Synopsis

Peter Parker and Miles Morales now protect New York together as Spider-Man. While both struggle to balance their personal lives with their responsibilities as heroes, a new threat emerges when Kraven the Hunter arrives in the city searching for opponents worthy of his pursuit.

At the same time, Peter comes into contact with a mysterious symbiote that grants him powerful new abilities and gradually changes both the way he fights and the way he behaves. What first appears to be a major advantage slowly becomes a threat to the balance he is trying to preserve.

Caught between Kraven’s ambitions, new enemies and the growing influence of the symbiote, Peter and Miles must face a crisis that tests their partnership, the people they care about and the way they share the responsibility of being Spider-Man.

Overview

In the first Marvel’s Spider-Man, Peter Parker carried almost the entire weight of New York on his shoulders. Miles Morales then learned how to become Spider-Man in his own way. Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 finally allows those two trajectories to operate in parallel. Peter and Miles are no longer the main hero and his successor: they now share the city, the fights and a story that regularly forces them to deal with very different problems.

That structure naturally changes the pace. Outside certain scripted sequences, the player can switch quickly between Peter and Miles, each with his own powers and skill trees. Miles continues to develop his bioelectric abilities, while Peter gains new possibilities linked in particular to the symbiote. A shared skill tree nevertheless reminds us that Insomniac is not trying to build two separate games, but two ways of inhabiting the same one.

New York grows as well. Manhattan remains at the heart of the experience, but Brooklyn and Queens now join the map, with Coney Island and other locations giving the city more horizontal space. To prevent this expansion from turning every journey into a long commute, traversal becomes faster too: quicker swinging, slingshots and especially Web Wings allow both heroes to glide between buildings and across less vertical areas.

The result remains immediately recognizable. Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 is still an open-world action game built around traversal, acrobatic combat, urban activities and highly cinematic superhero storytelling. But the formula no longer relies only on the feeling of being Spider-Man. It now explores what happens when two Spider-Men have to learn how to share the same responsibility without becoming interchangeable.

Key takeaways

  • Peter and Miles become two full protagonists. The game allows players to switch quickly between them in the open world, while certain missions remain tied to a specific hero.
  • Traversal becomes even faster. Web Wings, wind tunnels and slingshots complement traditional web-swinging and directly respond to the larger map.
  • Brooklyn and Queens join Manhattan. Their addition significantly expands Insomniac’s New York and introduces environments less dominated by skyscrapers.
  • Combat styles become more distinct. Peter develops new abilities linked to the symbiote, while Miles continues to evolve his bioelectric powers.
  • PS5 technology directly supports the pacing. The SSD enables faster traversal, major transitions during certain sequences and almost instantaneous switching between the two heroes.

PANACHES review

Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 understands that moving through New York is already a game mechanic in its own right. Many open worlds begin by building a map and then try to figure out how to keep the player from getting bored while crossing it. Insomniac seems to work from the opposite idea: if moving through the city remains enjoyable, the space separating two activities stops being nothing more than wasted time.

Web Wings reinforce that feeling. They could have made web-swinging less important; instead, they complement it by creating a constant alternation between falling, propulsion, swinging and gliding. New York’s expansion therefore finds its justification through movement. Brooklyn and Queens are not simply two new sections on a larger map: their architecture forces the game to broaden its vocabulary of traversal.

The Peter-Miles duo brings similar richness to combat. The two heroes share a familiar enough foundation for switching between them to feel natural, but their powers create different accents. The symbiote in particular gives Peter an unusual brutality that does more than make his attacks more spectacular. It also supports a story in which power itself becomes something that must be regarded with suspicion.

That narrative ambition does create some tension. Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 wants to tell the stories of Peter, Miles, their loved ones, Kraven, Venom and a city full of side stories while maintaining the pace of a blockbuster. Some character arcs therefore receive less space than they perhaps deserve, and several open-world activities remain close to structures already familiar from previous entries.

Insomniac does not ultimately revolutionize its formula. It tightens it while making it faster. That may sound less spectacular on the back of a box than “reinventing the open world,” but with the controller in hand the difference is immediate: New York has rarely seemed so uninterested in making a superhero walk calmly from point A to point B.

Good to know

  • Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 was released on October 20, 2023 for PlayStation 5. It is a single-player experience developed by Insomniac Games and published by Sony Interactive Entertainment.
  • The story takes place around nine months after Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales, which itself follows the events of Marvel’s Spider-Man.
  • For the first time in this series, Peter Parker and Miles Morales are both directly playable within the same adventure, with the ability to switch freely between them across part of the open world.
  • The addition of Brooklyn and Queens makes the map almost twice as large as before, according to PlayStation.
  • Web Wings allow both heroes to glide and become particularly useful in districts where skyscrapers are less common.
  • PlayStation currently lists 30 accessibility features for the PS5 version.
  • A PC version was released on January 30, 2025, developed and optimized by Nixxes Software in close collaboration with Insomniac Games.
  • The PS5 version currently holds a Metascore of 90/100, while SensCritique shows an average rating of 7.7/10.