Marvel's Spider-Man 2

Marvel’s Spider-Man was a solid port by Nixxes Software and I was excited to see how they would do with Marvel’s Spider-Man 2. One of the best selling games on the PlayStation 5, Spider-Man 2 is a great follow up to the first game and Miles Morales. Eric loved the game on the PlayStation 5, so how does it fare on the PC?

You may be wondering why this review is coming out now. Well, I’ve been trying to work through a backlog of products, but also there were various issues with performance and crashes with the initial release of the game on Steam. Nixxes and Sony issued a few patches in quick succession to try and fix a few problems upon its release. That said, I played through the entire main story line on the PC with a few problems here and there still. But for the most part, I got through the game with one or two crashes. But before we dive into that, let’s do a quick summary of the second game. I won’t go into too much detail as Eric did a great job in his review, but the bottom line is if you liked the first game and Miles Morales, you’ll also really enjoy the second game.

Spider-Man 2 has you playing both Peter Parker and Miles Morales this time in a story that has multiple layers for each character. They both have certain issues they are dealing with on their own and they both converge in the end to deal with the fan favorite Venom. As you know, Insomniac has taken their own approach to the Spider-Man lore and not everyone plays the same character as in the comics. You’ll quickly discover the symbiote has attached itself to Harry Osborne instead of Eddie Brock. In fact, there’s no Eddie anywhere in the game, something completely different from the original origin of Venom.

New York looks absolutely fantastic and even more livelier than ever. Insomniac has done a great job in improving the visuals of the city adding more people, events, and variety to New York City. You’ll see the aftermath of the Osborn Science Center from Miles Morales if you swing by there, seeing construction workers working to rebuild the place. Swinging by the Coney Island, there’s plenty of activity and color amongst the various rides and games that are stationed in that area. Weather will change as it can go from clear skies to raining depending on how far you’ve progressed in the game. Insomniac does save the most dramatic change in the city for the last part of the game and it’s amazing how they transformed the normal looking New York boroughs into what it becomes at the end.

As in the first game, you’ll be taking part in the main story and multiple side quests throughout New York City. Sprinkled in here and there will be radiant crime quests that you can partake in and sometimes you’ll even come across the other Spider-Man already there allowing you to both team up to take the criminals down together. Most of the time, you’ll be able to switch between Miles and Peter in between missions and it’s fun to be able to play the two on and off as both have vastly different powers. When you run into a mission that’s specific to a certain Spider-Man, the game automatically switches you to the person, which is really convenient.

Spider-Man 2 introduces a nice mode of traveling where you can glide in the air on some wings. Littered throughout the city are air vents and wind tunnels that can let you travel faster and longer without having to swing on something to gain height again as you do lose a little bit the further you glide. It’s a nice change of pace from swinging around and you can usually get to some farther away areas faster this way before you unlock fast travel. Although I did find myself gliding many times and then going into a swing that sent me backwards, that annoying aspect didn’t rear its head too much, but just enough to make it more of an issue than it should have been.

Fast travel’s a little different in this game as well as you have to perform a certain amount of missions in each sector to unlock it. But after doing so you can just select any area in that sector to fast travel to. Whereas the first game limited you to subway exits, Spider-Man 2 makes it a lot more convenient and it’s a very nice upgrade in the quality of life section of the game.

Another change from the original game is the spider suits no longer provide a certain small benefit to wearing them. They are now strictly cosmetic, which can be good or bad depending on your perspective. I did like that certain suits added some small upgrade to an ability, but if you don’t like the look of the suit, then you were stuck with going around in a look you weren’t too fond of. You now only have to go through the suit tech upgrade tree to get some of these benefits and since they aren’t locked to a specific suit, you are free to swing around the city and look however you want to look and still get the benefits through that specific upgrade path.

The multi-arc story is pretty good and I found myself really invested in the characters that Insomniac has in the game. The Kraven arc has some elements of Kraven’s Last Hunt, which I read in the late 80s. Venom, even with the change of character, moved and behaved just like how Venom would with its shape changing powers and the flair for the dramatic. He’s an unrelenting force and you can see and feel his powers when he’s on screen. Jonah didn’t seem as invasive in this game as the previous game in the sense that he doesn’t appear as much in those little pop ups that happen throughout the game on your phone. He’s still there and part of Mary Jane’s arc, but for Spider-Man 2, he seems to have been pushed to the side a little in terms of importance to the story.

For the most part, Insomniac improved on many aspects of the previous game and especially provided some great quality of life improvements that makes things like moving around the city a lot less frustrating. The story is a great continuation of the previous games and it’s good to see how each character has evolved from the previous game to where they are now. It took me about 22 hours or so to finish the main quest line with some small side quests completed as well. I’m really looking forward to where Insomniac takes them next, whenever the third game comes out.

