Marvel’s “Spider-Man 2” Swings Into Game Store Shelves

Dennis Paul | Writer

Miles Morales and Peter Parker are looking to clean the streets of New York one web at a time in the new “Marvel’s Spider-Man 2” video game, which was released on October 20 exclusively on PlayStation 5.  

The gameplay is familiar to people who played the previous Spider-Man game that was released on PlayStation 4, but that doesn’t mean that Insomniac Games  —the developers of both games— didn’t have tricks up their sleeves. 

“The movement is smooth and the hits are crunching, like some sort of peanut butter hybrid that every one of your foes is allergic to,” said Simon Cardy on IGN, an American video game and entertainment media website.

When booting up the game for the first time, players discovered that Spider-Man 2 adds the boroughs of Queens and Brooklyn into an already jam-packed map twice the size of the original map. But with a map this large, players will need to figure out how to get around quickly. Luckily, Spider-Man 2 introduces the ability to fast travel from one end of the map to the other with a simple click of a button in the pause menu.  

This game has also been breaking sales records at a rapid pace. According to an article by CNBC writer Jake Piazza, “Marvel’s Spider-Man 2” broke the record for the fastest-selling PlayStation Studios game in its opening 24 hours. “Consumers purchased more than 2.5 million copies of the game, breaking PlayStation Studios’ record,” Piazza said. 

However, the game’s praise and glory covered up one big flaw that was carried over from the first Spider-Man game to the new one. “The part that feels like it actually needed a radical rethinking is the open world of New York City, which has been made bigger but not better, with an exhausting checklist of mostly repetitious side activities,” said Eric Kain in a Forbes article.

Despite the side missions and non-canon activities, many gamers consider “Marvel’s Spider-Man 2” one of the best games of the year.