Web-swinging in Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 is the best it has ever felt in a video game. That’s not hyperbole. Insomniac added a wing suit glide mechanic that, combined with the already-excellent momentum-based swinging, turns traversal across New York into something close to flying. I lost entire hours just moving around the city. Not going anywhere specific. Just moving.
The game splits its focus between Peter Parker and Miles Morales, letting you switch between them at various points in the story. It’s a smart structure. Peter’s arc is about what happens when someone who’s been responsible for so long gets to stop — and the Venom symbiote gives that a dark, literal dimension. Miles’ arc is about legacy, about living up to something rather than living under it. Both storylines support each other in ways that make the individual parts stronger.
Venom is the best version of the character I’ve seen outside of the comics. The design is terrifying in the way it should be — that toothy grin, the absolute wrongness of the proportions — and the voice performance sells a menace that the MCU films never quite managed. The boss fights are properly spectacular without tipping over into incomprehensibility.
The emotional beats are earned too. The relationship between Peter and Miles — mentor and student becoming equals — has real warmth. The scenes between Miles and his mum Rio are the kind of small, human moments that bigger blockbuster games usually skip. And the stuff with MJ, which some people found tedious in the first game, is handled considerably better here.
It’s not a perfect game. The open world activities grow repetitive, and the final act rushes some things I wanted more time with. But the swinging is extraordinary, the story delivers, and the PS5 hardware — and now PC — handles it all with a visual quality that makes New York feel genuinely alive. Two Spiders, one city, zero time to rest. Exactly what I wanted.