Spider-Man 2 review: Dual Spideys play the hits in a deeply satisfying sequel

Let’s start by admitting something that Peter Parker never could: It’s fun as hell being Spider-Man. Sure, you have to fight supervillains, and your ability to hold down a job that isn’t “punch mentally ill people with deeply ludicrous access to technical resources” is deeply impaired. But swinging through New York? Sneakily stringing up evil-doers? Acrobatically bouncing off bad guys’ heads? It’s a blast—and grasping that joy has been a key element of many of the best Spider-Man video games across the years, most especially Insomniac Games’ fantastic 2018 Marvel’s Spider-Man. (Ditto its semi-sequel follow-up, 2020’s Miles Morales.)

Now, Insomniac has merged those two previous successes together, producing the almost overwhelmingly satisfying sequel Spider-Man 2. Refining, rather than reinventing, the basic template set by its predecessors, the worst thing you can say about Spidey 2 is that it’s eminently comfortable just playing the hits—whether that means presenting game-friendly takes on iconic comics stories like “Kraven’s Last Hunt” or the Venom-introducing Alien Costume Saga, or leaving the basic gameplay systems of the 2018 game functionally unchanged. But its presentation of, and tweaks to, this familiar material is so roundly winning, so often, that it feels practically ungrateful to complain about the game’s occasional lack of any higher ambitions.

Picking up a few months after the events of Miles Morales, the new game sees both our heroes (played, with considerable charm, by a returning Yuri Lowenthal and Nadji Jeter, and swapped between as the player character on a regular basis) mostly adjusted to their new status quo as New York’s shared heroes. (In a nice touch—and one of several ways the game works to ensure Pete’s more established story doesn’t overwhelm Miles’—they comfortably share the “Spider-Man” name, subtitles distinguishing them only by an icon of their respective masks.) Sure, both heroes are haunted by the aftermath of the first game, and the never-ending realization of how overwhelming the “great responsibility” of being Spider-Man can be. But Spider-Man 2 gets some of its early pleasures out of showing how smoothly the partnership between its 2 Spider-Men is currently functioning.

Said equilibrium is abruptly disrupted, though, by a pair of interlopers, one vicious, the other benign. On the one hand, New York suddenly finds itself under siege by a group of technologically advanced “Hunters” led by a challenge-seeking psychopath named Kraven, who’s looking to hunt the biggest, baddest game on the planet. And on the far side of the menace spectrum, Peter finds himself reunited with his high school best friend, Harry Osborn, who’s come back into his life to offer Pete his dream job: A chance to help people that doesn’t involve webbing violent assholes to the walls of New York’s various buildings on a daily basis. It all sounds too good to be true, and since the last time we saw the previously terminally ill Harry, he was floating in a tank in his dad’s laboratory, wrapped up in some very familiar looking black goo, it’s not hard to guess how badly this all might go…

Spider-Man 2 is, in other words, aiming to build its own story out of some very familiar parts, and largely succeeds in that task. Both Pete and Miles (plus Laura Bailey’s Mary Jane, now elevated to full status as a problem solver, and occasional player character, in the Spider Team) are struggling with what it means to help people, and what the best ways to actually save the world might be. Like the first game, the narrative doesn’t shy away from the nastier emotional consequences of what the stresses of those goals might do to people—especially once Pete makes a certain, long-telegraphed costume change. But that nastiness (and its eventual resolution) always arrives in ways that feel true to its characters; even when things get a little hokey, they at least get recognizably Spider-Man hokey. And, like the first game, the games takes repeated pains to highlight the world, and the people, outside the costumes, breaking up the spider-gameplay with regular shifts that put focus on its characters’ more human sides, whether that’s embracing a little playful nostalgia, or a sudden, shocking turn toward horror.

As for that gameplay, it remains an almost uniform joy. Each of the franchise’s three major gameplay modes—moving, fighting, and sneaking—see improvements here, albeit to different degrees. Fighting is the most familiar, mostly just incorporating the power-based “Abilities” system from Miles Morales into the already solid template of Spidey 1 combat. The thrill of the fights remains the interplay between an overwhelming numbers of threats and the two Spiders’ ability to mange them; not since Batman’s Arkham games (which the basic combat model here unashamedly lifts from) has a superhero title translated the way a famous hero fights in our imaginations into gameplay quite so well.

