Few games did more to sell PlayStation 4s, than the original Marvel’s Spider-Man. Swinging its way into Sony’s E3 2017 press conference and then dominating the charts on its release the following year, this surprisingly slick licensed offering was an unashamedly cinematic adventure, the cutscene-heavy formula setting the tone for the bombastic single-player blockbusters that defined the PS4 era. Now, six years later, all eyes are on the webslinger to repeat the trick for PlayStation 5.
At a recent demo event in London, I pick up the controller and send our quip-happy hero hurtling fearlessly across a shiny Manhattan – and initially it seems as if very little has changed. There is Peter Parker, now rocking a black symbiote suit being pursued across Manhattan by the hired goons of big-game hunter Kraven, and my brain happily switches to acrobatic autopilot, pummelling henchmen and swooping between skyscrapers as if it were 2018 again.
The big innovation comes from the creator, Insomniac Games, taking the words Spider-Man 2 incredibly literally. Now, players don the skin-hugging spandex of not one, but two Spider-Men, hurling both the original game’s Peter Parker and 2020’s Miles Morales into one web-tastic yarn. It is essentially the Hovis Best of Both approach to sequel-craft but, thankfully, it appears that you can teach an old spidey new tricks.
Petey’s grungey new spandex translates into some impressively hefty additional combat abilities, with Venom’s tar-like tendrils letting you slap around street thugs like a spiteful gothic octopus. Miles Morales, however, sticks to his signature electric-powered pummelling, and as you upgrade both sticky-fingered vigilantes, the pair both feel pleasingly distinctive. These additional abilities add some depth to the fast-paced button-mashing of old, and I soon slip into an enjoyable rhythm of darting from foe to unfortunate foe.
While the Marvel Cinematic Universe has lost its verve, the storytelling in Spider-Man 2 still delivers. It is set 10 months after the events of the 2018 original, and Kraven the Hunter has concocted nasty serums to drag the raging reptile out of Doctor Connors, sending the scientist-cum-scaly-behemoth rampaging around downtown New York. Starting a few hours into the story, my time in Marvel’s Manhattan flits between Harry and Peter looking for a cure for a mystery illness, and Miles attempting to help out his local community – while stopping to beat seven shades of shit out of countless street thugs, of course. It is all slickly scripted and animated stuff, with no individual storybeat overstaying its welcome, dragging you seamlessly back into the comic book-ready carnage.
“I think these games resonate so well with players because we don’t forget [our heroes] when they’re not wearing a mask,” says creative director Bryan Intihar. He adds: “As important as it is to tell those big bombastic stories, the human side of these characters is just as important – the 360 degree view of the superhero – and that’s what we really want to do with Pete and Miles: and do it in the same game, at the same time.”
Yet while the cinematic story delivers some impressive spectacle, it’s the city 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 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, pummelling 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 feels 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 smörgåsbord 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 from Spider-Man 2 with anything less than a web-eating grin.
Marvel’s Spider-Man launches on PS5 on 30 October
