Insomniac Games faced a genuinely tricky design problem with Marvel’s Spider-Man 2: how do you improve web-swinging that was already widely considered the best traversal system in gaming? Their answer, it turns out, is to make everything around it bigger without losing what made the first two games special.
Two Spider-Men, One City
The headline addition is the ability to switch between Peter Parker and Miles Morales on the fly, each with distinct powers, gadgets, and combat styles—Peter’s symbiote abilities add aggressive new melee options, while Miles’s bioelectric venom powers and camouflage keep his kit distinct from his predecessor’s. Being able to swap mid-mission for story or gameplay reasons keeps combat and traversal feeling fresh across a campaign that could easily have felt repetitive with a single character.
Web-Swinging, Perfected
The expanded map, now including Brooklyn and Queens alongside a redesigned Manhattan, gives the web-wings enough vertical and open space to shine. New wall-crawling animations, faster swing speed, and web-wing gliding make simply traveling across the city one of the most viscerally satisfying things in modern gaming, to the point where fast travel feels almost unnecessary. Combat builds on the previous games’ rhythm-based brawling with new gadgets and symbiote moves that make encounters feel more varied without sacrificing the series’ signature flow.
A More Personal, Darker Story
The narrative leans harder into personal stakes than its predecessors, using the symbiote storyline to explore Peter’s anger and burnout while Miles grapples with grief and his own villain origin parallels through Martin Li. The writing doesn’t always stick every landing—some side character arcs feel compressed to fit the runtime—but the central Peter/Venom arc is handled with real weight, and Kraven the Hunter makes for a genuinely menacing antagonist whose hunt threads through the entire campaign.
Where It Stumbles
The campaign is noticeably shorter than the combined length of the first two games, which may disappoint players expecting an equally massive story. Side content, while improved with more varied activities, still leans on some familiar open-world tropes like collectible hunts and repeated crime types. A few symbiote-related boss fights favor spectacle and quick-time-adjacent sequences over the tighter combat mechanics the game excels at elsewhere.
Verdict
Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 refines an already excellent formula rather than reinventing it, but the improvements to traversal, the dual-protagonist structure, and a more personal story make it the series’ most accomplished entry yet, even with a leaner campaign.
Score: 9.1/10
- Pros: Best-in-class web-swinging traversal; dual-protagonist structure keeps combat fresh; strong Venom storyline and villain writing
- Cons: Shorter campaign than expected; some side content leans on familiar open-world formulas; a few boss fights favor spectacle over mechanics
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