Spider-Man 2 is Sony's followup to 2018's successful Spider-Man, and it is in most respects a classic iterative sequel, delivering a bigger story with more cinematic set pieces, gameplay improvements, and more life-like New York to swing around. This time, you can switch between Miles Morales and Peter Parker, and although they play similarly, Miles has electrical abilities that differentiate his powers from Peter's, who goes through much of the game with the symbiote suit. Kraven the hunter is the main antagonist for about two-thirds of the runtime, until Venom shows up, with much fanfare. Sandman and the Lizard also make notable appearances, with the former appearing at the start of the game and more or less recreating his gigantic form from Sam Rami's Spider-Man 3. The story involves the dual Spider-Men attempting to prevent Kraven from offing their rogue's gallery, until the appearance of Harry Osborn, who has kept his life-threatening illness at bay with a biological suit of unknown origins, diverts Pete's attention. You can probably predict the rest, but playing through Spider-Man 2 is at least as enjoyable as watching one of his classic flicks. I have been thoroughly pursuing the sidequests, not just because of their quality (do the one involving Mysterio's virtual reality game) but because it's just plain fun to traverse this hyper-detailed New York. Both Pete and Miles have web-wings which allows them to fly alongside their web-slinging, and it is thrilling to glide in-between towering skyscrapers and across New York Bay. High quality ray-traced reflections look excellent and really add to the immersion. Combat has been expanded since the first game, with both Spider-Men having special abilities that they tap into during battle along with an array of gadgets and combo moves. Two-thirds in, you'll really master the system and start handling massive mobs with the supernatural dexterity of a spider-powered hero. All in all, Spider-Man 2 is right up there with God of War: Ragnarok as one of the best singleplayer games I've experienced this year.
A note on the PC version; it's not quite as good as you would really expect from Sony and Nixxies, who did the port. When it was released earlier this year, it was full of crashes and bugs and had terrible performance on even high-end hardware. A couple months later, the bugs aren't really plentiful (I got stuck behind level geometry a couple of times), but Spider-Man 2 still crashes more than is really acceptable. There's nothing that really prompts the crashes; sometimes I'll play for an hour or more and it will crash, other times just a few minutes. As for performance, this game is ridiculously CPU-heavy with ray-tracing enabled, especially when you consider how the Playstation 5 sports a down-clocked Zen 2 CPU. A smooth sixty frames per second is not possible without frame generation on my hardware. However, FSR frame gen can be enabled along with Nvidia's Reflex anti-lag tech and DLSS upscaling, and the result is pretty good. I played the game with an RTX 3080 and a Ryzen 7 5800x with a mix of High and Very High settings, with ray-traced reflections and interiors enabled on Very High at 1440p DLSS Quality, and my frame rates varied between 120 and 80 fps. I didn't notice any input lag or visual bugs due to frame gen, so I'd definitely enable it.
In conclusion, Spider-Man 2 looks great and plays great, but asks for some serious hardware and requires frame generation to run smoothly on PC. It think it's worth the asking price at this point, but it is a shame that Nixxes couldn't port the title to PC without some hurdles. Screenshots below:
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