [Spider-Man 2] than in the first one or in Miles Morales.”

As my demo’s crescendo builds, it seems Insomniac has been paying attention to its PlayStation peers. After an Uncharted-worthy river chase where Spidey leaps between dinghies mounted with machine guns before being dragged across the water by a raging Connors, I’m thrust into a truly epic three-stage boss battle. After tracking the lumpy lizard across an eerily abandoned fish market, complete with a PG-13-ready jumpscare, a building-levelling brawl sees spider and lizard slug it out in a tense sewer showdown.

Despite my suit of symbiote abilities, I die several times before eventually toppling the brute, causing an increasingly enraged, kaiju-sized Connors to return to the surface, wreaking havoc across Manhattan. As I eventually catch up with Connors and pin him to a building, I at last stop his rampage, pummeling him as he clings to a crumbling skyscraper. While PS4’s Spider-Man was no stranger to spectacle, each individual boss fight felt singular and neatly contained. It’s this gleeful sense of escalation from one jaw-dropping encounter to the next that makes Spider-Man 2 feel like a fully fledged sequel.

“We really wanted to push the boss fights to take advantage of what the PS5 can do, going seamlessly between buildings above and below ground. Not only to increase the scale of these showdowns, but changing up the phases of the fight to rack up the difficulty. So, you may have mastered phase one, but now for phase two something else gets introduced. I think here we really have that sense of challenge.”

In many ways, Spider-Man 2 feels like the PS5 itself. At first glance, it appears to be merely a bigger and shinier version of what came before, but over time, its smorgasbord of small changes add up to something more substantial. It’s the iteration rather than innovation approach, a bigger and better successor that quietly impresses rather than blows your socks off. Yet when the result is a blockbuster this well-made, it is hard to walk away unimpressed.

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