I Hadn't Touched Spider-Man in Years, Then Spider-Man 2 Yanked Me Off the Roof

I let go of the rooftop and just dropped. For about half a second there was nothing under me but a forty-story canyon of glass and the hum of traffic way down below, and my stomach did that thing it does on a real ledge. Then I fired a web, felt the line catch, and the whole world snapped into an arc. I swung up, let go at the top, and for a breath I was a tiny red dot flying over Manhattan with absolutely nothing holding me up.

I yelped. Out loud. Alone in my room like a child. I have not made a noise like that at a video game in a long time.

That was my first ninety seconds back. I hadn't played a Spider-Man game in years, the kind of years where you forget a series exists until a sale reminds you. I went in half-expecting to feel nothing, to do the polite "yeah, it's fine" nod and move on. Instead I spent the next three hours not doing a single mission. Just swinging. Just falling and catching myself over and over because the falling felt that good.

The swinging is the whole reason I'm still up at 2am

Let me be specific, because "the swinging feels good" is the kind of thing everyone says and nobody backs up.

Here is the exact maneuver that got me. You build up speed on a long swing, release at the bottom of the arc so you shoot forward instead of up, then immediately tuck into a dive between two buildings to gain even more momentum, and right as you're about to clip a billboard you snap a web and rocket back up into the sky. String five of those together and you stop thinking about the inputs entirely. Your hands just do it. That flow state, where you're not pressing buttons anymore but somehow flying, is the thing I forgot these games could do.

Spider-Man in the white-and-black Advanced suit gliding face-down between two rows of mirrored skyscrapers with the Web Wings spread, sun blazing ahead

And then there are the Web Wings, which I did not know about going in and which broke my brain a little. You hit a button mid-air and webbing snaps between your arms and legs and suddenly you're gliding, flat and fast, like a flying squirrel in spandex. The city even helps you: there are wind tunnels that yank you upward and a slingshot move that flings you across whole districts. I genuinely have not fast-traveled once. Not because I'm being a purist about it but because getting there is more fun than being there. The community consensus is that the traversal is the best thing in the game and I am not going to be the contrarian on this one. They're right.

What I'm actually playing, for the people who, like me, fell off

Okay, context, since I dropped you off a roof without explaining anything.

This is Marvel's Spider-Man 2, made by Insomniac Games and published by Sony. It first came out back on October 20, 2023 as a PlayStation 5 exclusive, and it landed on PC through Steam at the start of 2025. I'm playing it well after the dust settled, which, it turns out, is the best possible time to show up. More on that later, because the launch story is its own little drama.

The map is bigger than I remembered the old games being. You're not stuck in Manhattan anymore: the world now stretches out to Brooklyn and Queens, which gives all that gliding somewhere new to go. It sold 2.5 million copies in the first 24 hours and had crossed 10 million within four months, per Game Developer's reporting, and Sony's figures put it at 16 million units by late 2025, so clearly I'm late to a very large party. OpenCritic stuck a "Mighty" badge on it with a Top Critic Average around 88, and the PS5 Metacritic sits around 90. Big numbers, very loved game. I get why now.

Two Spider-Men, and yes I have a favorite

Here's a thing I didn't fully clock until I was in it: you play as both Peter Parker and Miles Morales. The game swaps you between them, sometimes mid-mission, and they don't just feel like reskins. Miles has the electric bio-venom stuff and that crackling, snappy energy. Peter gets the heavier, nastier toolkit, especially once the story does what it does to him.

Peter Parker in the red-and-blue suit and Miles Morales in the black-and-red suit web-swinging side by side past a towering sand-formed Sandman in a dust-choked city street

The opening throws a city-sized Sandman at you before you've even settled in, and you're swinging around a literal giant in the middle of the street. It's an absurd way to start and I loved the confidence of it. Then later there's a sequence with Dr. Curt Connors going full Lizard that genuinely creeped me out in a way superhero games usually don't bother trying for.