Playing the game on an AMD 9800X3D with a NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090, I cranked everything up including maxing out the ray tracing features and enabling DLSS quality mode at 4K. On my OLED TV, the game looked absolutely stunning at times and ran beautifully. Of course, this is with top of the line hardware specs and if you do have a really powerful computer, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 really pops on an OLED display. One example is Coney Island where the neon lights and colorful displays shine brightly and vividly if you enable HDR.

I didn’t need to but I did turn on multi frame generation to see how it did. On an RTX 5090, I didn’t really see or feel much of a difference with it on or off, so I left it off. You can utilize 2X, 3X, or 4X frame generation on a NVIDIA Blackwell card though if you want to smooth out the performance provided you have a good baseline frame rate to begin with. I personally would just keep it at 2X in order to minimize any graphic artifacts that can happen at higher levels of frame generation.

DLSS with the new Transform model really helps improve the performance of the game, especially if you’re going to turn on the ray tracing features. I found that you can go to balanced mode and still have really good picture quality whereas in the past using the older model, I recommended sticking to quality mode. I played through the entire game on quality mode though since the RTX 5090 didn’t need much help in providing really good performance for the game with most of the features set to high.

I did experience a wide variety of graphical glitches that didn’t appear to be because of DLSS, ray tracing, or frame generation. To be sure, I turned off all the features when I ran into these areas. For some characters' hair, there can be a weird shimmering effect that happens that can make it seem like their hair’s flickering on and off. I noticed this running into one of the cat mascots in the city where their fur really flickered a bit when looking at them. In some cut scenes, Norman Osborne’s hair also displayed the same flickering effect that was a little jarring at times. It didn’t happen all the time, but enough to be annoying.

There was another glitch I came across where certain parts of Peter or even entire bodies would just be bright white. In a cut scene showing Peter in the past breaking into the high school with Harry, Peter’s glasses would sometimes be completely white, but you could still see the details of the frame. As Peter moved, it would bounce back and forth from black to white, making it really jarring to watch as you would see these really bright white glasses on Peter.

The worst one though was doing a mission taking out some of the Flame and seeing not only Spider-Man but all the enemies completely bright white. As you can see in the screenshot, it’s really easy to make out everyone and it’s almost like everyone had turned into Mr. Negative in the game without the powers. This glitch lasted for just the outdoor portion of this mission, but as you can see, it’s pretty distracting. I turned off every NVIDIA specific feature in the game and it was still happening so while it could still be a NVIDIA specific bug, I wasn’t able to remove the glitch during this mission using the settings menu.

Other issues I ran into that weren’t graphics related, there were a few times I got stuck and had to restart the game at the nearest save or checkpoint. When walking with Harry through the new facility, I came to a pseudo-cut scene where Peter would just walk in circles around Harry after he finished talking. I couldn’t do any action other than walk and go into the menus. A quick reload got me past that area, but that’s not the only place I had something like that happen.

Swinging around the city, there were a few areas that I got caught in the environment where I couldn’t swing out of, causing me to reload. I got caught in one of the water towers which had a circle of steel around it causing me to go into the map and fast travel my way out of the predicament. I wasn’t so lucky as Mary Jane one time where I got stuck next to a building in the middle of being constructed causing Mary Jane to only be able to turn around in circles in place. Since this was in the middle of a mission, there was no way to get out of it other than to reload to the previous checkpoint.

So while New York is a lot more detailed than the previous game, some of the new environments can cause your character to get stuck making it hard to get out or worst case, making you reload the game.

I did experience two crashes in my 22 hour play through of the game, which all told isn’t that bad nowadays. Luckily they happened pretty quickly after I loaded into the game, but that also seemed to be about the same amount of crashes I had with the first Spider-Man game. I didn’t play it too much in the first two weeks after launch, so hopefully one of those few patches that were issued resolved most of it.

Moving to playing on the Steam Deck, the bottom line is don’t do it. While I was able to play the first Spider-Man game pretty well on the Steam Deck, the second’s performance on the handheld really makes it hard to recommend on that system. Even with everything turned low and FSR 3.1 enabled, the game’s FPS hung around the low 20s and dipped even more when there was action taking place. So while the store page says it’s playable, I would say technically it is, but you’ll have a bad experience with it. Definitely keep this on the PC if you plan on playing the game instead of using the Steam Deck.

As a fan of the other two games, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 is a great follow up to those games and continues a good story involving Kraven, Venom, and some of the other villains in Spider-Man’s rogue gallery. Having the ability to switch between Miles or Peter on the fly is really fun and playing the game from two different perspectives is enjoyable. The game, if you have the system to run it with all the bells and whistles on, looks gorgeous, especially on an OLED display.

The PC port still has some problems here and there, but it looks like Sony and Nixxes are working hard to try and fix as many as they can as fast as they can. It’s not Nixxes’ smoothest port of a PlayStation game, but if you don’t have a PlayStation 5 but do have a pretty good PC, you should definitely pick this one up to play.