Tets Plays: Marvel's Spiderman 2

 A.K.A This is not the Spiderman you are looking for.

After finally nabbing a Playstation 5, I wandered around and grabbed a copy of Marvel's Spiderman 2.  I rather enjoyed the first one on PS4 and thought the disc based DLC of Spiderman: Miles Morales was pretty well done.  Even though it used the same map and engine, and the story was extremely predictable, it did a lot to enhance the swinging mechanic of the first game (which was already pretty good) and I felt satisfied with its budget price.

Now, Spiderman 2 is loaded in and I've spent about  bhours messing about with it and feel like I have a pretty good feel for it.  

To be completely honest, it feels like a bit of a downgrade from the first.  

Let me justify my thoughts:

To their credit, the programmers have increased the map size, so you're not covering completely familiar territory and because of the map size, they've added new movement options so you can move from one side to the other much faster.  This is nice.

The city also has more action going on in it, more cars and more pedestrians, making the place seems more lively.  This is both good and bad.

The good, obviously it seems more like "New York" and less like a desolate area.

Anti Immersion

The bad, things kind of work, but don't, taking you "out of the zone" of believing you're in a city.  One things that particularly bothers me are the traffic lights.  They have working traffic lights (in some areas) which cars and pedestrians both follow.  Pedestrians wait for the green walking man and cars wait for the green light before crossing an intersection. 

However, this is not across the whole map.  There are areas where the lights are red IN ALL DIRECTIONS FOREVER. So everything just stops there and does nothing the entire time.  Moments like these really make you wonder what's going on here.

Add to that, story wise, there is a terrorist group running around tackling super villains (and heroes) at the start, but as you go through the game, you hear conversations from generic "city dwelling" NPCs that the terrorist group was heard sneaking around someone's house, or outside or something like that.  So this group are harassing your average New Yorker, and yet, the police are nowhere to be seen.

This doesn't make any sense, The group has car chases around the city, sets up blockades in the streets, yet the polices don't engage with them at all.  No army guys called in either.  It's just all left up to the Spidermen to deal with this problem?  Don't get me wrong, you do see police talking to people on the street at times, but if anything with the bad guys happens, they are nowhere to be seen.  Why isn't a SWAT team trying to tackle the gang in the first place?

I suspect this is an over reaction to the role of Spiderman and the police form the first game, in which Spiderman cooperated with them and helped out.  IIRC the first game was released around the time the extensive rioting and anti-police protests were going on and so the police force wasn't all that popular, so maybe that had some affect.  Now though, it's a bit too  unbelievable that the police would sit on their arses while a terror gang joyrides around the city unhindered.

Are Taikyaki popular in New York?

This is really minor and very specific, but I am extremely curious if this is just an attempt at localisation.  Sometimes, you'll hear someone speaking Japanese.  I have a Japanese copy of the game, set to English language options.  It's not unlikely that there are Japanese people wandering about NY, so that's fine.  This next one, however seems a bit of a stretch and I would like to know if US/EU.AU copies of the game have the same situation.

I was surprised to find a car selling taikayki, as it said on the cart.  Taikyaki is a pastry with a creamy filling, often red bean, or custard.  It is usually bakes in the shape of a fish.

It is delicious and I am very fond of them myself and hope to see their awesomeness spread to all barbarians around the globe.  Looking at the cart itself though, what their appear to be selling is not Taiyaki at all, but pretzels!

While I see and understand the need for localisation, I somehow doubt taiyaki are sold on carts in New York.  If they are, then the designers should have some Taiyaki models to put on the cart instead of pretzels.  Sure, we could all say "but crunch time and developer blah blah" which is fair enough, but in that case, just make the cart with the pretzels models have a Pretzels sign.... Immersion folks, immersion!

Spidermen play the same.

In the previous games, Peter and Miles gameplay styles were very different.  Miles was very much up into the enemies faces with his electric Venom punching powers, while Peter was more about using his gadgets to even the odds in the battle.

Now while we have two Spidermen to pay as, they pretty much play identically.  They share the same skill tree for map traversal, and while they have different combat trees, their moves essentially do the same things.

Venom blast = Parasite blast, Spider Barrage = Venom punch. The list continues.

They both use the same gadgets now and they are designed for direct combat so the stealth sections are very repetitive with you sneaking around and webbing people up, or just getting straight into it and punching everyone.  No more setting traps and having a gadget web three people to the wall.  This makes me sad.