If I'm honest, Peter's arc grabbed me harder, and that's mostly because of the suit.

The black suit turned a hero game into something meaner

So Peter gets wounded by Kraven the Hunter and bonds with the Venom symbiote, and the game lets you feel the change. The black suit unlocks Symbiote Surge abilities, and the whole vibe of his combat shifts from "friendly neighborhood" to "this guy is enjoying this too much." Fights get more aggressive. The animations get nastier. There's a real arc in just how you move.

Spider-Man in the blue suit leaping toward a massive hulking Venom under heavy rain at a baseball stadium, the glowing scoreboard lighting up the night

I'll register one complaint here, and it's the one I see all over the forums too: Venom himself, who is the final antagonist, doesn't really become the central threat until very late. People online argue the back half feels compressed, like the big bad shows up right as the credits are warming up, and yeah, playing it, I felt that gear-shift too. The symbiote stuff is so good that I wanted to live in it longer than the pacing lets you. That's a real criticism. It's also the kind of criticism you only have because the thing it's about is great.

Yes it's short, yes some of the side stuff is filler, no I don't care

Let me get the honest gripes out, because I'm not here to sell you a flawless game.

People say the campaign runs somewhere around 15-20 hours, and I've seen that number thrown around enough that it's clearly the rough community read. I felt it. It moves fast. There's also a fair complaint that the combat doesn't reinvent itself much if you've played the first game or the Miles Morales standalone, and a chunk of the player base will tell you it's a little too easy. That's a forum sentiment more than a reviewer verdict, but I won't pretend I haven't cruised through some fights on autopilot, barely looking at the screen.

The side content is the weakest part for me. Some of it is genuinely the mundane filler people complain about: scattered collectibles, repeatable challenges that wear thin. The Mary Jane segments, which were a sore spot in the first game when they were mandatory stealth slogs, are handled better here, less punishing, though I still wouldn't call them the highlight.

And here's the thing: I didn't care. I really didn't. A tight run that never made me bored beats a 60-hour open world I quietly abandon. Every hour of this one earned its place. I'd rather a game leave me wanting more than overstay until I resent it.

The set-pieces are doing the absolute most, and I'm here for it

Insomniac clearly decided restraint was for cowards.

Spider-Man web-swinging down a city street as an elevated subway train erupts in a fireball overhead with combat drones swarming the sky

There's a moment with a subway, an explosion, and a swarm of drones where I swung straight through a wall of fire while the whole street came apart around me, and I had that dumb grin again. The game is constantly tearing the city up around you in ways that feel handcrafted rather than scripted-at-you. ScreenRant's review leaned hard on the spectacle and I see exactly what they meant. These big sequences are where all that smooth traversal pays off, because you're already so fluent in moving that the game can throw chaos at you and trust you to surf it.

Show up late, get the good version

Here's my favorite part of being a returning player who waited: I never hit the bad version.

When the PC port dropped on January 30, 2025 (handled by Nixxes Software), it landed rough. Steam reviews were "Mixed," sitting around 56% positive, with stuttering, crashes, broken DLSS, missing textures, the works. Even high-end cards struggled. The site 80.lv covered the mess at the time. Insomniac and Nixxes pushed a patch within 24 hours and kept hotfixing.

And it worked. The Steam page now reads "Very Positive," with roughly 82% of tens of thousands of reviews landing positive. The version I'm playing has ray-traced reflections, frame generation, ultrawide support, the whole spread, and it runs clean. I dodged the entire launch disaster by accident and inherited the fixed game. If you bounced off it last year because it ran badly, that's not the game that exists right now.

So back to that first drop off the roof. I thought I was checking a box, doing the obligatory "let me see what I missed" tour before uninstalling. Instead I'm forty stories up at 2am, lining up one more dive between two buildings, telling myself it's the last swing before bed and knowing full well it isn't. I came back to Spider-Man expecting a polite nod. I got hooked instead.