Little tweaks, like swapping out multiple powersets, or the ability to team up with your fellow Spider-Man from time to time, are more cosmetic than anything meaningful. (The game’s skill tree is one of its less-well-implemented progression systems, of which it has a sometimes overwhelming amount.) But the basic rhythm—beat up that guy, that’s one got a gun, knock ’em both up into the air, oh shit, that guy’s got a rocket launcher, grab the rocket, slam it down, blow ‘em all to hell—is so inherently satisfying that it never wears out its welcome after 20-plus hours of gameplay.

Stealth, meanwhile, remains the game’s least developed system—in part because a happiness machine like Spider-Man 2 is rarely interested in punishing players for a “failure” like getting caught. (Or to put it another way: When the “punishment” for messing up a sneaking section is usually just more Spider-Man 2 combat, it barely qualifies as a punishment at all.) Even so, it’s been refined here, mostly through a new ability that lets Peter and Miles shoot out web lines that can criss-cross all over the spaces above goons, who rarely, if ever, think to look up (even though they presumably know they’re supposed to be dealing with Spider-Men).

The new tool mostly trivializes these parts, honestly, since you can now sneak up on damn near anybody—but there’s something undeniably cool about looking up at the web of lines you’ve spun across the upper reaches of a now-cleared room, and seeing the horde of cocooned-up goons you’ve steadily been adding to your net. (Stealth is also the one area where Peter and Miles play even marginally differently, which is one of those places where it feels like Spider-Man 2 could have pushed itself a little harder; being able to turn invisible at will is a major boon to sneaking up on baddies, turns out.)

The biggest changes, though, have come to the way the game handles movement—and somehow, Insomniac has managed to improve on what was already one of this series’ most sublime pleasures: Getting across New York’s various boroughs at maximum spider-speed. The key innovation is the addition of a glider-like set of “web wings” that allow Peter and Miles to switch from swinging to sailing at will, encouraging you to angle around buildings, catch an up-draft, and even hit air tunnels that swiftly move the Spiders from one neighborhood to the next.

Initially, the new system raises worries that gliding will overtake the web-swinging, one of these games’ core appeals. But after just a bit of time with the new tools, it becomes easy to see how the wings operates as part of your movement arsenal, rather than superseding it, allowing for quick hits of speed or lateral movement, while using other methods to build up height or execute more precise maneuvers. There are few pleasures in gaming quite like using Spider-Man 2's “web slingshot” technique from the top of a skyscraper to build up a ton of speed, hitting the glider, and allowing huge chunks of New York to disappear beneath you. Spider-Man was already top-in-class when it came to the sense of moving through space, and its sequel has only improved on that success.

Elsewhere, Spider-Man 2 will mostly feel familiar—maybe overly familiar, at times. The game’s open-world structure is kept almost entirely intact, with collectibles, sub-missions, and light-but-harmless puzzles spread across all of New York, encouraging you to go scavenger hunting through the gorgeously realized city on a regular basis. (Happily, the sequel uses the “Spider-App” structure taken from Miles Morales, rather than Peter’s weirdly pro-surveillance state “Spider-Cop” gig from the first game, to handle most of this side quest stuff.) Random crimes still break out nigh-constantly, giving you something to do in between simply swinging.

Some of the individual drips of content have different flavors to them—Taskmaster challenges from the first game are now tied in to a Mysterio sub-plot, for instance—but they all exist for the same reason: Giving you something to do, and resources to gather, in between the game’s big setpiece missions. (Also: Unlocking suits. The collection of Spider-suits is still one of the best reasons to poke at the game’s nooks and crannies, because even the hideously ugly ones are kind of fascinating to see in action.) This side content is nearly always fun, because playing Spider-Man 2 is almost always fun. But it’s rarely more than fun.

Which is to say that, while Spider-Man 2 delighted us for a pretty huge percentage of its 20-plus hour length, it rarely surprised us. (Not never, mind you; the game’s back half includes at least one jaw-dropping dose of joy.) As a game, it’s smart, and enjoyable, and respectful of its characters, and kind of, unavoidably, iterative. It refuses almost uniformly to mess with success and, in so doing, sometimes robs itself of the ability to shock or stun. But don’t get us wrong: The game does what it’s aiming to do so relentlessly well that it’s very hard to hold any of this against it, except in hindsight; in the moment, we were simply too busy having a total blast playing Spider-Man 2 for any of these more conceptual issues to matter all that much.