Finished Spider-Man 2. Got 100% tonight too.
This is gonna go down as one of the best traversal systems in games, and especially for Spidey. OMG I had so much fun just swinging around and not wanting to start any main missions to interrupt that flow.
The story itself was pretty good, with some cool stakes of Peter getting further corrupted by the symbiote, becoming more and more dangerous, before his friends have to save him from himself essentially.
After that though I really had trouble taking the story seriously and following along with things.
The plot really rushes through itself to get to it’s big symbiote climax with Venom. It’s just one major plot beat after another with little explanation or set-up for them.
Martin Li randomly shows up to save Peter from the symbiotes trying to corrupt him again – and also knows that he can transfer his power into Peter to act as a symbiote cure somehow.
I also thought the whole “mind scape adventure” thing was kinda silly overall.
Venom is after a meteor that will make him super powerful. He kinda just shows up with the first piece for some reason, no idea where that was. Also the city gets ovverun with symbiote goo extremely quickly, and that’s before the whole meteorite business. I wish there were at least one line that explained how it’s able to self replicate and spread so fast.
Norman Osborn tells the Spider-Men not to kill his son. So they don’t. He’s in a coma, but that’s after Peter had to essentially kill him to save the city – he’s still alive though, technically yeah. But Norman probably wants revenge now too I guess.
Oh yeah and Miles’ costume in the endgame is just SO BAD omg. Really cheesy, he did not cook with that.
I don’t like the blue lava lamp aesthetic on his arms and the bright red colour. Nor do I like how his mask doesn’t have webbing and the top of his head is sticking out! What about your Secret Identity, man??
I spent nearly all of my playthrough only using one suit for each character – Advanced 2.0 for Peter, and Advanced Tech for Miles – I tried to change Miles’ endgame suit to a Red/Black style at least, but the final mission still resets it to the default colours. That’s just sad, I am sad.
The combat feels a lot harder this time. It’s WAY more chaotic and there are tons of counters and enemies to keep you dodging or parrying.
I never really got a hang of the parry system.
I also just don’t like the way they’ve organized the spider-sense system. You keep having to swap looking between Spidey himself or the enemies. Plus I think the timing windows are given way too late. I’ve died and gone to low health way more than I should, and I feel like that’s not supposed to happen. Maybe I’m just bad at the game, but I feel like I’m having a worse time with this combat than in the other titles.
I did like how in the final chapter, the Danikast podcast shited its gears into rallying New Yorkers together, and Dani’s motto essentially became “The Spider-Men are doing their best to save the city, and we have to do our part too. Let’s go be heroes.”
WOO, that was pretty darn cool and I liked that angle they took.
Apart from that, I hope we get some quality of life features like Time of Day change post-game, or podcasts replays, or not locking specific suits to missions! because there’s some really weird omissions I’ve already mentioned before, hope they come back.
I’d give it an 8. Story was lacking in the end, gameplay and traversal was awesome. Side content was pretty good.
Ooh, also there is a Stealth upgrade at the very end of a skill tree that lets you takedown 2 enemies at once from above. Feels like it takes way too long to unlock that, because I really only used that for the end…
Can’t wait for New Game Plus though so I can be fully-powered up and swap suits to my heart’s content! There’s a lot that are really cool
In terms of what’s next for me, I’m not so sure!
I mean, I do have Dying Light 2 coming this week so I should probably just wait for that
but apart from that there’s other stuff I’ve wanted to get to.
Yakuza 0 and Judgement (aren’t they in the same franchise sort of?) have been on my mind lately, they might be a fun, different experience.
I wanna see what Hitman: Absolution is like, since I’ve fallen off of the WOA for a bit and I want something “new” but with that similar kind of gameplay.
Or, there’s plenty other stuff in my backlog I could try later too, I’ll think for a bit and see lol