Marvel's Spider-Man 2

I went into Marvel's Spider-Man 2 on PC knowing the launch was messy. The Steam reviews started mixed, communities lit up with crash reports, and outlets were largely saying the same thing: great game, bad timing. Several months and multiple patches later, that story has quietly changed, and the game sitting at 82% positive across over 40,000 reviews tells you most of what you need to know about where things landed. At its core, this is a big-budget, third-person action-adventure built around two playable protagonists: Peter Parker and Miles Morales. Story missions script which Spider-Man you control and often swap between them mid-sequence, while open-world exploration lets you pick freely. The distinction matters more than it sounds. Peter's movements feel deliberate and veteran; Miles has a looser, more kinetic energy. Each carries a separate skill tree and a set of combat powers that go well beyond what either had in the previous entries. Peter gains symbiote abilities tied to the main story, including mechanical spider-legs for crowd control, while Miles retains his bioelectric Venom strikes. The parry system added on top of the familiar dodge-and-counter rhythm from the Arkham-style combat template gives fights a bit more depth, though you can absolutely ignore it and still get through the game. The headline traversal addition is web wings, which both characters can deploy to glide across the city. What impresses here is that the wings were designed to work with momentum rather than replace it. You build speed through web-swinging, then ride it in the air with the wings, which means the two systems feed into each other naturally rather than one making the other feel obsolete. Wind tunnels scattered across Manhattan add another layer, letting you pick up altitude mid-glide. Getting from one side of the map to the other feels genuinely good, which matters in an open world where the side content is a mixed bag. Collectible hunts and drone sequences pad the runtime without adding much. The main story, centered on Kraven the Hunter's arrival and the symbiote's gradual effect on Peter, carries more weight and hits some strong emotional beats for both leads, though critics are split on whether juggling two big villain arcs at once results in a focused narrative. On the PC side: launch was genuinely troubled. Crashes were widespread, ray tracing had issues, and loading hitches were common even on mid-to-high-end hardware. Nixxes released multiple patches in quick succession. By most accounts from reviewers who returned post-patch, the game runs well on capable rigs, with open-world frame rates settling into a comfortable range on modern hardware. Ray tracing and reflections, when stable, are among the better implementations on PC. Steam Deck is a different story: frame rates hover in the low 20s at best even with settings dropped, and battery life suffers badly. Play this on a proper PC, with a controller rather than keyboard-and-mouse if possible, for the intended feel. If you played the first two entries, this is a comfortable continuation that does enough new things in traversal and combat to justify the playthrough. If you have no history with the series, the game includes a story recap that handles onboarding reasonably well. The open world still has the franchise's familiar problem of padding volume over quality in side activities, and the narrative ambition occasionally outruns its execution. But when the swinging clicks, the city looks the way it does, and both protagonists are bouncing off each other in a well-staged boss sequence, the game earns its reputation.

Alex · Scout Team

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