Miles doesn't really have a story

Peter is the main dude in this story, Miles does the "friendly neighbourhood spiderman" role running around and helping folks, but so far, his story isn't very compelling.

Too many non-Spiderman missions

The game has you spend a fair bit of time running around as Peter, or Miles, Or Mary Jane(MJ), or Miles prospective girlfriend (PGF) (who seems nice enough, but I can't remember her name).

One mission, has Peter riding a bicycle for some reason.  There was an earlier story mission that had you riding a bike with Harry, so I guess they wanted to use the bike programming again. However the bikes aren't good to control and not very fun to play as.  So....

There is a stealth level with MJ sneaking about tasering hunter people.  That was OK I guess and fit well with the story.  

However there was a level as Miles PGF, which has nothing to do with story.  In a way it was an interesting gameplay experience, as she is deaf, so her section has super muffled audio and you can't really hear anything, which is an interesting concept.  She also happens to have a magical ability to read people's and animal's emotions through emoji.  Even when they are on the other side of a building!  Remarkable.  Anyway, this section didn't add to the story and considering how there is a terrorist group running about the place the fact that she is clambering all over a building worksite just seemed so out of place and kinda dumb.  

Also the "gameplay" section required you to shake the controller.  Ugh, I HATE motion controls so goddam much!

All to show that she is a compassionate member of society.  It was dull though.  Much like the bicycle section.

Unexciting bad-guy.

Kraven, urgh, they try to make him all cool and tough, but he's just kind of lame.  He has a huge army of dudes to do all the work for him and only shows up to prove how badass he is supposed to be.

The first Spiderman really built up the main bad guy.  Sure, you started messing with Kingpin, which was cool, but the build up and creation of Dr. Octopus was fantastic.  As a result, you really felt emotionally drawn into Peter's conflict.  

Kraven comes out of nowhere is just a nuisance.  I couldn't care less about his shenanigans.

Kinda irritating combat

Combat has been copying the Batman Arkham style for a while now and they added in a few extra things.  They copied the Batman combat quite a bit with the old punchy punches, gadgets and dodge.  Now they have added a block and if timed correctly, the block becomes a counter.  I feel now that the counter has taken over the role of the dodge a wee bit too much.

As a result they have also changed up the enemy types.  Now there is a brute that goes running around with a shield and a hammer and I'm not too sure if I've just been a bit lax with the upgrade tree, or what, but I find them a real pain to deal with.  I feel that the vast majority of my attacks don't really have that much effect.  Can't dodge and punch from behind, most of my gadgets just get blocked and webbing is also blocked.  As a result, they just aren't very fun and seem to take a LONG time to knock out.

Now for the good stuff.

The graphics looks awesome and while the game has the option of playing in "Performance mode" with slight graphic drops in some areas, and "Graphics mode," which has all the whizz bangs, but runs at a slower FPS. Apparently.  Luckily the game runs pretty smoothly in full graphics mode and I've noticed no problems in the game.

Lookit that bewdiful light effects

Swingin' is good fun!

Traversal via web slinging is super duper fun!  The addition of the wing suit even makes getting across the river and zipping over the rooftops a breeze.  Much easier than the point launch you needed to string together from the olde game.

Wall crawling is smoother too!

In the old game, sometimes the camera would lose it's head if you crawled around a corner.  Now it's a bit better, but it also has the occasional moment of Spiderman getting stuck on a lip or ledge sometimes. So the camera is a bit better, but stickiness is slightly worse.

The buildings have a bit more going on and you can kinda look in the windows and see little rooms and stuff.  

Pervert Spiderman for the win!

"Good evening, are you alone?"

Webbing people too stuff is always fun!

What more do I need to say?

You OK pal?  You don't look ok...

Generally the game is

Fine.

I see on Metacritic it is banging a score of 9 out of 10.  Which personally I think it's a little too high.  Currently I would put it down to a solid 7.5.  It's good fun, and I will finish it for sure, but they will need to pull out some really good shit for Spiderman 3, and they better not slap it on the PS6....

Meanwhile, I have been spending a lot more time with Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, the sequel to Jedi: Fallen order.  I enjoyed FO a fair bit and when I first got into Survivor it wasn't gelling.

Then it did.  More on that later.

Marvel's Spiderman 2, yeah, it's all right I guess.